|
1. Aristotle lived long after Democrit, Phytagoras and Anaxagoras
2. Known by his teacher Plato as "the reader", he was the first to establish the lonesome studying of texts and publications by others
3. Aristotle broke with Plato´s view of the world as a mere reflection of eternal entities residing in a removed sphere or dimension (a thought offered again in the 20th century as the holographic universe, which is intrinsically two dimensional and extends into the 3rd dimension only by projection)
4. It is not His fault that he has been abused through the centuries by the katholic church
5. the fact that Plato´s Politeia (the state) is the blueprint for a dictatorship as proposed by the katholic church as well as the nazies does not make Aristotle, his scholar (who did not become leader of the academy after Platos death by Platos own command) a favourer of autocracian political systems
6. he had his big blunders: like the idea that the brain is a mere blood cooler (which it actually is, as humans loose most of their body temperature through the head) and that slavery is alright. However, he was born into it and lived with it about 2000 years before the great French revolution, a singularity that shifted the perception of slavery for the masters AND the slaves. It musn´t be forgot that slaves in ancient Athens were occasionly very powerful masters of the house of some aristocrat and teachers to their children. (even the old testament speaks about the freed slaves of egypt that lament in the desert about how good they had it in slavery, with meet all the time whilst in their new freedom they only had believe and some mana)
7. Aristotle invented the logic we still apply today. Plato´s dialectic is not conclusive but Aristoles Syllogism is:
I. if all humans are mortal
II. and Sokartes is a human
II. then Sokartes is mortal
8. a crater on our moon is called is Aristoteles (german pronouciation)
9. the book " Nikomachian Ethic" describes as first in this world the relationship between people amongst each other in terms of common moral; his theories about the drama/tragody (and perhaps even about the comedy, if you are with U. Ecco) enlight the reader about mechanisms of peotry working on the human -how it impresses our consciousness (or soul for want of better word)
10. he was the one that started working methodological, step after step, prove and disprove. He brought in the difference between a logical proof (a priori) and a proof upon reality (a posteriori). Even though he may not have been an astronomer like Hipparchos, he laid the foundations for a science that doesn´t want to prove what is being known already but probe what can be known about an observable system.
That some of his theories didn´t hold through the centuries is no reason to bash him. After all, Newton´s theory of gravivty is entirely true in the light of Einsteins General Relativity and I am sure that during this century we will see a new theory emerging that unites Quantum Mechanics and Gravity and thus render General Realtivity to an ancient believe.
The story keeps continuing. The pre-Socraterian Philosophers seem to be the ones who were on the right track. And it looks like a shame they got suppressed for so many centuries. Advances in theoretical cosmolgy, however, sometimes seem to suggest that those metaphysicians a´la Plato weren´t too far off either....
Thruth is a human invention that most probably has no correlation with the rest of the cosmos.
|