A History of Western Philosophy

Aristotle’s ideas about ethics are contained in three treatises, the most important of which is the Nicomachean Ethics. Russell sees the Ethics as embodying common sense and the values of “decent, well-behaved citizens” (173). Aristotle identifies happiness as the highest good and the goal of all ethical action. The human soul has two parts, rational and irrational. The rational part of the soul guides the human will in its actions and choices, while the irrational part has to do with appetite, emotion, and physical growth. Aristotle analyzes various virtues and defines them as the “golden mean” between two extremes. According to Aristotle, the highest virtue belongs only to a few, and thus in his view ethics is, to some degree, aristocratic and exclusionary. For example, Aristotle believes that some people are born belonging to a lower social class by nature and not just via familial socioeconomic status, thus justifying social inequality and slavery.

Aristotle’s political theories, as outlined in his treatise Politics, center on the Greek city state as he knew it in his youth, before Alexander the Great began to establish the Greek empire. As such, Russell sees Aristotle’s political theories as being a little out-of-date in the context of his time.

For Aristotle, the State is “the highest kind of community” and aims “at the highest good” (185). Government should function in the interests of the whole people, and tyranny is to be deplored. Aristotle establishes a scale of values by which to judge various forms of government. His operating assumption is that most existing governments are bad and that even weaker forms of government are preferable to tyranny. In the end, Aristotle prefers monarchy but arrives at a “qualified defence of democracy” (190) as being the best form of government.

Russell argues that Aristotle’s influence was strongest in the field of logic. Aristotle’s theories of logic centered on deductive and inductive reasoning. Aristotle used the model of the syllogism—a form of reasoning in which two assumed statements can be used to draw a new—to demonstrate how new knowledge can be created from what is already known. Aristotle was less prolific in his discussion of induction, which he said was a form of knowledge generation that moves from the specific to the general.

Aristotle’s theories on physics are expounded in his books Physics and On the Heavens. Aristotle, and the ancient Greeks in general, based their ideas of physical movement on the movement of animals and of the heavenly bodies. Aristotle considered physics to be the study of nature, broadly speaking, and he saw nature as governed by teleology: Various causes contribute to bringing about natural processes.

Aristotle’s ideas about astronomy, although mistaken in many points, were accepted until the time of Galileo and the rise of modern science. For example, he believed the earth to be the center of the universe and everything from the moon upwards to be eternal and indestructible.

Russell sees mathematics, and particularly “the art of mathematical demonstration” (208), as the most original Greek contribution to thought. The Greeks applied their mathematical discoveries to geometry and astronomy as well as to navigation and other practical problems. Euclid was the greatest of the Greek geometers. In astronomy, Pythagoras discovered that the earth was spherical and Aristarchus of Samos arrived at the Copernican hypothesis almost two thousand years before Copernicus.