Цитаты из книги Aristotle: A Very Short Introduction

Aristotle's teleology is sometimes summed up in the slogan 'Nature does nothing in vain', and he himself frequently uses aphorisms of this tenor. But although Aristotle holds that final causes are to be found throughout the natural world, they are not to be found literally everywhere.

From the first to the sixth century AD, a sequence of scholarly commentators preserved his writings and revivified his thought. There was a second renewal of interest in Byzantium in the eighth century. Later, in the twelfth century, Aristotle came to Western Europe, where his texts were read by learned men and translated…

Chapter 17 Teleology ... Final causes are not imposed on nature by theoretical considerations; they are observed in nature: 'we see more than one kind of cause'. (The term 'teleology' derives from the Greek 'telos', which is Aristotle's word for 'goal': a teleological explanation is one which appeals to goals or final…

Yet the generalities contain something of importance. Aristotle's first general account of the soul amounts to this: for a thing to have a soul is for it to be a natural organic body actually capable of functioning. The second general account explains what those functions are. Thus Aristotle's souls are not pieces of…

In Book VIII of the Physics Aristotle argues for the existence of a changeless source of change -- an 'unmoved mover' as it is normally called. ... What are we to make of all this? Some scholars take Aristotle's words at what seems to be their face value, and find living gods scattered throughout his writings -- he thus…

Aristotle's main contention is that the physical universe is spatially finite but temporally infinite: it is a vast but bounded sphere which has existed without beginning and will exist without end.

Chapter 14 Aristotle's World-Picture Aristotle was an industrious collector who amassed a prodigious quantity of information on a vast variety of topics. He was also an abstract thinker, whose philosophical ideas ranged wide. The two aspects of his intellectual activity were not kept in distinct mental compartments. On…

Aristotle ought perhaps to have taken scepticism more seriously -- but he had to leave bones for his successors to gnaw.

One of the terms which Aristotle recognizes as ambiguous is the term 'being' or 'existent'. Chapter 7 of Book V of the Metaphysics is given over to 'being'; and Book VII begins by observing that 'things are said to be in many senses, as we described earlier in our remarks on ambiguity; for being signifies what a thing is…

Aristotle divided knowledge into three major classes: 'all thought is either practical or productive or theoretical'. The productive sciences are those concerned with the making of things -- cosmetics and farming, art and engineering. Aristotle himself had relatively little to say about productive knowledge. The Rhetoric…