[Lecture Four] Founders of Western Philosophy: Thales to Hume
by Dr. Leonard Peikoff
Total Time: 2 hours, 48 minutes
Course summary: Presented as two complementary twelve-lecture courses—Founders of Western Philosophy: Thales to Hume and Modern Philosophy: Kant to the Present—The History of Philosophy covers the whole of western philosophy from its discovery in Ancient Greece to the twentieth century, including Objectivism. Dr. Peikoff argues that philosophy is the means by which we can understand any human culture and, more broadly, the history and changing course of a civilization. Read more »
In this lecture: This lecture begins the examination of Aristotle’s philosophy. Dr. Peikoff begins with some metaphysical preliminaries regarding Aristotle’s realism before examining his epistemology in depth. He explains Aristotle’s argument for knowledge based on sense perception, and his theories of explanation and definition. Peikoff discusses Aristotle’s crucial discovery of the principles of logic and his theory of proof. The lecture concludes with an explanation of Aristotle’s metaphysical account of change and its implications for causation.
Study Guide
This material is designed to help you digest the lecture content. You can also download below a PDF study guide for the entire course.
| What are the basic philosophic positions of the two schools of philosophy so far? |
| What is Aristotle’s main objection to the Platonic theory of Forms? |
| Why is Aristotle considered a “realist” in his approach to the one in the many? |
| What is implied by Aristotle’s argument for the basis of knowledge? |
| How is Aristotle’s theory of explanation different from Plato’s? |
| Explain Aristotle’s theory of definitions by giving three unique examples of a proper definition. |
| What are axioms, according to Aristotle, and how do we grasp them? |
| Explain how Aristotle accounts for change by describing in detail one example of change. |
| What are the four causes? |
| Provide an example of the four causes at work in a simple unique example. |
Q&A Guide
Below is a list of questions from the audience taken from this lecture, along with (approximate) time stamps.
| 2:19:33 | Could you please repeat who was the author of the law of identity? |
| 2:20:03 | Why would a definition of man as a rational mammal or a rational living thing be wrong? |
| 2:24:16 | Would Aristotle favor an analytic-synthetic dichotomy |
| 2:25:05 | When you commented that the laws of induction had not been written out, did you mean to imply someone had discovered them but hadn’t yet written them out? |
| 2:25:42 | Could you give us an indication of what a valid defense of the principle of induction would be? Does it involve the law of causality? |
| 2:26:40 | Who was the father of altruism in philosophy? |
| 2:28:34 | Did Aristotle originate the concept of abstraction from particulars to grasp universals? |
| 2:29:00 | In Aristotle’s view that man is born tabula rasa and then develops concepts from percepts, would he include introspective knowledge as well as extrospective in this scheme? |
| 2:29:41 | What was Aristotle’s most influential single contribution to thought? |
| 2:29:53 | After forming a definition, can one arbitrarily form a word for that concept, or is the word chosen based on the units of the concept? |
| 2:31:19 | Please redefine a syllogism. |
| 2:32:32 | In what way does Objectivism disagree with Aristotle views on form and matter? |
| 2:33:20 | Was Aristotle an atomist? |
| 2:34:00 | Did Aristotle believe in the existence of a vacuum? |
| 2:34:14 | Would you comment on the standard criticism of the correspondence theory of truth, namely that such a theory is fruitless since we can never get outside of our minds to validate that our ideas in fact correspond to reality? |
| 2:35:36 | Would you suggest good translations of Aristotle? |
| 2:37:21 | What is “begging the question”? |
| 2:39:39 | What, if any, is the difference between induction and abstraction? |
| 2:40:48 | According to Aristotle, are the primary premises of a science arrived at by intuition? |
| 2:43:54 | Would you contrast Aristotle’s concept of “explanation” with the positivist notion that explanation is merely description? |
| 2:46:57 | Why is the phrase “Anti-Nixonites for Nixon” not contradictory? |