Aristotle's Method Research Articles

THE ELEATIC STRANGER'S METHOD IN ARISTOTLE'S ETHICS

This article examines Aristotle's method for defining the concept of happiness in his Eudemian and Nicomachean ethics. In particular, the article draws attention to a methodological passage (Eth. Eud. 1.6 1216b26–35), in which he claims that ‘If we start from what is truly yet not clearly spoken, clarity will be won as we make progress’. This expression comes from Plato's Statesman 275a and 281d. Aristotle then seems to adopt the Eleatic stranger's method in two ways to clarify the initial imprecise statement that happiness is the greatest and best of human goods: first, he distinguishes a target object from other similar objects, and second, he refers to appearances as illustrations to clarify more abstract ethical concepts. This analysis illuminates the influence of the later Platonic method on Aristotle's ethics from a new angle.

From Aristotle to Newton’s philosophical ideas

Aristotle and Isaac Newton employed different methods in their respective areas of study. Observation vs. Experimentation: Aristotle's method relied heavily on observation of the natural world. He believed that knowledge could be acquired through careful observation and categorization of phenomena. Newton, on the other hand, emphasized experimentation as a critical component of scientific inquiry. He conducted experiments to test his theories and used mathematical equations to describe the behavior of physical systems. Deduction vs. Induction: Aristotle's method involved deductive reasoning, where he would start with general principles and derive specific conclusions. He used syllogistic logic and relied on the principles of validity and soundness. Newton, in contrast, employed inductive reasoning. He would observe specific instances and patterns and then formulate general laws or theories based on those observations. Theoretical vs. Mathematical: Aristotle's approach was more theoretical and philosophical in nature. He sought to understand the underlying principles and causes of natural phenomena. While he did use some mathematics, his focus was on conceptual understanding. Newton, on the other hand, heavily employed mathematics in his work. He developed mathematical equations and formulas to describe and predict the behavior of physical systems. Geocentric vs. Heliocentric: Aristotle's worldview was geocentric, meaning he believed that the Earth was at the center of the universe. This influenced his understanding of celestial bodies and their motions. Newton, however, embraced the heliocentric model proposed by Copernicus, which placed the Sun at the center of the solar system. This shift in perspective influenced Newton's understanding of celestial mechanics. Influence on Methodology: Aristotle's method of observation and deduction had a significant impact on scientific thinking in ancient and medieval times. His approach laid the foundation for natural philosophy and influenced scientific thought for centuries. Newton's method of experimentation and mathematical analysis revolutionized the field of physics and laid the groundwork for the scientific method as we know it today. While Aristotle and Newton employed different methods, both made significant contributions to their respective fields and advanced our understanding of the natural world. Their methods reflect the intellectual and technological contexts of their times and have shaped the way science is conducted and understood.

The Many, the Wise, and the Marginalized: The Endoxic Method andThe Second Sex

AbstractIn this article, I propose that Simone de Beauvoir'sThe Second Sexinstantiates a version of the endoxic method, a philosophical strategy practiced originally by Aristotle. After summarizing the methodological principles and the philosophical benefits of Aristotle's method, I argue that Beauvoir improves upon Aristotle's endoxic practice through her heightened focus on theendoxaof minority groups, in this case women. Despite this improvement, Beauvoir replicates some of Aristotle's mistakes with her exclusive focus on the experiences of white French women. I address problems of epistemological bias that arise with the endoxic method, and I hypothesize strategies to manage these biases. I conclude that the endoxic method offers a promising resource for feminist philosophers if we retrofit the method to include an intersectional lens and a practice of epistemic humility. My reading of the endoxic method complements feminist scholarship that readsThe Second Sexas a phenomenological investigation. Thus, I suggest that future research exploring the relationship between the endoxic method and phenomenology could generate important insights regarding feminist methodologies and social activism.

Aristotle's Method in Ethics by Joseph Karbowski

Aristotle's Method in Ethics by Joseph Karbowski

Aristotle for nursing.

Good health is the good functioning of the material aspect of humans; flourishing is good functioning of humans per se. The goals of nursing, which are based on health, are subsumed by the overall human goal of flourishing, and this helps us to understand and set boundaries to health care. Two examples illustrate this. The first is that mental illness is strongly within the purview of nursing and health care whereas bad decisions, such as smoking, are only marginally so. The second is ethics, where it is argued that the attempt to describe ethical decision-making as in addition to and separate from the decisions made within nursing and health care itself cannot be sustained.

I diversi approci metodologici nell'opera fisica di Aristotele

In this article we present an outline of Aristotle's method in his physical and biological works, pointing out the ductile method, typical of Aristotle, and the variety of interpretation schemes of the reality, implied by this method. This an important approach in the context of a science, like physics, which offers a very wide range of applications and is defined by Aristotle as the science of «what happens always or in most cases» (ἀeὶ ἢ ὡς ἐπὶ τo πoλυ; Physics, B, 8, 198 b 35). The argumentation is organized as follows: 1. the definition of Aristotle's concept of physis and natural science; 2. the outline of physikos' research field, defined as who looks after the form joined to the matter; 3. the gnoseological procedure of multiplying the explanatory schemes of reality, in order to understand it in all of its complexity; 4. the interpretation of this gnoseological approach as the underlying explanation of the methodological variety which characterize Aristotle's work; 5. the characterization of the method (or methods) to be applied to the natural science: in fact, in Aristotle's physical work it's possible to recognize both the presence and the collaboration of two constant movements, that respond to different goals: 5.1. the analysis of the predecessors' endoxa, field where Aristotle works in a dialectic way; 5.2. the procedure that goes from καθoλoυ) to καθ'ἕκαστα in more articulations that outline, in different contexts, as an inductive method as a deductive method.

Aristotle and Open Population Thinking

Aristotle's Politics contains the most extensive consideration of actual populations to survive from Antiquity. Population, for Aristotle, is a logistics of memberships. The size, fertility, and other properties of a state's population are determined by relationships among the several subpopulations that it comprises. This approach gives rise to a comprehensive logic that addresses many policy concerns of modern demography, yet within fundamentally different ideas of quantification and structure. Some of this logic fits easily with current demographic thinking. Relations among sub‐populations, for example, play a crucial role in population change because they are conduits of communication and reflect differences in education. Aristotle's method stands in contrast to modern demographic thinking, however, in treating migration, inequality, and the mutability of population memberships as primary processes of population change. Given that interest in this conjunction of issues is now central to the demography of globalization, there is added reason to consider Aristotle's insights as complementary to modern population studies. His principal case study, the constitution of Athens, illustrates the development of his thought.

An Argument for the use of Aristotelian Method in Bioethics

The main claim of this paper is that the method outlined and used in Aristotle's Ethics is an appropriate and credible one to use in bioethics. Here "appropriate" means that the method is capable of establishing claims and developing concepts in bioethics and "credible" that the method has some plausibility, it is not open to obvious and immediate objection. It begins by suggesting why this claim matters and then gives a brief outline of Aristotle's method. The main argument is made in three stages. First, it is argued that Aristotelian method is credible because it compares favourably with alternatives. In this section it is shown that Aristotelian method is not vulnerable to criticisms that are made both of methods that give a primary place to moral theory (such as utilitarianism) and those that eschew moral theory (such as casuistry and social science approaches). As such, it compares favourably with these other approaches that are vulnerable to at least some of these criticisms. Second, the appropriateness of Aristotelian method is indicated through outlining how it would deal with a particular case. Finally, it is argued that the success of Aristotle's philosophy is suggestive of both the credibility and appropriateness of his method.

On the Nature of Epagôgê

This essay pursues an interpretation of epagoge in Aristotle in order to challenge the current claims in the scholarship that Aristotle's method of discovery is, on the one hand, empirical or, on the other hand, a priori. In contrast to these claims, this essay offers a reading of the Analytica in conjunction with the Physics in order to propose the following: if we are to think through Aristotle's method of discovery, we must first unhinge ourselves from the oppositional paradigm of empirical contra conceptual. Through the example of Aristotle's inquiry into nature, it is shown that Aristotle's method of discovery is, at once, one intimately betrothed to conceptual (or, more properly, dialogical) resources, while also subtended by a comportment itself wakeful and perceptive of the being undergoing inquiry.

Aristotelian Syntax from a Computational–Combinatorial Point of View

This paper translates Aristotelian logic into the sphere of computational–combinatorical research methods. The task is accomplished by formalizing Aristotle's logical system in terms of rule-based reduction relations on a suitable basic set, which allows us to apply standard concepts of the theory of such structures (Newman lemma) to the ancient logical system. In this way we are able to reproduce Aristotle's method of deriving syllogisms within a precisely defined formal environment, and we can analyse the structure of the set of syllogistic rules by means of a computer program. Thus we show that Aristotle's syllogistic logic is a formal system of its own, which can be modelled independently of predicate logic and set theory. Our research is very much in the spirit of Smiley's and Corcoran's modelling of Aristotelian logic as a deductional system, and we aim to stay close to Aristotle's own term – logical concepts.

Cain on Linnaeus: the scientist-historian as unanalysed entity

Zoologist A. J. Cain began historical research on Linnaeus in 1956 in connection with his dissatisfaction over the standard taxonomic hierarchy and the rules of binomial nomenclature. His famous 1958 paper ‘Logic and Memory in Linnaeus's System of Taxonomy’ argues that Linnaeus was following Aristotle's method of logical division without appreciating that it properly applies only to ‘analysed entities’ such as geometric figures whose essential nature is already fully known. The essence of living things being unanalysed, there is no basis on which to choose the right characters to define a genus nor on which to differentiate species. Yet Cain's understanding of Aristotle, which depended on a 1916 text by H. W. B. Joseph, was fatally flawed. In the 1990s Cain devoted himself to further historical study and softened his verdict on Linnaeus, praising his empiricism. The idea that Linnaeus was applying an ancient and inappropriate method cries out for fresh study and revision.

Gersonides' Lost Commentary On the Metaphysics1

AbstractGersonides' commentary on the Metaphysics is no longer extant and we know almost nothing about it. I shall argue that the commentary was on Averroes's long commentary and that it was not completed, perhaps not continued beyond book Γ. What made Gcrsonides, who commented so systematically on Aristotle, abandon his project, just when he was commenting on the book, that is considered by many to be the climax of Aristotle's work? The answer suggested is: Gersonides considered his astronomy as a demonstrative science. As an astronomer he developed a method, which was structurally dialectical, while the testing of the hypotheses was mainly empirical. He could reconcile his method with Aristotle's method of demonstration by a suitable interpretation of the Posterior Analytics, but not with the conception of universal science presented in Metaphysics Γ.

Heidegger on the Experiment

Heidegger's analysis of the experiment in the 1930s is a pivotal moment for his later critique of the modern epoch. In order to show this, I will draw primarily on the Beitrage and Age of the World Picture, but where helpful I will look elsewhere, to explicate Heidegger's analysis of observation as a setting up of the real. I will then trace the implications ofthis analysis to the question of the mathematical representation of nature in the experiment. I thus hope to shed new light on Heidegger's critique of representational thinking, to draw particular attention to the role of the scientific method and quantification in that thinking, and to expose the problem of realism as one Heidegger shares with contemporary analytic philosophers of science. Since Heidegger's work on experimentation is spread over many texts, spanning 40 years of his thought, tracing its development is less than simple. Accordingly, I have divided the analysis into two parts. The first explicates how experimentation is violent in Heidegger's view. It begins by laying out his understanding, worked out from 1916 to 1938, of the difference between ancient and modern science. Then I look specifically at his interpretation of violence in the history of science to argue that observation in modern science is inherently violent in his view. I conclude this section by setting Heidegger's thinking against Ian Hacking's work on the problem of realism to show how for Heidegger the worry goes deeper than the analytic concern that theoretical entities may be fictitious. Heidegger holds that physics gets at the real, but that in doing so it encroaches upon nature by confining it reductively as object. He suggests that the experiment sets up and entraps nature by mastering it in calculation. In the second part, I explore the question of representation. First, I extend the account of calculation by looking at representation in exact science. I show how in Heidegger's view, exactitude secures certainty by representing objects as quantifiable. Finally, by analyzing the world as picture, I argue that for Heidegger the concealment of being in the modern epoch is forgotten in the experimental reduction of the real to quantitative representation. Accordingly, I show that it is Heidegger's consideration of the experiment that is pivotal to his claim that the modern epoch is determined by science. And hence I arguethat his critique of the experimental method is the basis for the critique of the modern epoch Heidegger undertakes in his later years. Experiment and Violence Heidegger holds that the modern experiment is not a passive observation of nature, but rather a setting up of the real that encroaches upon nature by confining it within the parameters of scientific objectivity. Unlike ancient science, phenomenological in the sense that it looks to the thing under inquiry to show itself, modern science entraps the thing as object in the experiment. That contrast between ancient and modern observational method is thus an appropriate starting-point for analysis of modern scientific method. To understand, however, in what sense this method is violent, one must first have a sense of what Heidegger means by violence. Only then can Heidegger's approach to the problem of realism be set against an analytic account to show that his insight is in raising the issue of calculation. Ancient Versus Modern Science Heidegger began thinking through the difference between ancient and modern science as early as 1916 in Der Zeitbegriff in der Geschichtswissenschaft. Here he noted that in ancient natural philosophy, Aristotle searched for the metaphysical essence and hidden causes arising in immediate actuality.' This is the sense in which Aristotle is an empiricist. He generalizes on the basis of observations, and therefore his account of natural phenomena begins with experience. Indeed, Heidegger repeats this claim about Aristotle's method some 20 years later, in Age of the World Picture, when he argues that it was Aristotle who first understood what empeiria (experientia) means in the investigation of nature. …

Aristotle's Method for Determining the Nature of Happiness

In this paper I shall be concerned with method Aristotle uses in inquiry into nature of happiness in Nicomachean Ethics. Through analysis of some of method's features, it will be seen that labelling it the onion approach to developing and fleshing out a hypothesis will be appropriate. I shall show how Aristotle derives a set of necessary conditions and a set of other criteria, or reliable indicators, which any adequate account of nature of happiness must meet. There are definite benefits to understanding strategy in these terms. Having derived a set of criteria which an adequate account must fulfill, we are in a position to examine which of two rival hypotheses about nature of happiness best satisfies criteria. The life of theoretical study emerges as clear winner at meeting criteria Aristotle himself imposes on an adequate account.

Theory and Practice: An Examination of the Platonic and Aristotelian Conceptions of Political Theory

N OUR DAY it a commonplace in political science and the history of political thought to draw a number of sharp distinctions. Among our most cherished distinctions are those between and practice, thought and action, is and ought, fact and value, normative and descriptive discourse, analytic and propositions, philosophy and science. Quite often, in order to gain a historical purchase on these distinctions, we look back to the beginnings of political philosophy. There we find, quite conveniently all too conveniently, I suspect the once-living personification, the very embodiment, of our own cherished distinctions. Plato, we are told, was the first political philosopher, Aristotle the first political scientist. Of course, the difference not usually stated so baldly, but more often subtle and indirect. Thus one may choose to look at their respective methods of inquiry, finding that Plato was given to a priori postulation and deductive theorizing, while Aristotle employed inductive methods of inquiry. Plato's method yields but merely analytic truth, i.e., that which necessarily certain because of the linguistic conventions governing the use of key terms and propositions.' Aristotle's method, by contrast, yields testable empirical propositions which disclose synthetic truth. It would not be difficult to continue drawing out such distinctions between Plato and Aristotle, cast in a modern idiom which would be incomprehensible (not to say silly) to them. I shall attempt something else instead. My aim in this essay will not be to spell out the differences between the two thinkers, using my own language as a yardstick to measure their differences (nor to hit them with either, for that matter). Instead I shall, in a rather roundabout fashion, attempt to spell out the character of their differences. And, since there are too many varieties of difference between them to treat in an essay of this length, I shall concentrate most of my attention on a matter which has been of perennial interest to political theorists: the problem of the relationship between theory and practice. How did each conceive of theory? Of practice? Did one have anything to do with the other, and if so, what was the character of this relationship as they saw it? These are the sorts of questions that will inform and guide my inquiry.

Aristotle's Poetics and Elder Olson

T HE CRITICAL writings of Elder Olson merit study because they offer a strong dissenting voice in a period when literary criticism is dominated by what may be broadly called depth psychology, anthropology, and semantics. Perhaps the most valuable emphasis in Olson's writings is his insistence that all systems of criticism and all attempts at practical criticism are governed by philosophical presuppositions, either implicit or explicit, which define the nature of literature and place it in the context of a more comprehensive system. There can be no adequate evaluation of a poetic theory, he insists, until the philosophic bases governing the theory have been discovered, evaluated in their own right, and compared with the theory which was derived, either consciously or unconsciously, from them. But, for all his insistence on this kind of rigor in literary criticism, Olson's own system has not fared well at the hands of the few critics who have criticized it in print. These critics tend to take issue either with the final interpretations which result from his system, or with the kind of system it is, rather than with philosophic presuppositions. To say that Olson has failed to grasp the contextual nature of poetry, as Krieger does-or that he has not seen that analogy and metaphor are the basis of poetry and must form the basis of any valid critical statement and that he is a less rigorous holist than the new critics, as Wimsatt does, or that he is a pure Aristotelian, as Ransom does-is to begin with the conclusions. These conclusions may or may not result from a proper study of Olson's poetics, but they cannot be justified until the philosophic bases have been determined. The foundation of Olson's poetic theory is quite freely acknowledged as the philosophy of Aristotle, and specifically Aristotle's method, which Olson calls