"6. Aristotle's Understanding of Reality"

So this is the first video on Aristotle and it is all about his understanding of reality. Aristotle argued for empiricism which if you remember is the belief that knowledge is gained by a sense experience of the physical or the material world. Aristotle is often interpreted as having a correspondence theory of truth. This means that when our understanding corresponds identically to an object we have knowledge of it. When it corresponds poorly we only have opinion. So if the idea I have in my head of the horse I'm looking at is exactly identical to the horse I'm looking at then I have knowledge. Unlike Plato, Aristotle rejected rationalism as the basis for knowledge. He argued that the changeable physical world could be the object of knowledge and he rejected along with that rationalism Plato's particular idea of rationalism which was innate rationalism. The idea that we have within us some truths that we learned in some prior existence. He rejected therefore also the realm of forms as superfluous because we don't need it as an explanation. We don't need to rely on reason to acquire knowledge. Instead he argued that we and that everything we know comes from perception of the physical world. Knowledge gained empirically in this way by a sense experience is called a posteriori knowledge. Aristotle argued that even our most basic first principles come from experience. Things like mathematical and logical truths and that includes as well our understanding of universals and abstract ideas like the perfect triangle or the general idea of what it is for a horse to be a those things that Plato tried to explain using the forms. Aristotle argued that knowledge is best achieved through careful observation and then through collaborating our observations with those of others. He said an individual contributes little or nothing to the inquiry but a combination of all conjectures results in something considerable. One of Aristotle's most important observations about the physical world was that everything has a purpose and the Greek word for this is telos. The exam board the OCR exam board want you to understand Aristotle's theory in terms of teleology. Teleology means the study of purpose and Aristotle used teleology as a way of understanding the world. So he believed that everything has a purpose an end or a goal referring to this as the telos or the why of the thing. He said it is that for the sake of which a thing is done and he gives some examples including health which he said is the cause of walking about or in other words the purpose of walking about. He gave other examples including actions, arts and sciences. He said their ends also are many. The end of medical art for example is health, that of shipbuilding a vessel, that of strategy victory and that of economics wealth. Aristotle argues that everything has a telos from actions to people as well as objects. He believed that to know something fully we need to understand its purpose and the purpose of a thing determines what that thing is like, its nature or its essence. In other words the why is reducible finally to the definition. Aristotle argued that how effectively something fulfills its telos determines its goodness. So the more effectively it fulfills its purpose the better it is. So we can look at lots of examples of this in the natural world. We've seen Aristotle's example of walking for the sake of health. One example from the natural world is a viper. A viper's tail looks very much like a spider and it runs the tail along the rocks where it's camouflaged to attract birds that it lures in as prey and when the bird comes close enough to try and eat what looks like a spider the snake pounces on the bird and eats it. So we could say that the viper's tail has the telos of luring prey. It has the purpose of attracting things for the snake to eat. From his observations of things having a purpose or a telos Aristotle concluded that everything has a purpose or a telos. So he moves from looking at several examples to generalizing to all examples and this process is what we call the process of induction where we move from one observation or a few observations to generalizing that all similar things will be like that as well. The method of induction can be explained in this way. All observed A are B therefore all A are B. For example we might observe some swans and say all observed swans are white therefore we conclude that all swans are white. Aristotle argued that having a telos doesn't imply a mind or an intention. So he's not saying that someone created all these natural things so that they have these purposes or ends. He's just observing that that is the way that things are. Everything does have an end and that the end is what makes it truly itself. This video has been brought to you by Jest Education. Thank you for watching and please subscribe to find out more.