his occasional reflections on systematization
are not to be taken too seriously – they are ritual gestures towards a platonic
notion of science, evidence of Aristotle’s own fundamental convictions. Aristotle has said quite enough to enable us to see how, in a perfect world, he would have presented and organized the scientific knowledge, he had industriously amassed. But his systematic plans are plans for a complete science, and he could not live long enough to discover everything.
Science is about real things, which is knowledge rather than fantasy. The question of ontology is : what are the fundamental items with which science must concern itself ? And Aristotle devoted much attention to this question. Most of his ontological thoughts are found in the ‘Metaphysics’.
| Aristotle thought that most of the key terms of philosophy were ambiguous. In the ‘Sophistical Refutations’ he spent some time in expounding and solving sophistical puzzles that are based on ambiguity, and Book V of the ‘Metaphysics’, sometimes called Aristotle’s "Philosophical Lexicon’, is a set of short essays on the different senses of a number of philosophical terms. |
According to Aristotle, there can be, four kinds of change : a thing can change in respect of substance, of quality, of quantity and of place.
And that, in every change there is an initial state and an end state may be granted; and the states must be distinct, or else no change will have occurred.
Aristotle had much more to say about change. Change takes place in time and space, and the Physics offers intricate theories about the nature of time, of place and empty space. Since space and time are infinitely divisible, Aristotle analyzed the notion of infinity. He discussed a number of particular problems concerning the relation of motion to time, including a brief treatment of Zero’s celebrated paradoxes of motion.
Saying about ‘Cause’ Aristotle said : ‘Not all explanations need actually have that specific form’; but he held that all explanations can be couched in that form, and that the form exhibits the nature of causal connections most perspicuously.