Aristotle

From Philosopedia

Aristotle (384—322 B.C.E.)

Called by Corliss Lamont “the first great naturalist in the history of philosophy,” Aristotle codified the laws of logic. However, he thought man had a soul and body, spoke of “God” as the Prime Mover, or Unmoved Magnet, and, Lamont added, “marred the purity of his Naturalism by indulging in a confusing redefinition of supernaturalist concept [which] made it easier for the Catholic Church many centuries later to incorporate his thought with seeming logic into its theology.”

Aristotle also believed in slavery and in the natural inferiority of women but apparently did not believe in an after-existence.

During the French Revolution, Pierre Maréchal cited Aristotle as seeming to be an atheist only from the standpoint of the strictest religious orthodoxy.

According to J. M. Robertson, Aristotle was an unbeliever in the popular and Platonic religion. He was a monotheist, but a monotheist with no practical religion. What was worst in his thinking, states Robertson, “was its tendency to a priorism, which made it in a later age so adaptable to the purposes of the Roman Catholic Church. Thus his doctrines of the absolute levity of fire and of nature’s abhorrence of a vacuum set up a hypnotizing verbalism, and his dictum that the earth is the center of the universe was fatally helpful to Christian obscurantism.”

“The common idea that [Aristotle] and Plato are the two typical thinkers of ancient Greece,” wrote Joseph McCabe, “is very far astray.” Plato’s spiritualism had few followers; Aristotle’s rejection of the idea of spirit and his inventing the idea of the immaterial, got a few more followers. They were attracted to his idea that man’s mind is not material but could exist only in an intimate union with matter. This did great harm to the evolutionary materialistic science of the Ionic School and introduced the metaphysical method. Another difference, says McCabe, is that he had red blood in his veins, that he “was very fond of his pretty mistress Herpyllis.”

Aristotle’s influence upon succeeding generations is not to be overlooked, for he was an albatross around the neck of science for fifteen hundred years. His dogmas, observed Harry Elmer Barnes in An Intellectual and Cultural History of the Western World, “held back the development of both physics and chemistry and were not finally obliterated until the time of Boyle and Stahl in the seventeenth century.”

Isaac Asimov observed that Aristotle’s views about the geography of Earth prevailed until the time of Columbus, and, as Dianed Ackerman points out in A Natural History of Love (1994), many still judge someone’s character by their looks: “Aristotle claimed that if a person looked at all like an animal he shared that animal’s essential nature. Someone with a beaky nose and angular face would be eaglelike - bold, brave, and egotistical. Someone with a horsey face would be loyal and proud. A broad face indicated stupidity, a small face trustworthiness, and so on.”

Bertrand Russell found Aristotle to have been the first to write like a professor, not as an inspired prophet. A professional teacher, Aristotle was “not passionate, or in any sense religious.” Saying Aristotle practically invented logic, Russell warns that traditional formal logic is analogous to Ptolemaic astronomy: Both are antiquated, a waste of time except to understand those historical periods. It has taken almost 2000 years, unfortunately, to break the hold that Aristotle has had on logic, and Russell blamed the Catholic Church’s insistence upon teaching an antiquated logic instead of pursuing the discoveries of modern logic.

(See entry for Gay Philosophers).

{CE; CL; EU, Aram Vartanian; HNS2; Bernard Katz, The American Rationalist, July-August 1998; JM; JMR; JMRH; RE; TYD}