Episode #006 - Transcript

Thank you for wanting to know more today than you did yesterday, and I hope you love the show.

Philosophize This! is a chronological approach to philosophy, and this whole time we’ve been going chronologically. But because there are so many interconnected parts when you’re learning about any one particular region’s philosophy, we’ve only been talking about the West. Now, after this episode, starting next episode, we’re going to go back and cover the Eastern philosophy up until about this point in history. And then we’re going to go back to Western philosophy. And we’re going to kind of zig zag back and forth between these dueling storylines until finally Western and Eastern philosophy come together years later.

Now, this is the best way to do it because it doesn’t just allow us to see all the unique differences between the West and the East, but even more it shows us the similarities between them. And this is one of the most interesting historical mysteries of all time. How much influence did these early philosophers have on each other when they lived two continents away from each other? Because the current narrative is not that much, if any. And if that’s the case, what a crazy coincidence that they would arrive at such similar ideas. And how do you account for that? And if they did have influence on each other, well, it opens up the endlessly intriguing nature of historical conjecture.

What exactly happened? There are a few things that may have happened that, if they ended up being true, would completely shake the way we think about the history of philosophy. God, I’m getting chills just thinking about it. I’m pretty sure they call those nerd chills. So, anyway, next episode we’re going back to the East in search for answers. Let’s get on to Aristotle.

So, Aristotle was one of those guys that accomplished so much in his life, it’s almost unbelievable when you hear about it. Let me do a rapid-fire list of his accomplishments. He had a biological system of classification that wasn’t improved upon for more than 1,500 years. He accurately attached many of the functions of the human body to their respective human organs. His ethics heavily influenced the Founding Fathers of the United States and the Declaration of Independence. He created the first formal scientific method. He created the first formal system of logic. He invented the mathematical variable. He structured and named several fields and areas of studies whose names we still use today. And, look, I’m going to stop there because that’s not even most of them.

He's usually the most reliable and comprehensive source we have when it comes to cataloging and analyzing the Presocratic philosophers. It honestly almost looks like, when he was going through all the different Presocratics and cataloging their life, he just cherry-picked out their best ideas and attributed them to himself. Oh, yeah, I studied Heraclitus today. Yeah, turns out, he didn’t have much to say, yeah, just some random quote about a river or something. But on a more positive note, today when I was studying him, I came up with this great idea on how to classify animals.

Now, this didn’t happen. He didn’t just steal all his ideas from the Presocratics. That’s completely ridiculous. But his body of work is so impressive that it’s how I think about him sometimes just to remember him. I mean, all of Aristotle’s works combined make up 1.5 million words. To put that into perspective, that is about the same as the entire Harry Potter book franchise combined with the entire Fifty Shades of Grey franchise. He wrote all of it. And how about the fact that’s only a fraction of everything he wrote?

See, Aristotle started a school called the Lyceum. And everything we have from him—the 1.5 million words—those are just what remains of lecture notes that were preserved from the Lyceum after his death. There’s tons of work Aristotle did, the vast majority of it that we’ll never see because it was destroyed.

So, before we delve into the main body of his philosophy, there are a few controversial things that everyone knows about Aristotle that we should probably talk about. When it comes down to it, all of these things are pretty insignificant from a philosophical perspective. But when people think of Aristotle, they usually have these famous preconceptions about him. So, it wouldn’t be right to just not address them at all. Plus, it’s just good information to know; it’s really interesting.

To start off, I think the most common little historical factoid that people think of when they hear the name Aristotle is that he was the teacher and friend of Alexander the Great. Yes, Aristotle did teach Alexander the Great for a short period of time. Now, most people hear this, and they get some overly romanticized view of it. Plutarch, a Roman historian, years later said that Aristotle taught Alexander the Great all kinds of things like ethics, politics, medicine, natural philosophy, poetry. But no matter how brilliant of a teacher Aristotle was or how interesting the information was, there’s one factor that trumps everything when it comes to learning.

Alexander the Great was 13 years old. How much would you guys have learned from Aristotle if you learned from him when you were 13 years old? Personally, I know I wouldn’t have learned much. I wouldn’t have appreciated it, especially being born into royalty of Macedonia and inheriting the most powerful army in the world when his father Phillip was assassinated. Look, we’d all love to believe in an amazing, Disney-movie-like storyline to think that a young Alexander the Great was an uneducated, scared child with a speech impediment and no future, and then Aristotle came along and turned him into the man that would eventually spread Hellenism and conquer most of the known world. But Alexander the Great already was a brave little toaster. Even the sources that desperately want there to be some massive influence that Aristotle had on him don’t have much to go on.

But really, this might not be a testament to the fact that he didn’t learn anything from Aristotle, but more that his priorities weren’t the same as Aristotle’s. One common story I’ve read that must be true is that Aristotle gave Alexander a copy of Homer’s Iliad, a famous epic poem that they must have studied extensively when he was teaching him poetry. Apparently, Alexander loved it so much he is said to have carried it with him across his campaigns eastward. But regardless, Aristotle’s influence on him was very slim.

But maybe the more significant thing to look at is not how Aristotle helped Alexander but how Alexander helped Aristotle. Because after Alexander became ruler, he helped Aristotle in his quest to classify all the living things he came across by ordering people in cities he was in control of to send Aristotle samples of animals indigenous to their areas. So, even aside from this, having Alexander the Great as an old friend couldn’t have yielded many bad returns for Aristotle in his lifetime. Well, except, of course, until he was exiled for having Macedonian sympathies later on in life—but other than that.

So, another really common thing that people hear about Aristotle is that he hated women and believed in slavery. Yes, Aristotle did think women were inferior to men in several ways. And he had all these different rationales to try to justify each of his beliefs. But keep in mind that Aristotle was a biologist. So, he looked at the world a lot of times through the lens of whatever he found in his biological research. And not surprisingly, some of the biological facts that he used to make these assertions about women being inferior to men and slavery were based on bad science.

He endorsed the concept of slavery because some humans, as he saw it, were born without the rational part of their soul at the forefront. They were closer to animals than humans. So, by nature, they were bound to a life of slavery. It’s kind of a logical jump, but those were his views on slavery. His views on women really came from the fact that people back then didn’t quite understand how little baby Aristotles were made. They thought the male semen actually gave the fetus all of its characteristics and form and that the woman’s role was just to provide the matter that the baby grew out of, which to Aristotle and the people of his time seemed to be a more passive and less important role in the baby-making process.

But Aristotle didn’t stop there. He actually used weird anecdotal evidence about how female animals are less courageous than male animals to conclude that women, just by nature, are less courageous than men are. Plus, not to mention, he thought that women were just incomplete men. And that’s a really, really kind description of what he actually wrote. It’s pretty ridiculous.

But it’s important to note that although it’s very hard to separate the notions in modern times, Aristotle wasn’t a male chauvinist. He just thought that the female half of the species was vastly inferior by design. There’s a huge difference. He actually talks a great deal about how a successful society needs women. And he talks about all sorts of things a husband should do to cater to the needs of his wife. He just then adds on at the end that the husband is the ruler of the marriage for some reason.

Look, here’s the thing, cultural indoctrination is an extremely powerful thing. Aristotle was born into a time when all of these things were accepted as fact. Now, this is a common argument. And the common rebuttal to that from feminist philosophers is that Plato wasn’t as anti-woman as Aristotle was. So Aristotle has no excuse. But then there’s a lot of other work by other feminist philosophers that discount Plato’s fair and balanced approach to women, saying he wasn’t as much of an apologist for them as most people think. But either way, look, if you don’t despise Aristotle for making a few mistakes in a massive, brilliant body of work, okay. But if you can’t stand the guy for his views on women, consider the fact that all this stuff is part of his legacy.

Now, I don’t really see slavery or the inferiority of women coming back into vogue any time soon. And I think just being associated with this stuff is punishment enough. We don’t need to discount everything else he had to say just to teach a dead guy a lesson. That said, it has always puzzled me why so many of these early great thinkers didn’t realize that by subjugating women they were instantly removing 50% of their potential brainpower. As people that often looked at things from a societal perspective, how could that possibly benefit society? But anyway, on to his philosophy.

There’s a famous painting by an Italian artist named Rafael called The School of Athens. At first glance, it’s just a painting that looks like a bunch of studious people sitting around discussing stuff on a grand staircase. But what it actually is is pretty much every philosopher from ancient Greece all standing around talking as sort of a painting embodiment of the lightyears of progress in philosophy that these men gave to us. Now, in the very center of the painting are two men. And the artist obviously separated them from the rest as though to point out that they stood apart from the other men. Well, they did.

It turns out, the two men in the middle are Plato and Aristotle. And if you look at them, at first glance you might think they’re just in mid conversation. You might think they’re just talking about something, and their arms are flailing around to embellish whatever it is that they’re saying. But their arm placement is actually deliberately done by the artist to symbolize the ways they thought philosophically. Plato is the older guy on the left, and he’s just pointing at the sky like he just had some divine revelation and just yelled, “Eureka!” or something. And the other guy is Aristotle on the right with his hand out in front of him. It’s kind of parallel to the ground. It’s almost like he’s looking at Plato and he’s trying to prove to him that he isn’t nervous, like he’s about to go out on stage or something. Like, do you see my hand shaking, old man? Do you think I’m really scared of this?

Plato is pointing up towards the sky because he believed that the truth about the world around us can be found in his transcendent world of forms—a heaven-like world where there was a perfect form of everything around us, and that everything here on earth is just an inferior copy of something in that world of forms. He thought that accessing this higher dimension of forms could only be done through reason, hence why he’s pointing towards the sky. Now, Aristotle, on the other hand, he thought that truth can be found right here on earth in the world around us, through our sense organs, hence why he’s holding his hand out as though something really important is underneath it.

Now, we’ve talked about the difference between rationalists and empiricists before. But these two men are practically archetypes when it comes to defining how people think of these two terms. It’s also really interesting that their individual personalities and their own fields of interest intellectually, that they extensively studied, compliment and seem to be directly related to their philosophy.

For example, Plato was a rationalist who was a mathematician. I mean, above the door leading into the famous Academy that he started, there was supposedly a sign that read, “Let no one ignorant of geometry enter here.” Because to Plato, who was heavily influenced by the Pythagoreans on that extensive road trip he took when he was young, mathematics and abstract concepts were the key to understanding things deeper. Like, when he would do these math problems in his head, when he would think about a perfect triangle or a perfect circle, none of these things actually existed in the natural world. We couldn’t perceive these things with our senses. We could only access them through thought and reason. And when we did, they turned out to be incredibly useful.

We could use them to build buildings and stuff. So, it’s not hard to understand why Plato may have taken this dynamic one step further and applied it to all things in the natural world too. Just as there are triangles and circles in the natural world that aren’t perfect and the only way we can conceive of a perfect triangle is through reason, Plato thought there are trees and rocks and chairs, or whatever, in the natural world that are imperfect and that somewhere out there, somewhere in his world of forms, the perfect versions of these things exist too.

Now, on the other hand, Aristotle was an empiricist who was a biologist. Now, biology in practice is much, much different than mathematics. Because, unlike math that deals with abstract concepts, biology is based entirely on observation. When you’re looking at an animal, when you’re trying to classify it in relation to all the other animals around you, or you’re trying to find out the purpose of all the different parts on it or how it reproduces, or whatever you’re looking at, you’re looking at it. It’s a much more hands-on job than being a mathematician. So, in other words, when it comes to finding truth in the field of biology, sensory experience is paramount. So, it’s easy to see how Aristotle could have taken this one step further and applied it to all knowledge we gain in this fleeting human existence.

See, we live in a seemingly changing world. Even people like Parmenides, who said change was impossible, recognized that it definitely looked like things were changing all the time. And it was an interesting concept to Plato and Aristotle to think about why we can see a tree, and even though no two trees are the same, we still recognize it as a tree. But how? As we talked about in the Plato episode, Plato thought we were all born with knowledge of everything in his world of forms, or the perfect form of everything. And it’s because of this innate knowledge that we already have that we’re able to see a tree and recognize tree-y-ness.

Now, Aristotle also recognized there was a tree-y-ness to a tree. But he didn’t think we necessarily needed to be born with knowledge of this heavenly realm to recognize it. What Aristotle thought is, our concept of tree-y-ness comes from our senses—the sum total of all our experiences with trees up until this point in our life. Like, when you’re growing up, whenever you see a tree, at some level either subconsciously or consciously, you compare that tree with all the other trees you’ve seen up until that point in your life. And you see similarities between them.

Aristotle doesn’t think all these trees you’ve seen are imperfect copies of an ideal form of a tree up in the sky. He thinks that tree-y-ness is found in each and every tree that we see, because the similarities between all those trees, even if they’re just concepts and not tangible things, are still found in every example of a tree. So, a lot like biology, by examining the tree closely and dissecting it down to identify what it actually is, we can find this more eternal concept of tree-y-ness under the surface.

Aristotle completely rejected Plato’s idea of innate knowledge, and not just about trees or chairs or things like that. He thought even our concepts of what virtuous behavior is is really just a byproduct of years of experience perceiving virtuous acts. Take one of Aristotle’s primary virtues like we talked about last episode: temperance. No baby is born into the world with the knowledge of what temperance is. That baby eventually grows into a young kid and learns what temperance is.

Like, for example, what do little kids do all the time? Play Angry Birds. Let’s say a kid is playing Angry Birds for ten hours a day. Now, after a while, hopefully, his parents tell him it’s not best to play Angry Birds that much or eventually you’re going to look like one of those evil, smiling pigs you’re shooting the birds at. Through that experience he gleans a little bit of an idea of what temperance is. And there’s going to be a lot of examples. Maybe he'd see his dad eating a plate of cookies, and then his dad stops eating the cookies and says to him, “I only get one cookie a day, son, because things are good in moderation.”

Examples like this, the sum total of all these examples, Aristotle thinks, is that child’s definition of what temperance actually is. And by dissecting these different instances of temperance, we can find similarities between and eventually refine our definition of temperance down to temperance-ness. We use our senses to perceive instances of temperance and arrive at a definition.

So, Plato and Aristotle agreed that there were eternal and universal properties between all these various examples of things in the natural world. The difference was how they arrived at that knowledge. And it was a pretty big difference. I mean, much of the evolution of Plato’s thought in his later works, including his complete departure from his level of conviction regarding his world of forms and what exactly it is—a lot of this can be attributed to the questions and counterarguments of Plato’s student Aristotle.

And how about the fact that Aristotle was Plato’s student? I mean, it’s one thing if two people don’t see eye to eye on something that live across the world from each other. But just the differences in their intellectual pursuits led them to almost opposite viewpoints. It really speaks to Aristotle’s brilliance that he was able to not just improve upon what his genius teacher taught him but arrive at his own way of thinking that was so vastly different from Plato’s. Their differences were probably the main reason Aristotle left Athens in the first place.

See, when Aristotle came to Athens after his father died when he was 17, he came there to be educated in Plato’s Academy. He studied there for 20 years until Plato died. And then, when the school was choosing who would be Plato’s successor at the time, they didn’t choose his flagship student Aristotle. They chose Plato’s nephew who, coincidentally, more closely shared Plato’s views. Once this happened, Aristotle left Athens to study elsewhere. And it would end up being one of the best decisions he ever made because the trip allowed him to explore his ideas to an extent he was never able to when studying under Plato.

Along the way, he collected samples of plants and animals and began analyzing them, noticing ways they could be distinguished from each other and grouped into a sensible, organized list. But this wasn’t just Aristotle’s cute little list of his favorite animals he was compiling. It was beautiful. It subdivided plants and animals down based on similar characteristics into a hierarchical structure that was so well constructed, it is the basis for the biological taxonomy we still use to this day.

And I believe that if Aristotle lived today, he would be the undisputed world champion at the board game Guess Who? You’ve probably seen it before. It’s the game where you have all the different people on the flip-up tabs. And you ask things like, “Does your person have a beard?” And then, by process of elimination, you guess who the person is that they chose. Guess Who? It’s a children’s board game, by the way. Look, there I go again using the most obscure children’s references in the world. Why do I always use children’s references? There’s got to be some Freudian implications there somewhere.

At the most basic level, Aristotle divides things down into two categories: living and non-living. That seems pretty obvious. Then the important work begins. The next step in his method of categorizing plants and animals involves identifying the physical characteristics of each plant or animal and placing similar ones in categories with each other. Now, this certainly includes things like, “Does it have wings?” or “Does it swim?” But the more he breaks down animals into different categories based on increasingly more specific criteria, the more important it becomes for us to use our senses to dissect exactly what makes, for example, a tree a tree—its tree-y-ness, the form of a tree. That’s how we’re able to distinguish a tree from a myriad of other plants that have similar qualities. And it had nothing to do with some distant world of forms at all.

So, in essence, what Aristotle did is found a way to use our senses combined with the rigorous method of cross-examination used by Plato and Socrates to get to the bottom of what things were and applied it to the classification of animals. Through doing this, Aristotle realized that to truly get to the bottom of how to classify these animals appropriately, it didn’t just involve physical attributes that they had. Many times, to get to an accurate understanding of what something is, you have to look at how it behaves.

Firstly, it’s important to note that Aristotle thought there was one fundamental type of existence that all the types of existence depend on—the existence of a physical thing in itself. This confused me when I first heard it, so let me explain. Let’s say we’re talking about a smooth, green tree. To Aristotle, the tree exists. Some other people, most notably Plato, would claim that if you had a smooth, green tree, that the tree exists, the greenness of that tree exists, and the smoothness of that tree exists all independently of each other. And to Plato, the ideal form of greenness or smoothness is far more important and real than any individual example of something that is green or smooth. But to Aristotle, greenness and smoothness and things like that that didn’t belong in a system of biological classification like plants, animals, or things that physically exist do—greenness and smoothness only exist if there is something that physically exists that possesses their qualities, which makes Aristotle think of them in a completely different class than physical objects.

So, once we’ve cleared that up, you can remove a good deal of potential confusion when moving forward in understanding how Aristotle classified things that exist. Like we said earlier, it’s not enough always to classify things just by their physical characteristics like greenness or smoothness. Sometimes it comes down to their behavior. To Aristotle, all the Presocratic philosophers that came before him thought about things way too narrowly. Whenever they thought about “What is this thing that exists?” they would agonize over what the thing is made out of, and then they wouldn’t really ever get very far past that.

Now, maybe it’s a little bit of an oversimplification by Aristotle, but we can definitely see where he’s coming from. Thales saying everything is made out of water; Democritus saying everything is made of atoms. I mean, it was revolutionary that someone like Empedocles would be so insightful to consider how his earth, fire, air, and water would coalesce together in the first place with his forces of love and strife. Aristotle definitely thought that we should ask what something is made of, but that’s only one of four causes that account for the existence of any one thing.

These four are known as Aristotle’s four causes. The first one is the one we just talked about, the material cause: what is the thing made of? The second cause is the formal cause: what is the form or structure of a thing? How is it arranged? The third cause is the efficient cause: how the thing is brought into being or what made it change into whatever it is now. And the last one is the final cause, which is, what is the purpose of the thing or what function does it serve?

The easiest way to remember these is to apply them to a specific example, I think. So, let’s just use a bridge, for example. The material cause of the bridge, or what it’s made of, is metal, wood, concrete, for example. The formal cause, or the form of the bridge, is whatever arrangement of these raw materials the architect deemed worthy. There’s a lot of different types of bridges. The efficient cause or how it’s brought into being is the construction crew that puts it together. And the final cause, or the function or purpose of the bridge is to allow people, cars, or trucks to cross a dangerous chasm, or I guess occasionally for a nice homeless drifter to live underneath.

If the Presocratics spent way too much time focusing on the material cause of something, then Plato and his influencers, the Pythagoreans, spent way too much time focusing on the formal cause, or what the form or arrangement of the thing was. Aristotle thought both of these were extremely important when looking at anything that exists. But he thought it wasn’t the whole story. Using his four causes, at least as far as he saw it, was far more sufficient.

Now, the final two were the efficient cause and the final cause. And it’s easy to see how, when classifying animals, it would be important to know the final cause of something, or what function each individual part of an animal performed. Because two creatures could have features that were remarkably similar but look completely different. And if you never considered what these characteristics actually accomplished, you could miss the fact that they belonged in the same category.

The study of looking at things in nature and dissecting them to eventually find the purpose that natural things serves is called teleology. And to Aristotle, there wasn’t a creature or a feature of a creature that was too small or seemingly insignificant to dissect and try to find the purpose nature assigned for it. When you have things to look at like human beings or a rhino or things that are ultra-complex like that, it seems like it could be easy to look at something like a mealworm and just gloss over it, just assuming it had a lot in common with all the other worms in the world and moving on to more exciting things. But Aristotle didn’t think about it that way. He thought each creature is a unique snowflake that potentially could show us something new and beautiful about the world around us.

Here he is talking about teleology: “We therefore must not recoil with childish aversion from the examination of the humbler animals. Every realm of nature is marvelous: and as Heraclitus, when the strangers who came to visit him found him warming himself at the furnace in the kitchen and hesitated to go in, is reported to have bidden them not to be afraid to enter, as even in that kitchen divinities were present, so we should venture on the study of every kind of animal without distaste; for each and all will reveal to us something natural and something beautiful. Absence of haphazard and conduciveness of everything to an end are to be found in nature’s works in the highest degree, and the resultant end of her generations and combinations is a form of the beautiful.”

So, this absence of haphazard and conduciveness of everything to an end that Aristotle is talking about is referring to the final cause of a thing. And it’s only by knowing what the function or purpose of something is that we can determine whether it can be classified as good or bad. For example, we have ears, right? Hopefully. The purpose of an ear is to hear things. So, an ear that hears things well is a good ear. This examination can be applied to all things no matter how basic or complex, from a single skin cell to the way humans live their lives. I mean, what is a good life? That’s extremely complex. We talked about that last episode, and as you can see, Aristotle addressed those sorts of things.

The same ideas of using observation to determine what a good life is can be applied to determining what a good ear is. You can’t classify something accurately if you don’t know what the parts of it are doing or what purpose they serve. And this is why final causes were so important to Aristotle.

So, once we understand the four causes that account for the existence of any one thing, we’re ready to use our power of observation to dissect their components and begin to classify them into different groups. Now, once Aristotle started doing this, he started to recognize patterns in how we could think about deducing that certain things were true. Let me explain.

Let’s say we’re trying to classify some unknown reptile that we just found. If all snakes are carnivorous reptiles that don’t have legs, and we just found a carnivorous reptile that has legs, then if those two things are true, no matter what, this reptile cannot be a snake. Now, another example could be, if all birds have wings, and this animal we just found doesn’t have wings, then this animal is not a bird.

So, as you can imagine, as Aristotle is classifying all these animals, he must have found himself repeating these sorts of logical deductions over and over and over again. Eventually, he realized he was doing it. And probably simultaneously realized that, hey, no one has ever developed a formal system of logic before. Maybe I’ll do that too in between classifying all these animals.

The type of reasoning in the examples I just gave is what Aristotle called a syllogism. It’s the type of conclusion that’s drawn when there are three things in question and two premises relating them to each other. Here’s how Aristotle explained it in his work we call now Prior Analytics from the Organon. “A syllogism is discourse in which, certain things being stated, something other than what is stated follows of necessity from there being so. I mean by the last phrase that they produce the consequence, and by this, that no further term is required from without in order to make the consequence necessary. I call that a perfect syllogism which needs nothing other than what has been stated to make plain what necessarily follows; a syllogism is imperfect, if it needs either one or more propositions, which are indeed the necessary consequences of the terms set down, but have not been expressly stated as premises.”

Now, in practically every philosophy textbook where they’re explaining the concept of a syllogism, they use the exact same example. All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore, Socrates is mortal. Right? It’s a very good one. So, almost everyone attributes this syllogism to Aristotle. But, fun little fact, he actually never used this example in any of his works on logic. I know because I read them. It was actually first used by a guy named Sextus Empiricus years later. But it should still be attributed to Aristotle because he’s the guy that came up with the system of logic behind it.

He actually mostly used mathematical variables to explain his system of logic because he didn’t want people to get caught up on the individual examples. When you use variables, it really shines light on the fact that, no matter what these variables stand for, this logical declaration will be true. If As are Cs and B is an A, then B is a C. Just how you’re able to notate irrefutable truths in mathematics, what Aristotle wanted is to be able to notate irrefutable truths when it came to ideas, and logic was his instrument to do so. In fact, the title of the piece of work where we get most of his ideas on logic is the Organon, which translated today means the Instrument. So, even Aristotle saw it this way.

But his system of logic didn’t begin and end with a single syllogism. After finding the first syllogism, he looked at the variables and said, hey, what if I switched B and C around? Would the statement still be true? Or what if I changed the premise from all As are Cs to all As are not Cs, or some As are Cs, or things like that? Would it still be true?

It starts to get pretty complex to explain in the spoken-word medium. I’ve tried to lay it out a few different ways, and I’ve just deleted the recording every single time. It honestly all just ends up sounding like, well, the last sentence I just said when I was pretending to be Aristotle like ten seconds ago. It just becomes a jumbled mess of variables that sounds like I’m trying to be confusing for the sake of being cute or something, like I’m playing some nerdy guy on a sitcom. But I’m not.

I’ll say this. After identifying the four different propositions that could exist—which are, all As are Cs, no As are Cs, some As are Cs, and some As are not Cs—by trying all the different combinations of these propositions and all the different ways you could position the variables within them—there’s actually 192 different possibilities—Aristotle lays out several relationships between them that exist every time. These are usually illustrated in what is known as Aristotle’s square of opposition, which basically is a four-sided Venn diagram that shows a relationship between these different propositions.

But for anyone who’s just generally interested in Aristotle, know that all of these are syllogisms, and that it was such a comprehensive and well-constructed account of logical reason that no one made any improvements on it for almost two millennia. More than that, his syllogism was incredibly versatile. I mean, it wasn’t just able to classify animals more efficiently. It had use in every single area where arriving at some universal truth was the ultimate goal. With a few slight modifications, his syllogism acted as the go-to method of arriving at truth for scientists for centuries.

His scientific method, as it has come to be known, was a mixture between inductive and deductive reasoning. Aristotle recognized that inductive reasoning could only be used to a certain extent when trying to arrive at universal truths. But he definitely recognized that it played an important role. Inductive reasoning is really good at discovering patterns or finding universal generalizations that we can then prove or disprove with our deductive reasoning. I mean, with his syllogisms—and his syllogisms were the deductive reasoning part of his scientific method—we already have a way to transform premises we know to be true into universal truths.

But how do we arrive at premises that we know to be true? Aristotle thinks it lies inductive reasoning. Personally, I think of it as the guess-and-check method, but only so I can remember it easier because it’s something I can relate it to. It’s nowhere near that simple. It’s more like the hypothesize-and-check method. Here Aristotle talks about this relationship between inductive and deductive reasoning in the Nicomachean Ethics.

“The opinions of the wise seem, then, to harmonize with our arguments. But while even such things carry some conviction, the truth in practical matters is discerned from the facts of life; for these are the decisive factor. We must therefore survey what we have already said, bringing it to the test of the facts of life, and if it harmonizes with the facts we must accept it, but if it clashes with them we must suppose it to be mere theory.”

Now, at first glance, this seems to be a departure from his typical empiricist viewpoint that truth is arrived at through the senses, not through reason. This can be explained by an important distinction he makes between knowledge of the fact and knowledge of the reasoned fact. There’s a big difference between knowing that grass is green and knowing why grass is green. And it’s impossible to know why grass is green merely with our senses. We need to hypothesize about potential causes using our reason and weigh them against what we already know to be true through syllogisms.

Science, to Aristotle, is not the search for facts but the search for causes. What Aristotle realized is that reason is something that exists exterior to the senses, and that whenever we learn something from experience, we’re merely reasoning and drawing conclusions about our prior experiences. He certainly didn’t think we were born with an encyclopedic knowledge of a world of eternal forms like Plato did. But he did hold that our ability to reason, above anything else, is what separates us from all the other animals in the animal kingdom and what warrants placing us on top of his hierarchy of creatures.

You know, I was going for a walk the other day, and I was thinking about Aristotle and his system of biological classification. I was looking at everything around me, just marveling at nature, the efficiency of it all. I was just looking at all the trees and birds and plants and just thinking about how each and every component on every one of these things is streamlined, symmetrical. It has a final cause that Aristotle would have recognized. And I found myself trying to find a word to describe all of it. And the only thing I could really come up with is beauty. Beauty is efficiency.

That was near the beginning of my walk. By the end of my walk, I had completely torn that definition apart and realized that it was nowhere near a proper definition. But it got me thinking. So, philosophize this: What is beauty? Is it things that are extraordinary? Is it a newborn baby? What is beauty to you?