Philosophy term paper
| [...] "Aristotle, as a philosopher, is in many ways very different from all his predecessors. He is the first to write like a professor: his treatises are systematic, his discussions are divided into heads, and he is a professional teacher, not an inspired prophet. His work is critical, careful, and pedestrian, without any trace of Bacchic enthusiasm. The Orphic elements in Plato are watered down in Aristotle, and mixed with a strong dose of common sense; where he is Platonic, one feels that his natural temperament has been overpowered by the teaching to which he has been subjected. He is not passionate, or in any profound sense religious. The errors of his predecessors were the glorious errors of youth attempting the impossible; his errors are those of age which cannot free itself of habitual prejudices. He is best in detail and in criticism; he fails in large construction, for lack of fundamental clarity and Titanic fire. It is difficult to decide at what point to begin an account of Aristotle's metaphysics, but perhaps the best place is his criticism of the theory of ideas and his own alternative doctrine of universals." [...] |
| [...] "The main point I want to make is that this development would not have occurred without the idea of system and, in particular, the axiom system which grew from the Pythagorean Table of Opposites. The continued attempt to reduce the realm of fantasy and to increase control is based upon this conception. We would not have been able to tackle problems like those concerned with the nature of number and of mathematics if logic had remained restricted to the syllogism. Instead of the single syllogism or, perhaps, a chain of them, the deductive system allows us to map out a whole realm of ideal objects and their properties by establishing the net of their interrelations." [...] |
| [...] "The fact that Russell has not formulated a systematic procedure for the application of constructions is illustrated by their gradual introduction into his own work. First he found it possible to define numbers, descriptions, and classes by the use of constructions, then later material objects, minds, and the entities of physics. Each construction seems to be a 'discovery', the result of a fortunate accident in determining that some problem can be analyzed by means of constructions, rather than the result of following some definite rule of analysis. This is no disparagement of Russell's work, since it might very well be necessary to find that certain problems can be treated by constructions before the notion of a systematic procedure would suggest itself." [...] |
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