Aristotle / Christopher Shields.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Shields, Christopher John.

Series:

Routledge philosophers

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Aristotle.

Physical Description:

xvi, 456 pages ; 23 cm.

Place of Publication:

London ; New York : Routledge, 2007.

Summary:

Aristotle (384-322BC) was one of the greatest philosophers of all time. His philosophy exerted a powerful influence on Medieval and Renaissance thought and remains widely influential today. In this excellent introduction. Christopher Shields introduces and assesses the whole of Aristotle's philosophy, showing how his powerful conception of human nature shaped much of his thinking on the nature of the soul and the mind, ethics, politics and the arts.

Beginning with a brief biography, Christopher Shields carefully explains the fundamental elements of Aristotle's thought: his explanatory framework; his philosophical methodology and his four-causal explanatory schema; his pioneering investigations into logical form; and his approach to scientific explanation and dialectic. He then shows how Aristotle puts this explanatory scheme to work in his metaphysics, his theory of categories, and his treatment of the human being as a living compound of soul and body.

In the final part, Christopher Shields concentrates on Aristotle's value theory as applied to ethics politics, and the arts. He assesses Aristotle's approach to happiness, virtues and the best life for human beings, arguing that many features of his philosophy remain viable today. In treating the arts, Shields shows how an understanding of Aristotle's general four-causal explanatory schema helps illuminate his perennially revisited theory of tragedy, whose crucial concepts of mimesis and catharsis cannot be understood, Shields urges, except in terms of that framework. He concludes with an appraisal of the abiding appeal of Aristotelianism today.

Contents:

1 Aristotle: Life and Works 8

1.1 Aristotle in the Ancient Biographical Tradition 8

1.2 Aristotle's Character 15

1.3 The Facts of Aristotle's Life 17

1.4 Reading Aristotle 22

1.5 Aristotle's Corpus and the Structure of the Aristotelian Sciences 28

2 Explaining Nature and the Nature of Explanation 36

2.1 Beginning in Wonder 36

2.2 Explaining Explaining 40

2.3 A Puzzle about Change and Generation 49

2.4 Matter and Form I 53

2.5 Matter and Form II 58

2.6 The Efficient Cause 64

2.7 The Final Cause I 68

2.8 The Final Cause II 78

2.9 Relations Among the Causes 90

3 Thinking 98

3.2 Essence and Accident 99

3.3 The Structure of Scientific Knowledge 106

3.4 An Overview of Aristotelian Logic 118

3.5 Dialectic 126

3.6 Univocity and Homonymy 133

4 Aristotle's Early Ontology 146

4.1 The General Orientation of Aristotle's Categories 146

4.2 Aristotle's Work: The Categories 150

4.3 The Pre-Categories: an Anti-Platonic Conviction 151

4.4 The Theory of Categories: Kinds of Beings 157

4.5 Generating the Categories 159

4.6 The Fundamentality of Substance 172

4.7 A Puzzle about Bi-valence and Modality 181

5 Puzzles of Nature 196

5.1 Change 196

5.2 The Infinite 203

5.3 Time 206

5.4 Zeno's Paradoxes of Motion 215

5.5 The Unmoved Mover 220

6 Substance and the Science of Being qua Being 232

6.1 Aristotle's Metaphysical Interests 232

6.2 Aristotle's Work: the Metaphysics 233

6.3 A Puzzle Remaining from the Physics 234

6.4 The Science of Being Qua Being 237

6.5 The Most Basic Principle of All Science 246

6.6 Substance Reconsidered: Form and Actuality 255

7 Living Beings 270

7.1 Psychological Applications of Hylomorphism 270

7.2 The Soul: Life is Meant in Many Ways 271

7.3 Against Reductive Materialism and Substance Dualism 278

7.4 The Hylomorphic Analysis of Living Beings 285

7.5 A Problem for Soul-Body Hylomorphism 290

7.6 Perception and Thought 293

8 Living Well 306

8.1 The Final Good for Human Beings 306

8.2 The Character of Human Happiness 310

8.3 Happiness and the Human Function 316

8.4 The Virtues of Character 323

8.5 A Puzzle about Akrasia 329

8.6 Friendship 334

8.7 The Final Good for Human Beings Reconsidered 340

9 Political Association 350

9.1 The Orientation of Aristotle's Political Theory 350

9.2 The Emergence and Priority of the Polis 353

9.3 The Best Constitution 363

9.4 An Ugly Aspect of Aristotle's Political Naturalism? 368

10 Rhetoric and the Arts 375

10.1 Aristotle's Orientation in Rhetoric and the Arts 375

10.2 Rhetoric as a Craft 377

10.3 Poetic Production 381

10.4 Tragedy 385

10.5 Catharsis 386

10.6 Mimesis 391

10.7 Prescriptive or Descriptive? 393

11 Aristotle's Legacy 398

11.1 Aristotle's Legacy into the Modern Period 398

11.2 Aristotle Today 402.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [419]-452) and index.

ISBN:

9780415283311

0415283310

9780415283328

0415283329

9780203961940

0203961943

OCLC:

71632053