28
votes
Accepted
Why is Aristotle's objection not considered a resolution to Zeno's paradox?
Aristotle's solution was largely accepted until the end of 19th century when Cantor and Dedekind formalized the notion of continuum in terms of set theory. Under their interpretation time is in fact ...
- 42.3k
26
votes
Accepted
Is there any worth—other than historical—to reading Aristotle's works on logic?
Logic means something different now than what it once did. In classical philosophy one primary branch of philosophy investigated the cosmos, one investigated human life, and a third investigated the ...
- 1,152
22
votes
Accepted
Why bother with anything else besides Aristotle's syllogistic logic?
Aristotle's syllogistic logic is too weak for serious work.
It does not readily express multi-place predicates. You cannot express two-place relations like, "John loves Mary", or three-...
- 22.1k
20
votes
Accepted
Why did the mid-19th century and earlier thinkers fixate on one-place predicates?
Because there was a calculus for one-place predicates, Aristotle's syllogistic, roughly equivalent to monadic predicate calculus. Aristotle does discuss "relatives" in Categories, which ...
- 42.3k
18
votes
The problem of Motion
I recommend to start with the arrow paradox by the Greek philosopher Zeno, see
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/paradox-zeno/#ParMot
Afterwards you could study how calculus formalizes the limit ...
- 20.8k
14
votes
Accepted
Does Aristotle ever explicitly refer to man as a "rational animal"?
Kind of.
The obvious
As animal sociale is the Latin, especially Scholastic translation of zoon politikon, just as animal rationale is the translation of ζῷον λόγον ἔχον, zōon logon ekhon, he ...
- 13.1k
14
votes
Is there any worth—other than historical—to reading Aristotle's works on logic?
No, Aristotle's logic has not been rendered obsolete or disproved; "modern works still reference/use his logic frequently" (courtesy: V2Blast).
See, for example:
Łukasiewicz, Jan. 1957. Aristotle's ...
- 7,782
12
votes
Accepted
Do all epistemologies suffer from the "regress of justifications" problem?
Terminology changed somewhat, and much of what used to be called "logic" as late as early 20th century is now called epistemology, for more details see What are the differences between philosophies ...
- 42.3k
12
votes
Accepted
Why were Kant's categories used in the mathematical category theory?
The paper General Theory of Natural Equivalences by Eilenberg and Mac Lane (1945), where the terminology is first introduced, mentions neither Aristotle, nor Kant, nor even Carnap, who was still alive....
- 42.3k
10
votes
Accepted
How do Thomists prove that: "Everything that exists must exist by something."?
Thomists affirm theism, but God would be a counterexample to your proposition as stated: God is something "that exists" in Himself; He does not "exist by something [else]".
...
- 7,782
8
votes
Thomas of Aquino vs. William of Ockham
One view is that Ockham invented his Nominalism in order to justify his being against the papacy.
The Thomist semiotician John Deely, in his Four Ages of Understanding pp. 394 ff., shows how the ...
- 7,782
8
votes
Accepted
What does Aristotle mean by showing fear in times of boldness?
The context is human action and its "rationality":
[ 1113b.1 ] The activities in which the virtues are exercised deal with means. Therefore virtue also depends on ourselves. And so also ...
- 35.9k
8
votes
Accepted
What does Aristotle mean by contemplation?
The Greek word for contemplation is 'theoria', and is the basis for the word 'theory' where it came to mean 'careful contemplation of a subject'. A theoros is a spectator at a theatre, observing the ...
- 19.8k
7
votes
Accepted
Are there necessary truths in physical theories, more or less strictly speaking?
Strictly speaking there are no absolute necessities in physics. But strictly speaking there are no absolute necessities in mathematics and logic either. Mathematical theories have axioms, necessity of ...
- 42.3k
7
votes
Accepted
Is Aristotle's resolution of Zeno's paradoxes vindicated by motion in the intuitionistic continuum?
There are several notions of intuitionistic continuum, the closest ones to Aristotle's are Brouwer's "fluid continuum", and especially late Weyl’s version of it since On the New Foundational Crisis of ...
- 42.3k
7
votes
What's the difference between Aristotle's logic and Frege's logic especially with regard to predicates?
There are several important differences between the logics of Aristotle and Frege.
1.Aristotle understood sentences to be fundamentally of the form Subject-Predicate. He classified sentences into ...
- 22.1k
7
votes
Seeking the Source of an Aristotle quotation
Aristotle, 'In the case of objects which involve no matter, what thinks and what is thought are identical' ('De Anima', III, 430a, 3-4). (J.A. Smith tr., Oxford.)
- 35.3k
7
votes
Reference Format to Aristotle Book
That's not quite right for the parsing.
What you're seeing is BOOK Chapter and Bekker notation.
Your example:
Met. I.3 983b6–18
= Metaphysics Book I Chapter 3
Bekker page 983 column b lines 6-...
- 24.5k
7
votes
Aristotle's Categories with academic commentary
Aristotle, Aristotle's Categories and De Interpretatione, Published by Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1963. Translated with notes by J.L.Ackrill. Ackrill was a fine scholar and I still find this book ...
- 35.3k
7
votes
What other philosophers I read before taking a class on “being and time”
Given that you have about a month and a half to prepare, in which you estimate you can read two or three books, I would not recommend starting with Aristotle to understand Being and Time.
Instead, I ...
- 24.5k
7
votes
Accepted
What does Aquinas mean when he refers to things being "identical numerically" or "specifically identical" with things?
The efficient cause is not numerically identical with the effect because the "things" involved into the "production process" are different individials : the father of John generates John but he is a ...
- 35.9k
7
votes
Why did the mid-19th century and earlier thinkers fixate on one-place predicates?
An n-ary relation gives rise to parameterized unary predicates if one fixes n-1 arguments. Wilfrid Hodges argues that this is what logicians did before the nineteenth century. (There may be other ...
- 201
7
votes
Why bother with anything else besides Aristotle's syllogistic logic?
From a modern point of view, Aristotle's Logic is a subset of predicate logic, called Monadic predicate logic:
monadic predicate calculus (also called monadic first-order logic) is the fragment of ...
- 35.9k
7
votes
The problem of Motion
To enlarge upon Jo Wehler's answer, Zeno's Paradox was only a paradox for philosophers, not for Zeno's neighbors who sailed boats, walked down roads, built buildings, plowed the earth or carried rocks ...
- 7,443
6
votes
What is the relation between calculus and Aristotle's view of infinite divisibility?
That there is a threshold force required to move a body subject to friction is an interesting fact, but even cursory observation shows that this threshold is different for different bodies, and ...
- 42.3k
6
votes
Accepted
Is this quote from Aristotle's Poetics?
Aristotle, Poetics, 1451b :
The real difference is this, that one tells what happened and the other what might happen. For this reason poetry is something more scientific and serious than history, ...
- 35.9k
6
votes
Accepted
Why is it true that anything that changes must be divisible according to Aristotle?
My expertise lies more towards the ethics side of things (especially with Aristotle), but I think Aristotle's point here generally makes sense so I will see if I can spell it out better. One ...
- 24.5k
6
votes
Accepted
I wanna start - how to be a philosopher?
I'd make two points. The first is that you can't do everything at once, so you should recognise that acquiring a competence in philosophy will be a slow process. A single text or a set of guides will ...
- 35.3k
6
votes
Is there any worth—other than historical—to reading Aristotle's works on logic?
Aristotle's Rhetoric was fun to read... it isn't long, and it offers a "classical" perspective on what makes a convincing (not just correct) argument. This was the work that introduced me to the ...
- 4,055
6
votes
How do Thomists prove that: "Everything that exists must exist by something."?
There isn't really a ubiquitous reading of the principle of sufficient reason (PSR), so I think it's worth going over some distinctions and different formulations.
There are at least two major ...
- 3,764
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