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1000-Word Philosophy: An Introductory Anthology

Philosophy, One Thousand Words at a Time

Welcome to 1000-Word Philosophy: An Introductory Anthology , an ever-growing set of over 190 original 1000-word essays on philosophical questions, theories, figures, and arguments.

All of our essays are available in audio format; many of our essays are available as videos . 

Newest Essays

Here are our newest essays :

• Robert Nozick’s “Wilt Chamberlain” Argument for Libertarianism by Daniel Weltman
• Artificial Intelligence: Ethics, Society, and the Environment and Artificial Intelligence: The Possibility of Artificial Minds by Thomas Metcalf
• Pyrrhonian Skepticism: Suspending Judgment by Lewis Ross
• Moral Education: Teaching Students to Become Better People by Dominik Balg
• Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems by Jon Charry
• Objects and their Parts: The Problem of Material Composition by Jeremy Skrzypek
• The Mind-Body Problem: What Are Minds? by Jacob Berger
• Seemings: Justifying Beliefs Based on How Things Seem by Kaj André Zeller
• Form and Matter: Hylomorphism by Jeremy W. Skrzypek
• Kant’s Theory of the Sublime by Matthew Sanderson
• Philosophy of Color by Tiina Carita Rosenqvist
• On Karl Marx’s Slogan “From Each According to their Ability, To Each According to their Need” by Sam Badger

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Essay Categories

We have essays in these categories:

• Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art
• Africana Philosophy
• Buddhist Philosophy
• Chinese Philosophy
• Epistemology, or Theory of Knowledge
• Historical Philosophy
• Islamic Philosophy
• Logic and Reasoning
• Metaphilosophy, or Philosophy of Philosophy
• Metaphysics
• Phenomenology and Existentialism
• Philosophy of Education
• Philosophy of Law
• Philosophy of Mind and Language
• Philosophy of Race
• Philosophy of Religion
• Philosophy of Science
• Philosophy of Sex and Gender
• Social and Political Philosophy

New categories are added as the project expands. 

New to Philosophy?

You might begin with these essays:

• What is Philosophy? by Thomas Metcalf
• Critical Thinking: What is it to be a Critical Thinker? by Carolina Flores
• Arguments: Why Do You Believe What You Believe? by Thomas Metcalf
• Is it Wrong to Believe Without Sufficient Evidence? W.K. Clifford’s “The Ethics of Belief” by Spencer Case

Popular Essays

Some of our most popular essays include: 

• Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am” by Charles Miceli and  Descartes’ Meditations by Marc Bobro
• Marx’s Conception of Alienation  by Dan Lowe
• John Rawls’ ‘A Theory of Justice’  by Ben Davies
• The Ethics of Abortion  by Nathan Nobis
• Aristotle’s Defense of Slavery  by Dan Lowe
• “God is Dead”: Nietzsche and the Death of God  by Justin Remhof
• Philosophy and Its Contrast with Science : Comparing Philosophical and Scientific Understanding  by Thomas Metcalf
• Happiness: What is it to be Happy?  by Kiki Berk
• Pascal’s Wager: A Pragmatic Argument for Belief in God  by Liz Jackson
• The African Ethic of Ubuntu  by Thaddeus Metz

A complete list of all our essays is here . 

Student Resources

We have resources for students , including essays on How to Read Philosophy and How to Write a Philosophical Essay by the Editors of 1000-Word Philosophy . 

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The 25 Most Influential Philosophers of All Time–A Philosophy Study Starter

Whether you’re majoring in philosophy, beginning your personal journey to better understand the universe, or you just have some humanities credits to fulfill, this is a great place to start. Logically speaking (which is an important way to speak within the context of philosophy), the most influential philosophers in history are responsible for the most influential ideas in history. These are the thinkers who put forth notions that still inform our understanding of the human condition today—groundbreaking, illuminating, ingenious (and frequently debunked) notions about reasoning, reality, spirituality, consciousness, dreams, social organization, human behavior, logic, and even love.

The list here is a portal to the history of human thought, a window into everything and nothing all at once. And yet, this is by no means a comprehensive discussion. The number of individuals who have impacted the course of human history through their insight, intuition, and intellect is far too great to quantify. And ideas expressed just by those included here fill untold volumes of writing. But based on our findings, this is the top tier of thinkers, those who paved the way for all which came after, who laid the foundation for so much of what we hold to be true, who in essence created the field of study we call philosophy.

What follows is a list of the The 25 Most Influential Philosophers of all time based on the period of history between 1000 BCE and 2000 CE. This is a bird’s eye view of philosophy, an overview from the very top, but by no means a comprehensive nor probing dive into any one area. That’s why we call this a Study Starter. We just get the ball rolling. The rest is up to you...

Influence Rankings

The InfluenceRanking engine calculates a numerical influence score for people, institutions, and disciplinary programs. It performs this calculation by drawing from Wikipedia/data, Crossref, and an ever-growing body of data reflecting academic achievement and merit.

The InfluenceRanking engine measures the influence of a given person in a given discipline, as well as in important related subdisciplines. Influence can also be measured within a specific set of time parameters. For instance, it is said that Greek thinker Pythagoras coined the term philosophy in the 6th Century BC. This, therefore, seems an appropriate starting point for the period under investigation. Accordingly, our ranking of the 25 Most Influential Philosophers of All Time uses the time parameters of 1000 BC to 2000 CE.

A Note On Diversity

We concede from the outset that this ranking list reflects a problem, not specifically with our algorithm, but with the human history of influence. What follows is a list composed entirely of men, most of them European, descendent from European ancestry, or famous for proliferating European ideas. Absent are the great women who have altered the course of human history by way of their ideas and actions. Also limited in appearance are the brilliant thinkers from Arabic or African antiquity, from Eastern traditions of thought, or from more recent centuries where the greatest minds were set to work on advancing civil rights.

• Top Influential Black Philosophers

This is not because we have overlooked these thinkers, nor because their contributions don’t warrant inclusion in such a list. Rather, this is a direct reflection of the enormous scope of time accounted for in our ranking. Across the vast majority of the 3000 years represented here, social, racial, and gender inequality have been very real and very consequential realities. Moreover, our rankings are limited to those thinkers whose work has enjoyed extensive translation in the English-speaking world.

Because our influence rankings measure the raw permeation of citations, writing, and ideas originating with each of these thinkers, the rigid prejudices that have persisted throughout history are also reflected on our list. This is not an endorsement of those prejudices-merely a faithful reporting on a subject which is inherently reflective of those prejudices.

Happily, when one distills a more current period of history in the philosophy discipline, one can see just how much the field of thought has evolved today, such that a meaningful number of women, people of color, and people of non-European origin are represented. This denotes a clear evolution in an academic field that, for all of its insight and illumination, also has a deep-seated history of Eurocentrism.

For a look at the philosophers with the greatest influence on the field today, check out:

• Top Influential Philosophers Today

With this limitation acknowledged, we bring you...

The Most Influential Philosophers of All Time

What follows is a list, in order, of the most influential philosophers who ever lived. Most of the names below will be familiar, though you might find a few surprises.

Other information provided below includes a condensed Wikipedia bio for each philosopher, their Key Contributions to the discipline, and Selected Works. You can also click on the profile link for each philosopher to see where they rank in specific philosophy subdisciplines, such as logic, ethics, and metaphysics.

1. Socrates (470 BC–399 BC)/ Plato (429 BC–347 BC)

*Socrates and Plato are inseparable from one another in the history of thought and are therefore inseparable in our ranking.

Socrates was a Greek philosopher from Athens who is credited as one of the founders of Western philosophy, and as being the first moral philosopher of the Western ethical tradition of thought. An enigmatic figure, he made no writings, and is known chiefly through the accounts of classical writers writing after his lifetime, particularly his students Plato and Xenophon. Other sources include the contemporaneous Antisthenes, Aristippus, and Aeschines of Sphettos. Aristophanes, a playwright, is the main contemporary author to have written plays mentioning Socrates during Socrates’ lifetime, though a fragment of Ion of Chios’ Travel Journal provides important information about Socrates’ youth.

The most influential of Socrates’ students, Plato was an Athenian philosopher during the Classical period in Ancient Greece. He was the founder of the Platonist school of thought, and the Academy, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. He is widely considered as one of the most important and influential individuals in human history, and the pivotal figure in the history of Ancient Greek and Western philosophy, along with his teacher, Socrates, and his most famous student, Aristotle.

Plato has also often been cited as one of the founders of Western religion and spirituality. The so-called neoplatonism of philosophers such as Plotinus and Porphyry greatly influenced Christianity through Church Fathers such as Augustine. Alfred North Whitehead once noted: “the safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.” Unlike the work of nearly all of his contemporaries, Plato’s entire body of work is believed to have survived intact for over 2,400 years. Although their popularity has fluctuated, Plato’s works have consistently been read and studied.

Key Contributions from Socrates

• Socratic Dialogue
• Socratic Questioning
• Socratic Method

Key Contributions from Plato

• Theory of Forms
• Theory of Soul

Selected Works

*There is limited consensus about the exact publication date for each of these works. Dates below should be seen as approximations.

**Though Socrates is widely considered the father of the Western philosophical tradition, he authored no texts during his lifetime. His influence was felt in his lifetime through his dialogues with prominent pupils. Therefore, he is best read through the works of his most influential students:

• Apology of Socrates (c. 399 BC)
• The Phaedo (c. 399 BC)
• Crito (c. 399 BC)
• Symposium (c. 385-370 BC)
• The Republic (c. 375 BC)
• The Sophist (c. 360 BC)
• Timaeus (c. 360 BC)
• Symposium (c. 422 BC)
• Apology of Socrates to the Jury (c. 399 BC)
• Memorabilia (c. 371 BC)
• Oeconomicus (c. 362 BC)

Find out where Socrates among philosophy’s major branches and subdisciplines.

Find out where Plato among philosophy’s major branches and subdisciplines.

2. Aristotle (384 BC–322 BC)

Aristotle was a Greek philosopher and polymath during the Classical period in Ancient Greece. Taught by Plato, he was the founder of the Lyceum, the Peripatetic school of philosophy, and the Aristotelian tradition. His writings cover many subjects including physics, biology, zoology, metaphysics, logic, ethics, aesthetics, poetry, theatre, music, rhetoric, psychology, linguistics, economics, politics, and government.

Aristotle provided a complex synthesis of the various philosophies existing prior to him. It was above all from his teachings that the West inherited its intellectual lexicon, as well as problems and methods of inquiry. As a result, his philosophy has exerted a unique influence on almost every form of knowledge in the West and it continues to be a subject of contemporary philosophical discussion.

Key Contributions

• Aristotelianism
• Peripatetic school
• On the Soul (c. 350 BC)
• Nicomachean Ethics (c. 340 BC)
• Metaphysics (c. 335-323 BC)*
• Rhetoric (c. 322 BC)

Find out where this influencer ranks among philosophy’s major branches and subdisciplines.

3. Immanuel Kant (1724–1804)

Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher and one of the central Enlightenment thinkers. Kant’s comprehensive and systematic works in epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics have made him one of the most influential figures in modern Western philosophy. In his doctrine of transcendental idealism, Kant argued that space and time are mere “forms of intuition” which structure all experience, and therefore that while “things-in-themselves” exist and contribute to experience, they are nonetheless distinct from the objects of experience. From this it follows that the objects of experience are mere “appearances”, and that the nature of things as they are in themselves is consequently unknowable to us.

In an attempt to counter the skepticism he found in the writings of philosopher David Hume, he wrote the Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787), one of his most well-known works. In it, he developed his theory of experience to answer the question of whether synthetic a priori knowledge is possible, which would in turn make it possible to determine the limits of metaphysical inquiry. Kant drew a parallel to the Copernican revolution in his proposal that the objects of the senses must conform to our spatial and temporal forms of intuition, and that we can consequently have a priori cognition of the objects of the senses. Kant believed that reason is also the source of morality, and that aesthetics arise from a faculty of disinterested judgment. Kant’s views continue to have a major influence on contemporary philosophy, especially the fields of epistemology, ethics, political theory, and post-modern aesthetics.

• Categorical Imperative
• Kantian Ethics
• Practical Reason
• Transcendental Idealism
• Universal Natural History (1755)
• Critique of Practical Reason (1788)
• Critique of Judgment (1790)
• Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason (1793)
• Metaphysics of Morals (1797)

4. René Descartes (1596–1650)

René Descartes was a French philosopher, mathematician, and scientist. A native of the Kingdom of France, he spent about 20 years of his life in the Dutch Republic after serving for a while in the Dutch States Army of Maurice of Nassau, Prince of Orange and the Stadtholder of the United Provinces. One of the most notable intellectual figures of the Dutch Golden Age, Descartes is also widely regarded as one of the founders of modern philosophy.

Many elements of Descartes’s philosophy have precedents in late Aristotelianism, the revived Stoicism of the 16th century, or in earlier philosophers like Augustine. In his natural philosophy, he differed from the schools on two major points: first, he rejected the splitting of corporeal substance into matter and form; second, he rejected any appeal to final ends, divine or natural, in explaining natural phenomena. In his theology, he insists on the absolute freedom of God’s act of creation. Refusing to accept the authority of previous philosophers, Descartes frequently set his views apart from the philosophers who preceded him. In the opening section of the Passions of the Soul , an early modern treatise on emotions, Descartes goes so far as to assert that he will write on this topic “as if no one had written on these matters before.” His best known philosophical statement is ” cogito, ergo sum ″ (“I think, therefore I am”; French: Je pense, donc je suis ), found in Discourse on the Method (1637; in French and Latin) and Principles of Philosophy (1644, in Latin).

Descartes has often been called the father of modern philosophy, and is largely seen as responsible for the increased attention given to epistemology in the 17th century.

• Cogito, Ergo Sum
• Cartesian Doubt
• Cartesian Coordinate System
• Cartesian Dualism
• Discourse on the Method (1637)
• Meditations on First Philosophy (1641)
• Principles of Philosophy (1644)
• Passions of the Soul (1649)

5. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a German philosopher, cultural critic, composer, poet, and philologist whose work has exerted a profound influence on modern intellectual history. He began his career as a classical philologist before turning to philosophy. He became the youngest person ever to hold the Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel in 1869 at the age of 24. Nietzsche resigned in 1879 due to health problems that plagued him most of his life; he completed much of his core writing in the following decade. In 1889, at age 44, he suffered a collapse and afterward a complete loss of his mental faculties. He lived his remaining years in the care of his mother until her death in 1897 and then with his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche.

Nietzsche’s writing spans philosophical polemics, poetry, cultural criticism, and fiction while displaying a fondness for aphorism and irony. Prominent elements of his philosophy include his radical critique of truth in favor of perspectivism; a genealogical critique of religion and Christian morality and related theory of master-slave morality; the aesthetic affirmation of life in response to both the “death of God” and the profound crisis of nihilism; the notion of Apollonian and Dionysian forces; and a characterization of the human subject as the expression of competing wills, collectively understood as the will to power. He also developed influential concepts such as the Übermensch and the doctrine of eternal return. In his later work, he became increasingly preoccupied with the creative powers of the individual to overcome cultural and moral mores in pursuit of new values and aesthetic health. His body of work touched a wide range of topics, including art, philology, history, religion, tragedy, culture, and science, and drew inspiration from figures such as Socrates, Zoroaster, Arthur Schopenhauer, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Wagner and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

• Master-slave Morality
• God is Dead
• Human, All Too Human (1878)
• Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883)
• Beyond Good and Evil (1886)
• On the Genealogy of Morality (1887)
• Ecce Homo (1888; published in 1908)

6. Karl Marx (1818–1883)

Karl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, journalist and socialist revolutionary. Born in Trier, Germany, Marx studied law and philosophy at university. He married Jenny von Westphalen in 1843. Due to his political publications, Marx became stateless and lived in exile with his wife and children in London for decades, where he continued to develop his thought in collaboration with German thinker Friedrich Engels and publish his writings, researching in the reading room of the British Museum.

His best-known titles are the 1848 pamphlet The Communist Manifesto and the three-volume Das Kapital . Marx’s political and philosophical thought had enormous influence on subsequent intellectual, economic and political history. His name has been used as an adjective, a noun and a school of social theory.

• Economic Determinism
• Historical Materialism
• Marxist Dialectic
• Marxist Philosophy of Nature
• Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1843)
• Wage Labour and Capital (1847)
• Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848)
• Das Kapital, Vol. 1 (1867)

7. Avicenna (980–1037)

Ibn Sina, also known as Abu Ali Sina , Pur Sina , and often known in the West as Avicenna , was a Persian polymath who is regarded as one of the most significant physicians, astronomers, thinkers and writers of the Islamic Golden Age, and the father of early modern medicine. Sajjad H. Rizvi has called Avicenna “arguably the most influential philosopher of the pre-modern era”. He was a Muslim Peripatetic philosopher influenced by Aristotelian philosophy. Of the 450 works he is believed to have written, around 240 have survived, including 150 on philosophy and 40 on medicine.

His most famous works are The Book of Healing , a philosophical and scientific encyclopedia, and The Canon of Medicine , a medical encyclopedia which became a standard medical text at many medieval universities and remained in use as late as 1650. Besides philosophy and medicine, Avicenna’s corpus includes writings on astronomy, alchemy, geography and geology, psychology, Islamic theology, logic, mathematics, physics and works of poetry.

• Islamic Metaphysics
• Proof of the Truthful
• Floating Man
• The Canon of Medicine (1025)
• The Book of Healing (1027)
• Al Nijat (Published 1913)

8. David Hume (1711–1776)

David Hume was a Scottish Enlightenment philosopher, historian, economist, librarian and essayist, who is best known today for his highly influential system of philosophical empiricism, skepticism, and naturalism. Beginning with A Treatise of Human Nature , Hume strove to create a naturalistic science of man that examined the psychological basis of human nature. Hume argued against the existence of innate ideas, positing that all human knowledge derives solely from experience. This places him with Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and George Berkeley, as a British Empiricist.

• Bundle Theory
• Association of Ideas
• Hume’s Fork
• A Treatise of Human Nature (1740)
• An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751)
• An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1758)
• Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779; posthumously)

9. Martin Heidegger (1889–1976)

Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher and a seminal thinker in the Continental tradition of philosophy. He is best known for contributions to phenomenology, hermeneutics, and existentialism. In Heidegger’s fundamental text Being and Time (1927), “Dasein” is introduced as a term for the specific type of being that humans possess.[15] Dasein has been translated as “being there”. Heidegger believes that Dasein already has a “pre-ontological” and non-abstract understanding that shapes how it lives. This mode of being he terms “being-in-the-world”.

Commentators have noted that Dasein and “being-in-the-world” are unitary concepts in contrast with the “subject/object” view of rationalist philosophy since at least René Descartes. Heidegger uses an analysis of Dasein to approach the question of the meaning of being, which Heidegger scholar Michael Wheeler describes as “concerned with what makes beings intelligible as beings”. Heidegger’s later work includes criticism of the view, common in the Western tradition, that all of nature is a “standing reserve” on call, as if it were a part of industrial inventory. Heidegger was a member and supporter of the Nazi Party. There is controversy as to the relationship between his philosophy and his Nazism.

*Indeed, because of Heidegger’s connection to Nazism, we consider his inclusion on this list controversial. However, his performance using our Ranking Analytics made this inclusion unavoidable. For more on the sometimes overlapping phenomena of influence and infamy, take a look at our discussion on the undeniable influence of terror mastermind Osama bin Laden .

• Heideggerian terminology
• Ontological Difference
• Being and Time (1927)
• Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (1929)
• Introduction to Metaphysics (1935)
• The Principle of Reason (1955-56)
• Identity and Difference (1955-57)

10. Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)

Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein was an Austrian-British philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. He is considered by some to be the greatest philosopher of the 20th century. From 1929 to 1947, Wittgenstein taught at the University of Cambridge. In spite of his position, during his entire life only one book of his philosophy was published, the relatively slim 75-page Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung (Logical-Philosophical Treatise) (1921) which appeared, together with an English translation, in 1922 under the Latin title Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus .

His only other published works were an article, “Some Remarks on Logical Form” (1929), a book review, and a children’s dictionary. His voluminous manuscripts were edited and published posthumously. The first and best-known of this posthumous series is the 1953 book Philosophical Investigations . A survey among American university and college teachers ranked the Investigations as the most important book of 20th-century philosophy, standing out as “the one crossover masterpiece in twentieth-century philosophy, appealing across diverse specializations and philosophical orientations.”

• Family Resemblance
• Form of Life
• Language-Game
• Wittgenstein’s Ladder
• Tractatus Logico-Philosphicus (1921)
• Some Remarks on Logical Form (1929)
• Philosophical Investigations (1953)
• Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief (1967)

11. John Locke (1632–1704)

John Locke was an English philosopher and physician, widely regarded as one of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers and commonly known as the “Father of Liberalism”. Considered one of the first of the British empiricists, following the tradition of Sir Francis Bacon, Locke is equally important to social contract theory. His work greatly affected the development of epistemology and political philosophy. His writings influenced Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, many Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, as well as the American Revolutionaries. His contributions to classical republicanism and liberal theory are reflected in the United States Declaration of Independence.

• Natural Rights
• Lockean Proviso
• Consent of the Governed
• Consciousness
• Social Contract
• A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689)
• An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689)
• Two Treatises of Government (1690)
• Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693)

12. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a German philosopher and an important figure in German idealism. He is considered one of the fundamental figures of modern Western philosophy, with his influence extending to the entire range of contemporary philosophical issues, from aesthetics to ontology to politics, both in the analytic and continental tradition. Hegel’s principal achievement was his development of a distinctive articulation of idealism, sometimes termed absolute idealism , in which the dualisms of, for instance, mind and nature and subject and object are overcome.

• Hegelian Dialectic
• Master-slave Dialectic
• Phenomenology of Spirit (1807)
• Science of Logic (1812-1816)
• Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1816)
• Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1820)

13. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274)

Thomas Aquinas was an Italian Dominican friar, philosopher, Catholic priest, and Doctor of the Church. An immensely influential philosopher, theologian, and jurist in the tradition of scholasticism, he is also known within the latter as the and the . The name Aquinas identifies his ancestral origins in the county of Aquino in present-day Lazio, Italy. He was the foremost classical proponent of natural theology and the father of Thomism; of which he argued that reason is found in God. His influence on Western thought is considerable, and much of modern philosophy developed or opposed his ideas, particularly in the areas of ethics, natural law, metaphysics, and political theory.

• Scholasticism
• Theological Intellectualism
• Moderate Realism
• Summa contra Gentiles (1259-1265)
• Summa Theologiae (1265-1274)

14. Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855)

Søren Aabye Kierkegaard was a Danish philosopher, theologian, poet, social critic and religious author who is widely considered to be the first existentialist philosopher. He wrote critical texts on organized religion, Christendom, morality, ethics, psychology, and the philosophy of religion, displaying a fondness for metaphor, irony and parables. Much of his philosophical work deals with the issues of how one lives as a “single individual”, giving priority to concrete human reality over abstract thinking and highlighting the importance of personal choice and commitment. He was against literary critics who defined idealist intellectuals and philosophers of his time, and thought that Swedenborg, Hegel, Fichte, Schelling, Schlegel and Hans Christian Andersen were all “understood” far too quickly by “scholars”.

• Existentialism
• Leap of Faith
• On The Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates (1841)
• Fear and Trembling (1843)
• Either/Or (1843)
• The Sickness Unto Death (1849)

15. Edmund Husserl (1859–1938)

Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl was a German philosopher who established the school of phenomenology. In his early work, he elaborated critiques of historicism and of psychologism in logic based on analyses of intentionality. In his mature work, he sought to develop a systematic foundational science based on the so-called phenomenological reduction. Arguing that transcendental consciousness sets the limits of all possible knowledge, Husserl redefined phenomenology as a transcendental-idealist philosophy. Husserl’s thought profoundly influenced 20th-century philosophy, and he remains a notable figure in contemporary philosophy and beyond.

• Phenomenology
• Formal Ontology
• Theory of Moments
• Philosophy of Arithmetic (1891)
• Logical Investigations (1900)
• Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Present Phenomenological Philosophy (1913)
• Cartesian Meditations (1931)

16. Bertrand Russell (1872–1970)

Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell was a British polymath. As an academic, he worked in philosophy, mathematics, and logic. His work has had a considerable influence on mathematics, logic, set theory, linguistics, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, computer science and various areas of analytic philosophy, especially logic, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of language, epistemology and metaphysics. Russell was also a public intellectual, historian, social critic, political activist, and Nobel laureate.

• Analytic Philosophy
• Axiom of Reducibility
• Automated Reasoning
• Mathematical Beauty
• The Principles of Mathematics (1903)
• On Denoting (1905)
• Principia Mathematica (1910)
• Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy (1919)

17. Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980)

Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre was a French philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic. He was one of the key figures in the philosophy of existentialism and phenomenology, and one of the leading figures in 20th-century French philosophy and Marxism. His work has also influenced sociology, critical theory, post-colonial theory, and literary studies, and continues to influence these disciplines.

• Existence Precedes Essence
• Being-in-itself
• Nausea (1938)
• Being and Nothingness (1943)
• No Exit (1944)
• Existentialism and Humanism (1946)

18. Jacques Derrida (1930–2004)

Jacques Derrida was an Algerian-born French philosopher best known for developing a form of semiotic analysis known as deconstruction, which he discussed in numerous texts, and developed in the context of phenomenology. He is one of the major figures associated with post-structuralism and postmodern philosophy.

• Deconstruction
• Phallogocentrism
• Speech and Phenomena (1967)
• Of Grammatology (1967)
• Writing and Difference (1967)
• Margins of Philosophy (1972)

19. Michel Foucault (1926–1984)

Paul-Michel Foucault was a French philosopher, historian of ideas, social theorist, and literary critic. Foucault’s theories primarily address the relationship between power and knowledge, and how they are used as a form of social control through societal institutions. Though often cited as a structuralist and postmodernist, Foucault rejected these labels. His thought has influenced academics, especially those working in communication studies, anthropology, psychology, sociology, criminology, cultural studies, literary theory, feminism, Marxism and critical theory.

• Disciplinary institution
• Foucauldian discourse analysis
• Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (1961)
• The Birth of the Clinic: An Archeology of Medical Perception (1963)
• The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (1966)
• The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969)

20. Averroes (1126–1198)

Ibn Rushd (full name in Arabic: أبو الوليد محمد ابن احمد ابن رشد, romanized: Abū l-Walīd Muḥammad Ibn ʾAḥmad Ibn Rušd;) often Latinized as Averroes was a Muslim Andalusian polymath and jurist of Berber descent who wrote about many subjects, including philosophy, theology, medicine, astronomy, physics, psychology, mathematics, Islamic jurisprudence and law, and linguistics. The author of more than 100 books and treatises, his philosophical works include numerous commentaries on Aristotle, for which he was known in the western world as The Commentator and Father of Rationalism . Ibn Rushd also served as a chief judge and a court physician for the Almohad Caliphate. Averroes was a strong proponent of Aristotelianism; he attempted to restore what he considered the original teachings of Aristotle and opposed the Neoplatonist tendencies of earlier Muslim thinkers, such as Al-Farabi and Avicenna.

• Unity of the Intellect
• Aristotelianism in the Islamic philosophical tradition
• Philosophy within a Muslim Religious Tradition
• The General Principles of Medicine (c. 1162)
• Decisive Treatise on the Agreement Between Religious Law and Philosophy (c. 1178-1180)
• Examination of the Methods of Proof Concerning the Doctrines of Religion (c. 1179-1180)
• The Incoherence of the Incoherence (c. 1179-1180)

21. John Stuart Mill (1806–1873)

John Stuart Mill , usually cited as J. S. Mill, was an English philosopher, political economist, and civil servant. One of the most influential thinkers in the history of classical liberalism, he contributed widely to social theory, political theory, and political economy. Dubbed “the most influential English-speaking philosopher of the nineteenth century”, he conceived of liberty as justifying the freedom of the individual in opposition to unlimited state and social control.

• Utilitarianism
• Liberal Feminism
• Mill’s Methods
• A System of Logic (1843)
• On Liberty (1859)
• Utilitarianism (1863)
• The Subjection of Women (1869)

22. William James (1842–1910)

William James was an American philosopher and psychologist, and the first educator to offer a psychology course in the United States. James is considered to be a leading thinker of the late nineteenth century, one of the most influential philosophers of the United States, and the “Father of American psychology”. Along with Charles Sanders Peirce, James established the philosophical school known as pragmatism, and is also cited as one of the founders of functional psychology. A Review of General Psychology analysis, published in 2002, ranked James as the 14th most eminent psychologist of the 20th century. A survey published in American Psychologist in 1991 ranked James’s reputation in second place, after Wilhelm Wundt, who is widely regarded as the founder of experimental psychology. James also developed the philosophical perspective known as radical empiricism.

• The Will to Believe
• Pragmatic Theory of Truth
• Radical Empiricism
• Stream of Consciousness
• The Principles of Psychology (1890)
• The Will To Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897)
• The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (1902)
• Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (1907)

23. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716)

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was a prominent German polymath and one of the most important logicians, mathematicians and natural philosophers of the Enlightenment. As a representative of the seventeenth-century tradition of rationalism, Leibniz developed, as his most prominent accomplishment, the ideas of differential and integral calculus, independently of Isaac Newton’s contemporaneous developments. Mathematical works have consistently favored Leibniz’s notation as the conventional expression of calculus. It was only in the 20th century that Leibniz’s law of continuity and transcendental law of homogeneity found mathematical implementation.

• The Product Rule
• Law of Continuity
• Best of All Possible Worlds
• Meditations on Knowledge, Truth, and Ideas (1864)
• Discourse on Metaphysics (1686)
• New Essays on Human Understanding (1704)
• The Theodicy (1710)
• Monadology (1714)

24. Gottlob Frege (1848–1925)

• Frege’s Propositional Calculus
• Principle of Compositionality
• Context Principle
• Begriffsschrift (1879)
• The Foundations of Arithmetic (1884)
• Basic Laws of Arithmetic (1893-1903)

25. John Dewey (1859–1952)

John Dewey was an American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer whose ideas have been influential in education and social reform. He is regarded as one of the most prominent American scholars in the first half of the twentieth century. The overriding theme of Dewey’s works was his profound belief in democracy, be it in politics, education, or communication and journalism. As Dewey himself stated in 1888, while still at the University of Michigan, “Democracy and the one, ultimate, ethical ideal of humanity are to my mind synonymous.” Dewey was one of the primary figures associated with the philosophy of pragmatism and is considered one of the fathers of functional psychology.

• Instrumentalism
• Functional Psychology
• Progressive Education
• Occupational Psychosis
• Psychology (1887)
• Leibniz’s New Essays Concerning the Human Understanding (1888)
• Ethics (1908)
• Democracy and Education (1916)
• Art as Experience (1934)

And if this bird’s eye view of the philosophy discipline has sparked your interest, consider diving a little deeper with a look at:

• The 25 Most Influential Philosophy Books
• How to Major in Philosophy
• What Can I do With a Master’s in Philosophy?

Find additional study resources with a look at our study guides for students at every stage of the educational journey.

Or get valuable study tips, advice on adjusting to campus life, and much more at our student resource homepage .

Guide to the classics: Michel de Montaigne’s Essays

Associate Professor in Philosophy, Deakin University

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Matthew Sharpe is part of an ARC funded project on modern reinventions of the ancient idea of "philosophy as a way of life", in which Montaigne is a central figure.

Deakin University provides funding as a member of The Conversation AU.

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When Michel de Montaigne retired to his family estate in 1572, aged 38, he tells us that he wanted to write his famous Essays as a distraction for his idle mind . He neither wanted nor expected people beyond his circle of friends to be too interested.

His Essays’ preface almost warns us off:

Reader, you have here an honest book; … in writing it, I have proposed to myself no other than a domestic and private end. I have had no consideration at all either to your service or to my glory … Thus, reader, I myself am the matter of my book: there’s no reason that you should employ your leisure upon so frivolous and vain a subject. Therefore farewell.

The ensuing, free-ranging essays, although steeped in classical poetry, history and philosophy, are unquestionably something new in the history of Western thought. They were almost scandalous for their day.

No one before Montaigne in the Western canon had thought to devote pages to subjects as diverse and seemingly insignificant as “Of Smells”, “Of the Custom of Wearing Clothes”, “Of Posting” (letters, that is), “Of Thumbs” or “Of Sleep” — let alone reflections on the unruliness of the male appendage , a subject which repeatedly concerned him.

French philosopher Jacques Rancière has recently argued that modernism began with the opening up of the mundane, private and ordinary to artistic treatment. Modern art no longer restricts its subject matters to classical myths, biblical tales, the battles and dealings of Princes and prelates.

If Rancière is right, it could be said that Montaigne’s 107 Essays, each between several hundred words and (in one case) several hundred pages, came close to inventing modernism in the late 16th century.

Montaigne frequently apologises for writing so much about himself. He is only a second rate politician and one-time Mayor of Bourdeaux, after all. With an almost Socratic irony , he tells us most about his own habits of writing in the essays titled “Of Presumption”, “Of Giving the Lie”, “Of Vanity”, and “Of Repentance”.

But the message of this latter essay is, quite simply, that non, je ne regrette rien , as a more recent French icon sang:

Were I to live my life over again, I should live it just as I have lived it; I neither complain of the past, nor do I fear the future; and if I am not much deceived, I am the same within that I am without … I have seen the grass, the blossom, and the fruit, and now see the withering; happily, however, because naturally.

Montaigne’s persistence in assembling his extraordinary dossier of stories, arguments, asides and observations on nearly everything under the sun (from how to parley with an enemy to whether women should be so demure in matters of sex , has been celebrated by admirers in nearly every generation.

Within a decade of his death, his Essays had left their mark on Bacon and Shakespeare. He was a hero to the enlighteners Montesquieu and Diderot. Voltaire celebrated Montaigne - a man educated only by his own reading, his father and his childhood tutors – as “the least methodical of all philosophers, but the wisest and most amiable”. Nietzsche claimed that the very existence of Montaigne’s Essays added to the joy of living in this world.

More recently, Sarah Bakewell’s charming engagement with Montaigne, How to Live or a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer (2010) made the best-sellers’ lists. Even today’s initiatives in teaching philosophy in schools can look back to Montaigne (and his “ On the Education of Children ”) as a patron saint or sage .

So what are these Essays, which Montaigne protested were indistinguishable from their author? (“ My book and I go hand in hand together ”).

It’s a good question.

Anyone who tries to read the Essays systematically soon finds themselves overwhelmed by the sheer wealth of examples, anecdotes, digressions and curios Montaigne assembles for our delectation, often without more than the hint of a reason why.

To open the book is to venture into a world in which fortune consistently defies expectations; our senses are as uncertain as our understanding is prone to error; opposites turn out very often to be conjoined (“ the most universal quality is diversity ”); even vice can lead to virtue. Many titles seem to have no direct relation to their contents. Nearly everything our author says in one place is qualified, if not overturned, elsewhere.

Without pretending to untangle all of the knots of this “ book with a wild and desultory plan ”, let me tug here on a couple of Montaigne’s threads to invite and assist new readers to find their own way.

Philosophy (and writing) as a way of life

Some scholars argued that Montaigne began writing his essays as a want-to-be Stoic , hardening himself against the horrors of the French civil and religious wars , and his grief at the loss of his best friend Étienne de La Boétie through dysentery.

Certainly, for Montaigne, as for ancient thinkers led by his favourites, Plutarch and the Roman Stoic Seneca, philosophy was not solely about constructing theoretical systems, writing books and articles. It was what one more recent admirer of Montaigne has called “ a way of life ”.

Montaigne has little time for forms of pedantry that value learning as a means to insulate scholars from the world, rather than opening out onto it. He writes :

Either our reason mocks us or it ought to have no other aim but our contentment.

We are great fools . ‘He has passed over his life in idleness,’ we say: ‘I have done nothing today.’ What? have you not lived? that is not only the fundamental, but the most illustrious of all your occupations.

One feature of the Essays is, accordingly, Montaigne’s fascination with the daily doings of men like Socrates and Cato the Younger ; two of those figures revered amongst the ancients as wise men or “ sages ”.

Their wisdom, he suggests , was chiefly evident in the lives they led (neither wrote a thing). In particular, it was proven by the nobility each showed in facing their deaths. Socrates consented serenely to taking hemlock, having been sentenced unjustly to death by the Athenians. Cato stabbed himself to death after having meditated upon Socrates’ example , in order not to cede to Julius Caesar’s coup d’état .

To achieve such “philosophic” constancy, Montaigne saw, requires a good deal more than book learning . Indeed, everything about our passions and, above all, our imagination , speaks against achieving that perfect tranquillity the classical thinkers saw as the highest philosophical goal.

We discharge our hopes and fears, very often, on the wrong objects, Montaigne notes , in an observation that anticipates the thinking of Freud and modern psychology. Always, these emotions dwell on things we cannot presently change. Sometimes, they inhibit our ability to see and deal in a supple way with the changing demands of life.

Philosophy, in this classical view, involves a retraining of our ways of thinking, seeing and being in the world. Montaigne’s earlier essay “ To philosophise is to learn how to die ” is perhaps the clearest exemplar of his indebtedness to this ancient idea of philosophy.

Yet there is a strong sense in which all of the Essays are a form of what one 20th century author has dubbed “ self-writing ”: an ethical exercise to “strengthen and enlighten” Montaigne’s own judgement, as much as that of we readers:

And though nobody should read me, have I wasted time in entertaining myself so many idle hours in so pleasing and useful thoughts? … I have no more made my book than my book has made me: it is a book consubstantial with the author, of a peculiar design, a parcel of my life …

As for the seeming disorder of the product, and Montaigne’s frequent claims that he is playing the fool , this is arguably one more feature of the Essays that reflects his Socratic irony. Montaigne wants to leave us with some work to do and scope to find our own paths through the labyrinth of his thoughts, or alternatively, to bobble about on their diverting surfaces .

A free-thinking sceptic

Yet Montaigne’s Essays, for all of their classicism and their idiosyncracies, are rightly numbered as one of the founding texts of modern thought . Their author keeps his own prerogatives, even as he bows deferentially before the altars of ancient heroes like Socrates, Cato, Alexander the Great or the Theban general Epaminondas .

There is a good deal of the Christian, Augustinian legacy in Montaigne’s makeup. And of all the philosophers, he most frequently echoes ancient sceptics like Pyrrho or Carneades who argued that we can know almost nothing with certainty. This is especially true concerning the “ultimate questions” the Catholics and Huguenots of Montaigne’s day were bloodily contesting.

Writing in a time of cruel sectarian violence , Montaigne is unconvinced by the ageless claim that having a dogmatic faith is necessary or especially effective in assisting people to love their neighbours :

Between ourselves, I have ever observed supercelestial opinions and subterranean manners to be of singular accord …

This scepticism applies as much to the pagan ideal of a perfected philosophical sage as it does to theological speculations.

Socrates’ constancy before death, Montaigne concludes, was simply too demanding for most people, almost superhuman . As for Cato’s proud suicide, Montaigne takes liberty to doubt whether it was as much the product of Stoic tranquility, as of a singular turn of mind that could take pleasure in such extreme virtue .

Indeed when it comes to his essays “ Of Moderation ” or “ Of Virtue ”, Montaigne quietly breaks the ancient mold. Instead of celebrating the feats of the world’s Catos or Alexanders, here he lists example after example of people moved by their sense of transcendent self-righteousness to acts of murderous or suicidal excess.

Even virtue can become vicious, these essays imply, unless we know how to moderate our own presumptions.

Of cannibals and cruelties

If there is one form of argument Montaigne uses most often, it is the sceptical argument drawing on the disagreement amongst even the wisest authorities.

If human beings could know if, say, the soul was immortal, with or without the body, or dissolved when we die … then the wisest people would all have come to the same conclusions by now, the argument goes. Yet even the “most knowing” authorities disagree about such things, Montaigne delights in showing us .

The existence of such “ an infinite confusion ” of opinions and customs ceases to be the problem, for Montaigne. It points the way to a new kind of solution, and could in fact enlighten us.

Documenting such manifold differences between customs and opinions is, for him, an education in humility :

Manners and opinions contrary to mine do not so much displease as instruct me; nor so much make me proud as they humble me.

His essay “ Of Cannibals ” for instance, presents all of the different aspects of American Indian culture, as known to Montaigne through travellers’ reports then filtering back into Europe. For the most part, he finds these “savages’” society ethically equal, if not far superior, to that of war-torn France’s — a perspective that Voltaire and Rousseau would echo nearly 200 years later.

We are horrified at the prospect of eating our ancestors. Yet Montaigne imagines that from the Indians’ perspective, Western practices of cremating our deceased, or burying their bodies to be devoured by the worms must seem every bit as callous.

And while we are at it, Montaigne adds that consuming people after they are dead seems a good deal less cruel and inhumane than torturing folk we don’t even know are guilty of any crime whilst they are still alive …

A gay and sociable wisdom

“So what is left then?”, the reader might ask, as Montaigne undermines one presumption after another, and piles up exceptions like they had become the only rule.

A very great deal , is the answer. With metaphysics, theology, and the feats of godlike sages all under a “ suspension of judgment ”, we become witnesses as we read the Essays to a key document in the modern revaluation and valorization of everyday life.

There is, for instance, Montaigne’s scandalously demotic habit of interlacing words, stories and actions from his neighbours, the local peasants (and peasant women) with examples from the greats of Christian and pagan history. As he writes :

I have known in my time a hundred artisans, a hundred labourers, wiser and more happy than the rectors of the university, and whom I had much rather have resembled.

By the end of the Essays, Montaigne has begun openly to suggest that, if tranquillity, constancy, bravery, and honour are the goals the wise hold up for us, they can all be seen in much greater abundance amongst the salt of the earth than amongst the rich and famous:

I propose a life ordinary and without lustre: ‘tis all one … To enter a breach, conduct an embassy, govern a people, are actions of renown; to … laugh, sell, pay, love, hate, and gently and justly converse with our own families and with ourselves … not to give our selves the lie, that is rarer, more difficult and less remarkable …

And so we arrive with these last Essays at a sentiment better known today from another philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, the author of A Gay Science (1882) .

Montaigne’s closing essays repeat the avowal that: “ I love a gay and civil wisdom … .” But in contrast to his later Germanic admirer, the music here is less Wagner or Beethoven than it is Mozart (as it were), and Montaigne’s spirit much less agonised than gently serene.

It was Voltaire, again, who said that life is a tragedy for those who feel, and a comedy for those who think. Montaigne adopts and admires the comic perspective . As he writes in “Of Experience”:

It is not of much use to go upon stilts , for, when upon stilts, we must still walk with our legs; and when seated upon the most elevated throne in the world, we are still perched on our own bums.

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Aristotle (384–322 B.C.E.) numbers among the greatest philosophers of all time. Judged solely in terms of his philosophical influence, only Plato is his peer: Aristotle’s works shaped centuries of philosophy from Late Antiquity through the Renaissance, and even today continue to be studied with keen, non-antiquarian interest. A prodigious researcher and writer, Aristotle left a great body of work, perhaps numbering as many as two-hundred treatises, from which approximately thirty-one survive. [ 1 ] His extant writings span a wide range of disciplines, from logic, metaphysics and philosophy of mind, through ethics, political theory, aesthetics and rhetoric, and into such primarily non-philosophical fields as empirical biology, where he excelled at detailed plant and animal observation and description. In all these areas, Aristotle’s theories have provided illumination, met with resistance, sparked debate, and generally stimulated the sustained interest of an abiding readership.

Because of its wide range and its remoteness in time, Aristotle’s philosophy defies easy encapsulation. The long history of interpretation and appropriation of Aristotelian texts and themes—spanning over two millennia and comprising philosophers working within a variety of religious and secular traditions—has rendered even basic points of interpretation controversial. The set of entries on Aristotle in this site addresses this situation by proceeding in three tiers. First, the present, general entry offers a brief account of Aristotle’s life and characterizes his central philosophical commitments, highlighting his most distinctive methods and most influential achievements. [ 2 ] Second are General Topics , which offer detailed introductions to the main areas of Aristotle’s philosophical activity. Finally, there follow Special Topics , which investigate in greater detail more narrowly focused issues, especially those of central concern in recent Aristotelian scholarship.

1. Aristotle’s Life

2. the aristotelian corpus: character and primary divisions, 3. phainomena and the endoxic method, 4.2 science, 4.3 dialectic, 5. essentialism and homonymy, 6. category theory, 7. the four causal account of explanatory adequacy, 8. hylomorphism, 9. aristotelian teleology, 10. substance, 11. living beings, 12. happiness and political association, 13. rhetoric and the arts, 14. aristotle’s legacy, a. translations, b. translations with commentaries, c. general works, d. bibliography of works cited, other internet resources, related entries.

Born in 384 B.C.E. in the Macedonian region of northeastern Greece in the small city of Stagira (whence the moniker ‘the Stagirite’, which one still occasionally encounters in Aristotelian scholarship), Aristotle was sent to Athens at about the age of seventeen to study in Plato’s Academy, then a pre-eminent place of learning in the Greek world. Once in Athens, Aristotle remained associated with the Academy until Plato’s death in 347, at which time he left for Assos, in Asia Minor, on the northwest coast of present-day Turkey. There he continued the philosophical activity he had begun in the Academy, but in all likelihood also began to expand his researches into marine biology. He remained at Assos for approximately three years, when, evidently upon the death of his host Hermeias, a friend and former Academic who had been the ruler of Assos, Aristotle moved to the nearby coastal island of Lesbos. There he continued his philosophical and empirical researches for an additional two years, working in conjunction with Theophrastus, a native of Lesbos who was also reported in antiquity to have been associated with Plato’s Academy. While in Lesbos, Aristotle married Pythias, the niece of Hermeias, with whom he had a daughter, also named Pythias.

In 343, upon the request of Philip, the king of Macedon, Aristotle left Lesbos for Pella, the Macedonian capital, in order to tutor the king’s thirteen-year-old son, Alexander—the boy who was eventually to become Alexander the Great. Although speculation concerning Aristotle’s influence upon the developing Alexander has proven irresistible to historians, in fact little concrete is known about their interaction. On the balance, it seems reasonable to conclude that some tuition took place, but that it lasted only two or three years, when Alexander was aged from thirteen to fifteen. By fifteen, Alexander was apparently already serving as a deputy military commander for his father, a circumstance undermining, if inconclusively, the judgment of those historians who conjecture a longer period of tuition. Be that as it may, some suppose that their association lasted as long as eight years.

It is difficult to rule out that possibility decisively, since little is known about the period of Aristotle’s life from 341–335. He evidently remained a further five years in Stagira or Macedon before returning to Athens for the second and final time, in 335. In Athens, Aristotle set up his own school in a public exercise area dedicated to the god Apollo Lykeios, whence its name, the Lyceum . Those affiliated with Aristotle’s school later came to be called Peripatetics , probably because of the existence of an ambulatory ( peripatos ) on the school’s property adjacent to the exercise ground. Members of the Lyceum conducted research into a wide range of subjects, all of which were of interest to Aristotle himself: botany, biology, logic, music, mathematics, astronomy, medicine, cosmology, physics, the history of philosophy, metaphysics, psychology, ethics, theology, rhetoric, political history, government and political theory, and the arts. In all these areas, the Lyceum collected manuscripts, thereby, according to some ancient accounts, assembling the first great library of antiquity.

During this period, Aristotle’s wife, Pythias, died and he developed a new relationship with Herpyllis, perhaps like him a native of Stagira, though her origins are disputed, as is the question of her exact relationship to Aristotle. Some suppose that she was merely his slave; others infer from the provisions of Aristotle’s will that she was a freed woman and likely his wife at the time of his death. In any event, they had children together, including a son, Nicomachus, named for Aristotle’s father and after whom his Nicomachean Ethics is presumably named.

After thirteen years in Athens, Aristotle once again found cause to retire from the city, in 323. Probably his departure was occasioned by a resurgence of the always-simmering anti-Macedonian sentiment in Athens, which was free to come to the boil after Alexander succumbed to disease in Babylon during that same year. Because of his connections to Macedon, Aristotle reasonably feared for his safety and left Athens, remarking, as an oft-repeated ancient tale would tell it, that he saw no reason to permit Athens to sin twice against philosophy. He withdrew directly to Chalcis, on Euboea, an island off the Attic coast, and died there of natural causes the following year, in 322. [ 3 ]

Aristotle’s writings tend to present formidable difficulties to his novice readers. To begin, he makes heavy use of unexplained technical terminology, and his sentence structure can at times prove frustrating. Further, on occasion a chapter or even a full treatise coming down to us under his name appears haphazardly organized, if organized at all; indeed, in several cases, scholars dispute whether a continuous treatise currently arranged under a single title was ever intended by Aristotle to be published in its present form or was rather stitched together by some later editor employing whatever principles of organization he deemed suitable. [ 4 ] This helps explain why students who turn to Aristotle after first being introduced to the supple and mellifluous prose on display in Plato’s dialogues often find the experience frustrating. Aristotle’s prose requires some acclimatization.

All the more puzzling, then, is Cicero’s observation that if Plato’s prose was silver, Aristotle’s was a flowing river of gold ( Ac. Pr. 38.119, cf. Top . 1.3, De or. 1.2.49). Cicero was arguably the greatest prose stylist of Latin and was also without question an accomplished and fair-minded critic of the prose styles of others writing in both Latin and Greek. We must assume, then, that Cicero had before him works of Aristotle other than those we possess. In fact, we know that Aristotle wrote dialogues, presumably while still in the Academy, and in their few surviving remnants we are afforded a glimpse of the style Cicero describes. In most of what we possess, unfortunately, we find work of a much less polished character. Rather, Aristotle’s extant works read like what they very probably are: lecture notes, drafts first written and then reworked, ongoing records of continuing investigations, and, generally speaking, in-house compilations intended not for a general audience but for an inner circle of auditors. These are to be contrasted with the “exoteric” writings Aristotle sometimes mentions, his more graceful compositions intended for a wider audience ( Pol. 1278b30; EE 1217b22, 1218b34). Unfortunately, then, we are left for the most part, though certainly not entirely, with unfinished works in progress rather than with finished and polished productions. Still, many of those who persist with Aristotle come to appreciate the unembellished directness of his style.

More importantly, the unvarnished condition of Aristotle’s surviving treatises does not hamper our ability to come to grips with their philosophical content. His thirty-one surviving works (that is, those contained in the “Corpus Aristotelicum” of our medieval manuscripts that are judged to be authentic) all contain recognizably Aristotelian doctrine; and most of these contain theses whose basic purport is clear, even where matters of detail and nuance are subject to exegetical controversy.

These works may be categorized in terms of the intuitive organizational principles preferred by Aristotle. He refers to the branches of learning as “sciences” ( epistêmai ), best regarded as organized bodies of learning completed for presentation rather than as ongoing records of empirical researches. Moreover, again in his terminology, natural sciences such as physics are but one branch of theoretical science , which comprises both empirical and non-empirical pursuits. He distinguishes theoretical science from more practically oriented studies, some of which concern human conduct and others of which focus on the productive crafts. Thus, the Aristotelian sciences divide into three: (i) theoretical, (ii) practical, and (iii) productive. The principles of division are straightforward: theoretical science seeks knowledge for its own sake; practical science concerns conduct and goodness in action, both individual and societal; and productive science aims at the creation of beautiful or useful objects ( Top . 145a15–16; Phys . 192b8–12; DC 298a27–32, DA 403a27–b2; Met. 1025b25, 1026a18–19, 1064a16–19, b1–3; EN 1139a26–28, 1141b29–32).

(i) The theoretical sciences include prominently what Aristotle calls first philosophy , or metaphysics as we now call it, but also mathematics , and physics , or natural philosophy. Physics studies the natural universe as a whole, and tends in Aristotle’s hands to concentrate on conceptual puzzles pertaining to nature rather than on empirical research; but it reaches further, so that it includes also a theory of causal explanation and finally even a proof of an unmoved mover thought to be the first and final cause of all motion. Many of the puzzles of primary concern to Aristotle have proven perennially attractive to philosophers, mathematicians, and theoretically inclined natural scientists. They include, as a small sample, Zeno’s paradoxes of motion, puzzles about time, the nature of place, and difficulties encountered in thought about the infinite.

Natural philosophy also incorporates the special sciences, including biology, botany, and astronomical theory. Most contemporary critics think that Aristotle treats psychology as a sub-branch of natural philosophy, because he regards the soul ( psuchê ) as the basic principle of life, including all animal and plant life. In fact, however, the evidence for this conclusion is inconclusive at best. It is instructive to note that earlier periods of Aristotelian scholarship thought this controversial, so that, for instance, even something as innocuous-sounding as the question of the proper home of psychology in Aristotle’s division of the sciences ignited a multi-decade debate in the Renaissance. [ 5 ]

(ii) Practical sciences are less contentious, at least as regards their range. These deal with conduct and action, both individual and societal. Practical science thus contrasts with theoretical science, which seeks knowledge for its own sake, and, less obviously, with the productive sciences, which deal with the creation of products external to sciences themselves. Both politics and ethics fall under this branch.

(iii) Finally, then, the productive sciences are mainly crafts aimed at the production of artefacts, or of human productions more broadly construed. The productive sciences include, among others, ship-building, agriculture, and medicine, but also the arts of music, theatre, and dance. Another form of productive science is rhetoric, which treats the principles of speech-making appropriate to various forensic and persuasive settings, including centrally political assemblies.

Significantly, Aristotle’s tri-fold division of the sciences makes no mention of logic. Although he did not use the word ‘logic’ in our sense of the term, Aristotle in fact developed the first formalized system of logic and valid inference. In Aristotle’s framework—although he is nowhere explicit about this—logic belongs to no one science, but rather formulates the principles of correct argumentation suitable to all areas of inquiry in common. It systematizes the principles licensing acceptable inference, and helps to highlight at an abstract level seductive patterns of incorrect inference to be avoided by anyone with a primary interest in truth. So, alongside his more technical work in logic and logical theory, Aristotle investigates informal styles of argumentation and seeks to expose common patterns of fallacious reasoning.

Aristotle’s investigations into logic and the forms of argumentation make up part of the group of works coming down to us from the Middle Ages under the heading the Organon ( organon = tool in Greek). Although not so characterized in these terms by Aristotle, the name is apt, so long as it is borne in mind that intellectual inquiry requires a broad range of tools. Thus, in addition to logic and argumentation (treated primarily in the Prior Analytics and Topics ), the works included in the Organon deal with category theory, the doctrine of propositions and terms, the structure of scientific theory, and to some extent the basic principles of epistemology.

When we slot Aristotle’s most important surviving authentic works into this scheme, we end up with the following basic divisions of his major writings:

• Categories ( Cat .)
• De Interpretatione ( DI ) [ On Interpretation ]
• Prior Analytics ( APr )
• Posterior Analytics ( APo )
• Topics ( Top .)
• Sophistical Refutations ( SE )
• Physics ( Phys .)
• Generation and Corruption ( Gen. et Corr .)
• De Caelo ( DC ) [ On the Heavens ]
• Metaphysics ( Met .)
• De Anima ( DA ) [ On the Soul ]
• Parva Naturalia ( PN ) [ Brief Natural Treatises ]
• History of Animals ( HA )
• Parts of Animals ( PA )
• Movement of Animals ( MA )
• Meteorology ( Meteor .)
• Progression of Animals ( IA )
• Generation of Animals ( GA )
• Nicomachean Ethics ( EN )
• Eudemian Ethics ( EE )
• Magna Moralia ( MM ) [ Great Ethics ]
• Politics ( Pol .)
• Rhetoric ( Rhet .)
• Poetics ( Poet .)

The titles in this list are those in most common use today in English-language scholarship, followed by standard abbreviations in parentheses. For no discernible reason, Latin titles are customarily employed in some cases, English in others. Where Latin titles are in general use, English equivalents are given in square brackets.

Aristotle’s basic approach to philosophy is best grasped initially by way of contrast. Whereas Descartes seeks to place philosophy and science on firm foundations by subjecting all knowledge claims to a searing methodological doubt, Aristotle begins with the conviction that our perceptual and cognitive faculties are basically dependable, that they for the most part put us into direct contact with the features and divisions of our world, and that we need not dally with sceptical postures before engaging in substantive philosophy. Accordingly, he proceeds in all areas of inquiry in the manner of a modern-day natural scientist, who takes it for granted that progress follows the assiduous application of a well-trained mind and so, when presented with a problem, simply goes to work. When he goes to work, Aristotle begins by considering how the world appears, reflecting on the puzzles those appearances throw up, and reviewing what has been said about those puzzles to date. These methods comprise his twin appeals to phainomena and the endoxic method.

These two methods reflect in different ways Aristotle’s deepest motivations for doing philosophy in the first place. “Human beings began to do philosophy,” he says, “even as they do now, because of wonder, at first because they wondered about the strange things right in front of them, and then later, advancing little by little, because they came to find greater things puzzling” ( Met. 982b12). Human beings philosophize, according to Aristotle, because they find aspects of their experience puzzling. The sorts of puzzles we encounter in thinking about the universe and our place within it— aporiai , in Aristotle’s terminology—tax our understanding and induce us to philosophize.

According to Aristotle, it behooves us to begin philosophizing by laying out the phainomena , the appearances , or, more fully, things appearing to be the case , and then also collecting the endoxa , the credible opinions handed down regarding matters we find puzzling. As a typical example, in a passage of his Nicomachean Ethics , Aristotle confronts a puzzle of human conduct, the fact that we are apparently sometimes akratic or weak-willed. When introducing this puzzle, Aristotle pauses to reflect upon a precept governing his approach to many areas of inquiry:

As in other cases, we must set out the appearances ( phainomena ) and run through all the puzzles regarding them. In this way we must prove the credible opinions ( endoxa ) about these sorts of experiences—ideally, all the credible opinions, but if not all, then most of them, those which are the most important. For if the objections are answered and the credible opinions remain, we shall have an adequate proof. ( EN 1145b2–7)

Scholars dispute concerning the degree to which Aristotle regards himself as beholden to the credible opinions ( endoxa ) he recounts and the basic appearances ( phainomena ) to which he appeals. [ 6 ] Of course, since the endoxa will sometimes conflict with one another, often precisely because the phainomena generate aporiai , or puzzles, it is not always possible to respect them in their entirety. So, as a group they must be re-interpreted and systematized, and, where that does not suffice, some must be rejected outright. It is in any case abundantly clear that Aristotle is willing to abandon some or all of the endoxa and phainomena whenever science or philosophy demands that he do so ( Met. 1073b36, 1074b6; PA 644b5; EN 1145b2–30).

Still, his attitude towards phainomena does betray a preference to conserve as many appearances as is practicable in a given domain—not because the appearances are unassailably accurate, but rather because, as he supposes, appearances tend to track the truth. We are outfitted with sense organs and powers of mind so structured as to put us into contact with the world and thus to provide us with data regarding its basic constituents and divisions. While our faculties are not infallible, neither are they systematically deceptive or misdirecting. Since philosophy’s aim is truth and much of what appears to us proves upon analysis to be correct, phainomena provide both an impetus to philosophize and a check on some of its more extravagant impulses.

Of course, it is not always clear what constitutes a phainomenon ; still less is it clear which phainomenon is to be respected in the face of bona fide disagreement. This is in part why Aristotle endorses his second and related methodological precept, that we ought to begin philosophical discussions by collecting the most stable and entrenched opinions regarding the topic of inquiry handed down to us by our predecessors. Aristotle’s term for these privileged views, endoxa , is variously rendered as ‘reputable opinions’, ‘credible opinions’, ‘entrenched beliefs’, ‘credible beliefs’, or ‘common beliefs’. Each of these translations captures at least part of what Aristotle intends with this word, but it is important to appreciate that it is a fairly technical term for him. An endoxon is the sort of opinion we spontaneously regard as reputable or worthy of respect, even if upon reflection we may come to question its veracity. (Aristotle appropriates this term from ordinary Greek, in which an endoxos is a notable or honourable man, a man of high repute whom we would spontaneously respect—though we might, of course, upon closer inspection, find cause to criticize him.) As he explains his use of the term, endoxa are widely shared opinions, often ultimately issuing from those we esteem most: ‘ Endoxa are those opinions accepted by everyone, or by the majority, or by the wise—and among the wise, by all or most of them, or by those who are the most notable and having the highest reputation’ ( Top. 100b21–23). Endoxa play a special role in Aristotelian philosophy in part because they form a significant sub-class of phainomena ( EN 1154b3–8): because they are the privileged opinions we find ourselves unreflectively endorsing and reaffirming after some reflection, they themselves come to qualify as appearances to be preserved where possible.

For this reason, Aristotle’s method of beginning with the endoxa is more than a pious platitude to the effect that it behooves us to mind our superiors. He does think this, as far as it goes, but he also maintains, more instructively, that we can be led astray by the terms within which philosophical problems are bequeathed to us. Very often, the puzzles confronting us were given crisp formulations by earlier thinkers and we find them puzzling precisely for that reason. Equally often, however, if we reflect upon the terms within which the puzzles are cast, we find a way forward; when a formulation of a puzzle betrays an untenable structuring assumption, a solution naturally commends itself. This is why in more abstract domains of inquiry we are likely to find ourselves seeking guidance from our predecessors even as we call into question their ways of articulating the problems we are confronting.

Aristotle applies his method of running through the phainomena and collecting the endoxa widely, in nearly every area of his philosophy. To take a typical illustration, we find the method clearly deployed in his discussion of time in Physics iv 10–14. We begin with a phainomenon : we feel sure that time exists or at least that time passes . So much is, inescapably, how our world appears: we experience time as passing, as unidirectional, as unrecoverable when lost. Yet when we move to offer an account of what time might be, we find ourselves flummoxed. For guidance, we turn to what has been said about time by those who have reflected upon its nature. It emerges directly that both philosophers and natural scientists have raised problems about time.

As Aristotle sets them out, these problems take the form of puzzles, or aporiai , regarding whether and if so how time exists ( Phys . 218a8–30). If we say that time is the totality of the past, present and future, we immediately find someone objecting that time exists but that the past and future do not. According to the objector, only the present exists. If we retort then that time is what did exist, what exists at present and what will exist, then we notice first that our account is insufficient: after all, there are many things which did, do, or will exist, but these are things that are in time and so not the same as time itself. We further see that our account already threatens circularity, since to say that something did or will exist seems only to say that it existed at an earlier time or will come to exist at a later time . Then again we find someone objecting to our account that even the notion of the present is troubling. After all, either the present is constantly changing or it remains forever the same. If it remains forever the same, then the current present is the same as the present of 10,000 years ago; yet that is absurd. If it is constantly changing, then no two presents are the same, in which case a past present must have come into and out of existence before the present present. When? Either it went out of existence even as it came into existence, which seems odd to say the least, or it went out of existence at some instant after it came into existence, in which case, again, two presents must have existed at the same instant. Now, Aristotle does not endorse the claims set out in stating these sorts of aporiai ; in fact, very often he cannot, because some aporiai qualify as aporiai just because they comprise individually plausible arguments generating incompatible conclusions. They thus serve as springboards to deeper, more demanding analysis.

In general, then, in setting such aporiai , Aristotle does not mean to endorse any given endoxon on one side or the other. Rather, he thinks that such considerations present credible puzzles, reflection upon which may steer us towards a defensible understanding of the nature of time. In this way, aporiai bring into sharp relief the issues requiring attention if progress is to be made. Thus, by reflecting upon the aporiai regarding time, we are led immediately to think about duration and divisibility, about quanta and continua , and about a variety of categorial questions. That is, if time exists, then what sort of thing is it? Is it the sort of thing which exists absolutely and independently? Or is it rather the sort of thing which, like a surface, depends upon other things for its existence? When we begin to address these sorts of questions, we also begin to ascertain the sorts of assumptions at play in the endoxa coming down to us regarding the nature of time. Consequently, when we collect the endoxa and survey them critically, we learn something about our quarry, in this case about the nature of time—and crucially also something about the constellation of concepts which must be refined if we are to make genuine philosophical progress with respect to it. What holds in the case of time, Aristotle implies, holds generally. This is why he characteristically begins a philosophical inquiry by presenting the phainomena , collecting the endoxa , and running through the puzzles to which they give rise.

4. Logic, Science, and Dialectic

Aristotle’s reliance on endoxa takes on a still greater significance given the role such opinions play in dialectic , which he regards as an important form of non-scientific reasoning. Dialectic, like science ( epistêmê ), trades in logical inference; but science requires premises of a sort beyond the scope of ordinary dialectical reasoning. Whereas science relies upon premises which are necessary and known to be so, a dialectical discussion can proceed by relying on endoxa , and so can claim only to be as secure as the endoxa upon which it relies. This is not a problem, suggests Aristotle, since we often reason fruitfully and well in circumstances where we cannot claim to have attained scientific understanding. Minimally, however, all reasoning—whether scientific or dialectical—must respect the canons of logic and inference.

Among the great achievements to which Aristotle can lay claim is the first systematic treatment of the principles of correct reasoning, the first logic. Although today we recognize many forms of logic beyond Aristotle’s, it remains true that he not only developed a theory of deduction, now called syllogistic, but added to it a modal syllogistic and went a long way towards proving some meta-theorems pertinent to these systems. Of course, philosophers before Aristotle reasoned well or reasoned poorly, and the competent among them had a secure working grasp of the principles of validity and soundness in argumentation. No-one before Aristotle, however, developed a systematic treatment of the principles governing correct inference; and no-one before him attempted to codify the formal and syntactic principles at play in such inference. Aristotle somewhat uncharacteristically draws attention to this fact at the end of a discussion of logic inference and fallacy:

Once you have surveyed our work, if it seems to you that our system has developed adequately in comparison with other treatments arising from the tradition to date—bearing in mind how things were at the beginning of our inquiry—it falls to you, our students, to be indulgent with respect to any omissions in our system, and to feel a great debt of gratitude for the discoveries it contains ( Soph. Ref. 184b2–8).

Even if we now regard it as commonplace that his logic is but a fraction of the logic we know and use, Aristotle’s accomplishment was so encompassing that no less a figure than Kant, writing over two millennia after the appearance of Aristotle’s treatises on logic, found it easy to offer an appropriately laudatory judgment: ‘That from the earliest times logic has traveled a secure course can be seen from the fact that since the time of Aristotle it has not had to go a single step backwards…What is further remarkable about logic is that until now it has also been unable to take a single step forward, and therefore seems to all appearance to be finished and complete’ ( Critique of Pure Reason B vii).

In Aristotle’s logic, the basic ingredients of reasoning are given in terms of inclusion and exclusion relations, of the sort graphically captured many years later by the device of Venn diagrams. He begins with the notion of a patently correct sort of argument, one whose evident and unassailable acceptability induces Aristotle to refer to is as a ‘perfect deduction’ ( APr . 24b22–25). Generally, a deduction ( sullogismon ), according to Aristotle, is a valid or acceptable argument. More exactly, a deduction is ‘an argument in which when certain things are laid down something else follows of necessity in virtue of their being so’ ( APr . 24b18–20). His view of deductions is, then, akin to a notion of validity, though there are some minor differences. For example, Aristotle maintains that irrelevant premises will ruin a deduction, whereas validity is indifferent to irrelevance or indeed to the addition of premises of any kind to an already valid argument. Moreover, Aristotle insists that deductions make progress, whereas every inference from p to p is trivially valid. Still, Aristotle’s general conception of deduction is sufficiently close to validity that we may pass into speaking in terms of valid structures when characterizing his syllogistic. In general, he contends that a deduction is the sort of argument whose structure guarantees its validity, irrespective of the truth or falsity of its premises. This holds intuitively for the following structure:

• All A s are B s.
• All B s are C s.
• Hence, all A s are C s.

Accordingly, anything taking this form will be a deduction in Aristotle’s sense. Let the A s, B s, and C s be anything at all, and if indeed the A s are B s, and the B s C s, then of necessity the A s will be C s. This particular deduction is perfect because its validity needs no proof, and perhaps because it admits of no proof either: any proof would seem to rely ultimately upon the intuitive validity of this sort of argument.

Aristotle seeks to exploit the intuitive validity of perfect deductions in a surprisingly bold way, given the infancy of his subject: he thinks he can establish principles of transformation in terms of which every deduction (or, more precisely, every non-modal deduction) can be translated into a perfect deduction. He contends that by using such transformations we can place all deduction on a firm footing.

If we focus on just the simplest kinds of deduction, Aristotle’s procedure comes quickly into view. The perfect deduction already presented is an instance of universal affirmation: all A s are B s; all B s C s; and so, all A s are C s. Now, contends Aristotle, it is possible to run through all combinations of simple premises and display their basic inferential structures and then to relate them back to this and similarly perfect deductions. Thus, if we vary the quantity of a proposition’s subject (universal all versus indeterminate some ) along with the quality or kind of the predication ( positive versus negative ), we arrive at all the possible combinations of the most basic kind of arguments.

It turns out that some of these arguments are deductions, or valid syllogisms, and some are not. Those which are not admit of counterexamples, whereas those which are, of course, do not. There are counterexamples to those, for instance, suffering from what came to be called undistributed middle terms, e.g.: all A s are B s; some B s are C s; so, all A s are C s (all university students are literate; some literate people read poetry; so, all university students read poetry). There is no counterexample to the perfect deduction in the form of a universal affirmation: if all A s are B s, and all B s C s, then there is no escaping the fact that all A s are C s. So, if all the kinds of deductions possible can be reduced to the intuitively valid sorts, then the validity of all can be vouchsafed.

To effect this sort of reduction, Aristotle relies upon a series of meta-theorems, some of which he proves and others of which he merely reports (though it turns out that they do all indeed admit of proofs). His principles are meta -theorems in the sense that no argument can run afoul of them and still qualify as a genuine deduction. They include such theorems as: (i) no deduction contains two negative premises; (ii) a deduction with a negative conclusion must have a negative premise; (iii) a deduction with a universal conclusion requires two universal premises; and (iv) a deduction with a negative conclusion requires exactly one negative premise. He does, in fact, offer proofs for the most significant of his meta-theorems, so that we can be assured that all deductions in his system are valid, even when their validity is difficult to grasp immediately.

In developing and proving these meta-theorems of logic, Aristotle charts territory left unexplored before him and unimproved for many centuries after his death.

For a fuller account of Aristotle’s achievements in logic, see the entry on Aristotle’s Logic .

Aristotle approaches the study of logic not as an end in itself, but with a view to its role in human inquiry and explanation. Logic is a tool, he thinks, one making an important but incomplete contribution to science and dialectic. Its contribution is incomplete because science ( epistêmê ) employs arguments which are more than mere deductions. A deduction is minimally a valid syllogism, and certainly science must employ arguments passing this threshold. Still, science needs more: a science proceeds by organizing the data in its domain into a series of arguments which, beyond being deductions, feature premises which are necessary and, as Aristotle says, “better known by nature”, or “more intelligible by nature” ( gnôrimôteron phusei ) ( APo . 71b33–72a25; Top . 141b3–14; Phys . 184a16–23). By this he means that they should reveal the genuine, mind-independent natures of things.

He further insists that science ( epistêmê )—a comparatively broad term in his usage, since it extends to fields of inquiry like mathematics and metaphysics no less than the empirical sciences—not only reports the facts but also explains them by displaying their priority relations ( APo . 78a22–28). That is, science explains what is less well known by what is better known and more fundamental, and what is explanatorily anemic by what is explanatorily fruitful.

We may, for instance, wish to know why trees lose their leaves in the autumn. We may say, rightly, that this is due to the wind blowing through them. Still, this is not a deep or general explanation, since the wind blows equally at other times of year without the same result. A deeper explanation—one unavailable to Aristotle but illustrating his view nicely—is more general, and also more causal in character: trees shed their leaves because diminished sunlight in the autumn inhibits the production of chlorophyll, which is required for photosynthesis, and without photosynthesis trees go dormant. Importantly, science should not only record these facts but also display them in their correct explanatory order. That is, although a deciduous tree which fails to photosynthesize is also a tree lacking in chlorophyll production, its failing to produce chlorophyll explains its inability to photosynthesize and not the other way around. This sort of asymmetry must be captured in scientific explanation. Aristotle’s method of scientific exposition is designed precisely to discharge this requirement.

Science seeks to capture not only the causal priorities in nature, but also its deep, invariant patterns. Consequently, in addition to being explanatorily basic, the first premise in a scientific deduction will be necessary. So, says Aristotle:

We think we understand a thing without qualification, and not in the sophistic, accidental way, whenever we think we know the cause in virtue of which something is—that it is the cause of that very thing— and also know that this cannot be otherwise. Clearly, knowledge ( epistêmê ) is something of this sort. After all, both those with knowledge and those without it suppose that this is so—although only those with knowledge are actually in this condition. Hence, whatever is known without qualification cannot be otherwise. ( APo 71b9–16; cf. APo 71b33–72a5; Top . 141b3–14, Phys . 184a10–23; Met. 1029b3–13)

For this reason, science requires more than mere deduction. Altogether, then, the currency of science is demonstration ( apodeixis ), where a demonstration is a deduction with premises revealing the causal structures of the world, set forth so as to capture what is necessary and to reveal what is better known and more intelligible by nature ( APo 71b33–72a5, Phys . 184a16–23, EN 1095b2–4).

Aristotle’s approach to the appropriate form of scientific explanation invites reflection upon a troubling epistemological question: how does demonstration begin? If we are to lay out demonstrations such that the less well known is inferred by means of deduction from the better known, then unless we reach rock-bottom, we will evidently be forced either to continue ever backwards towards the increasingly better known, which seems implausibly endless, or lapse into some form of circularity, which seems undesirable. The alternative seems to be permanent ignorance. Aristotle contends:

Some people think that since knowledge obtained via demonstration requires the knowledge of primary things, there is no knowledge. Others think that there is knowledge and that all knowledge is demonstrable. Neither of these views is either true or necessary. The first group, those supposing that there is no knowledge at all, contend that we are confronted with an infinite regress. They contend that we cannot know posterior things because of prior things if none of the prior things is primary. Here what they contend is correct: it is indeed impossible to traverse an infinite series. Yet, they maintain, if the regress comes to a halt, and there are first principles, they will be unknowable, since surely there will be no demonstration of first principles—given, as they maintain, that only what is demonstrated can be known. But if it is not possible to know the primary things, then neither can we know without qualification or in any proper way the things derived from them. Rather, we can know them instead only on the basis of a hypothesis, to wit, if the primary things obtain, then so too do the things derived from them. The other group agrees that knowledge results only from demonstration, but believes that nothing stands in the way of demonstration, since they admit circular and reciprocal demonstration as possible. ( APo. 72b5–21)

Aristotle’s own preferred alternative is clear:

We contend that not all knowledge is demonstrative: knowledge of the immediate premises is indemonstrable. Indeed, the necessity here is apparent; for if it is necessary to know the prior things, that is, those things from which the demonstration is derived, and if eventually the regress comes to a standstill, it is necessary that these immediate premises be indemonstrable. ( APo . 72b21–23)

In sum, if all knowledge requires demonstration, and all demonstration proceeds from what is more intelligible by nature to what is less so, then either the process goes on indefinitely or it comes to a halt in undemonstrated first principles, which are known, and known securely. Aristotle dismisses the only remaining possibility, that demonstration might be circular, rather curtly, with the remark that this amounts to ‘simply saying that something is the case if it is the case,’ by which device ‘it is easy to prove anything’ ( APo . 72b32–73a6).

Aristotle’s own preferred alternative, that there are first principles of the sciences graspable by those willing to engage in assiduous study, has caused consternation in many of his readers. In Posterior Analytics ii 19, he describes the process by which knowers move from perception to memory, and from memory to experience ( empeiria )—which is a fairly technical term in this connection, reflecting the point at which a single universal comes to take root in the mind—and finally from experience to a grasp of first principles. This final intellectual state Aristotle characterizes as a kind of unmediated intellectual apprehension ( nous ) of first principles ( APo . 100a10–b6).

Scholars have understandably queried what seems a casually asserted passage from the contingent, given in sense experience, to the necessary, as required for the first principles of science. Perhaps, however, Aristotle simply envisages a kind of a posteriori necessity for the sciences, including the natural sciences. In any event, he thinks that we can and do have knowledge, so that somehow we begin in sense perception and build up to an understanding of the necessary and invariant features of the world. This is the knowledge featured in genuine science ( epistêmê ). In reflecting on the sort of progression Aristotle envisages, some commentators have charged him with an epistemological optimism bordering on the naïve; others contend that it is rather the charge of naïveté which is itself naïve, betraying as it does an unargued and untenable alignment of the necessary and the a priori . [ 7 ]

Not all rigorous reasoning qualifies as scientific. Indeed, little of Aristotle’s extant writing conforms to the demands for scientific presentation laid down in the Posterior Analytics . As he recognizes, we often find ourselves reasoning from premises which have the status of endoxa , opinions widely believed or endorsed by the wise, even though they are not known to be necessary. Still less often do we reason having first secured the first principles of our domain of inquiry. So, we need some ‘method by which we will be able to reason deductively about any matter proposed to us on the basis of endoxa , and to give an account of ourselves [when we are under examination by an interlocutor] without lapsing into contradiction’ ( Top . 100a18–20). This method he characterizes as dialectic .

The suggestion that we often use dialectic when engaged in philosophical exchange reflects Aristotle’s supposition that there are two sorts of dialectic: one negative, or destructive, and the other positive, or constructive. In fact, in his work dedicated to dialectic, the Topics , he identifies three roles for dialectic in intellectual inquiry, the first of which is mainly preparatory:

Dialectic is useful for three purposes: for training, for conversational exchange, and for sciences of a philosophical sort. That it is useful for training purposes is directly evident on the basis of these considerations: once we have a direction for our inquiry we will more readily be able to engage a subject proposed to us. It is useful for conversational exchange because once we have enumerated the beliefs of the many, we shall engage them not on the basis of the convictions of others but on the basis of their own; and we shall re-orient them whenever they appear to have said something incorrect to us. It is useful for philosophical sorts of sciences because when we are able to run through the puzzles on both sides of an issue we more readily perceive what is true and what is false. Further, it is useful for uncovering what is primary among the commitments of a science. For it is impossible to say anything regarding the first principles of a science on the basis of the first principles proper to the very science under discussion, since among all the commitments of a science, the first principles are the primary ones. This comes rather, necessarily, from discussion of the credible beliefs ( endoxa ) belonging to the science. This is peculiar to dialectic, or is at least most proper to it. For since it is what cross-examines, dialectic contains the way to the first principles of all inquiries. ( Top . 101a26–b4)

The first two of the three forms of dialectic identified by Aristotle are rather limited in scope. By contrast, the third is philosophically significant.

In its third guise, dialectic has a role to play in ‘science conducted in a philosophical manner’ ( pros tas kata philosphian epistêmas ; Top . 101a27–28, 101a34), where this sort of science includes what we actually find him pursuing in his major philosophical treatises. In these contexts, dialectic helps to sort the endoxa , relegating some to a disputed status while elevating others; it submits endoxa to cross-examination in order to test their staying power; and, most notably, according to Aristotle, dialectic puts us on the road to first principles ( Top. 100a18–b4). If that is so, then dialectic plays a significant role in the order of philosophical discovery: we come to establish first principles in part by determining which among our initial endoxa withstand sustained scrutiny. Here, as elsewhere in his philosophy, Aristotle evinces a noteworthy confidence in the powers of human reason and investigation.

However we arrive at secure principles in philosophy and science, whether by some process leading to a rational grasping of necessary truths, or by sustained dialectical investigation operating over judiciously selected endoxa , it does turn out, according to Aristotle, that we can uncover and come to know genuinely necessary features of reality. Such features, suggests Aristotle, are those captured in the essence-specifying definitions used in science (again in the broad sense of epistêmê ).

Aristotle’s commitment to essentialism runs deep. He relies upon a host of loosely related locutions when discussing the essences of things, and these give some clue to his general orientation. Among the locutions one finds rendered as essence in contemporary translations of Aristotle into English are: (i) to ti esti (the what it is); (ii) to einai (being); (iii) ousia (being); (iv) hoper esti (precisely what something is) and, most importantly, (v) to ti ên einai (the what it was to be) ( APo 83a7; Top . 141b35; Phys . 190a17, 201a18–21; Gen. et Corr . 319b4; DA 424a25, 429b10; Met. 1003b24, 1006a32, 1006b13; EN 1102a30, 1130a12–13). Among these, the last locution (v) requires explication both because it is the most peculiar and because it is Aristotle’s favored technical term for essence. It is an abbreviated way of saying ‘that which it was for an instance of kind K to be an instance of kind K ,’ for instance ‘that which it was (all along) for a human being to be a human being’. In speaking this way, Aristotle supposes that if we wish to know what a human being is, we cannot identify transient or non-universal features of that kind; nor indeed can we identify even universal features which do not run explanatorily deep. Rather, as his preferred locution indicates, he is interested in what makes a human being human—and he assumes, first, that there is some feature F which all and only humans have in common and, second, that F explains the other features which we find across the range of humans.

Importantly, this second feature of Aristotelian essentialism differentiates his approach from the now more common modal approach, according to which: [ 8 ]

F is an essential property of x = df if x loses F , then x ceases to exist.

Aristotle rejects this approach for several reasons, including most notably that he thinks that certain non-essential features satisfy the definition. Thus, beyond the categorical and logical features (everyone is such as to be either identical or not identical with the number nine), Aristotle recognizes a category of properties which he calls idia ( Cat . 3a21, 4a10; Top . 102a18–30, 134a5–135b6), now usually known by their Medieval Latin rendering propria. Propria are non-essential properties which flow from the essence of a kind, such that they are necessary to that kind even without being essential. For instance, if we suppose that being rational is essential to human beings, then it will follow that every human being is capable of grammar . Being capable of grammar is not the same property as being rational, though it follows from it. Aristotle assumes his readers will appreciate that being rational asymmetrically explains being capable of grammar , even though, necessarily, something is rational if and only if it is also capable of grammar. Thus, because it is explanatorily prior, being rational has a better claim to being the essence of human beings than does being capable of grammar . Consequently, Aristotle’s essentialism is more fine-grained than mere modal essentialism. Aristotelian essentialism holds:

F is an essential property of x = d f (i) if x loses F , then x ceases to exist; and (ii) F is in an objective sense an explanatorily basic feature of x .

In sum, in Aristotle’s approach, what it is to be, for instance, a human being is just what it always has been and always will be, namely being rational . Accordingly, this is the feature to be captured in an essence-specifying account of human beings ( APo 75a42–b2; Met. 103b1–2, 1041a25–32).

Aristotle believes for a broad range of cases that kinds have essences discoverable by diligent research. He in fact does not devote much energy to arguing for this contention; still less is he inclined to expend energy combating anti-realist challenges to essentialism, perhaps in part because he is impressed by the deep regularities he finds, or thinks he finds, underwriting his results in biological investigation. [ 9 ] Still, he cannot be accused of profligacy regarding the prospects of essentialism.

On the contrary, he denies essentialism in many cases where others are prepared to embrace it. One finds this sort of denial prominently, though not exclusively, in his criticism of Plato. Indeed, it becomes a signature criticism of Plato and Platonists for Aristotle that many of their preferred examples of sameness and invariance in the world are actually cases of multivocity , or homonymy in his technical terminology. In the opening of the Categories , Aristotle distinguishes between synonymy and homonymy (later called univocity and multivocity ). His preferred phrase for multivocity, which is extremely common in his writings, is ‘being spoken of in many ways’, or, more simply, ‘multiply meant’ ( pollachôs legomenon ). All these locutions have a quasi-technical status for him. The least complex is univocity:

a and b are univocally F iff (i) a is F , (ii) b is F , and (iii) the accounts of F -ness in ‘ a is F ’ and ‘ b is F ’ are the same.

Thus, for instance, since the accounts of ‘human’ in ‘Socrates is human’ and ‘Plato is human’ will be the same, ‘human’ is univocal or synonymous in these applications. (Note that Aristotle’s notion of the word ‘synonymy’ is not the same as the contemporary English usage where it applies to different words with the same meaning.) In cases of univocity, we expect single, non-disjunctive definitions which capture and state the essence of the kinds in question. Let us allow once more for purposes of illustration that the essence-specifying definition of human is rational animal . Then, since human means rational animal across the range of its applications, there is some single essence to all members of the kind.

By contrast, when synonymy fails we have homonymy. According to Aristotle:

a and b are homonymously F iff (i) a is F , (ii) b is F , (iii) the accounts of F -ness in ‘ a is F ’ and ‘ b is F ’ do not completely overlap.

To take an easy example without philosophical significance, bank is homonymous in ‘Socrates and Alcibiades had a picnic on the bank’ and ‘Socrates and Alcibiades opened a joint account at the bank.’ This case is illustrative, if uninteresting, because the accounts of bank in these occurrences have nothing whatsoever in common. Part of the philosophical interest in Aristotle’s account of homonymy resides in its allowing partial overlap. Matters become more interesting if we examine whether—to use an illustration well suited to Aristotle’s purposes but left largely unexplored by him— conscious is synonymous across ‘Charlene was conscious of some awkwardness created by her remarks’ and ‘Higher vertebrates, unlike mollusks, are conscious.’ In these instances, the situation with respect to synonymy or homonymy is perhaps not immediately clear, and so requires reflection and philosophical investigation.

Very regularly, according to Aristotle, this sort of reflection leads to an interesting discovery, namely that we have been presuming a univocal account where in fact none is forthcoming. This, according to Aristotle, is where the Platonists go wrong: they presume univocity where the world delivers homonymy or multivocity. (For a vivid illustration of Plato’s univocity assumption at work, see Meno 71e1–72a5, where Socrates insists that there is but one kind of excellence ( aretê ) common to all kinds of excellent people, not a separate sort for men, women, slaves, children, and so on.) In one especially important example, Aristotle parts company with Plato over the univocity of goodness:

We had perhaps better consider the universal good and run through the puzzles concerning what is meant by it—even though this sort of investigation is unwelcome to us, because those who introduced the Forms are friends of ours. Yet presumably it would be the better course to destroy even what is close to us, as something necessary for preserving the truth—and all the more so, given that we are philosophers. For though we love them both, piety bids us to honour the truth before our friends. ( EN 1096a11–16)

Aristotle counters that Plato is wrong to assume that goodness is ‘something universal, common to all good things, and single’ ( EN 1096a28). Rather, goodness is different in different cases. If he is right about this, far-reaching consequences regarding ethical theory and practice follow.

To establish non-univocity, Aristotle’s appeals to a variety of tests in his Topics where, again, his idiom is linguistic but his quarry is metaphysical. Consider the following sentences:

• Socrates is good.
• Communism is good.
• After a light meal, crème brûlée is good.
• Redoubling one’s effort after failure is always good.
• Maria’s singing is good, but Renata’s is sublime.

Among the tests for non-univocity recommended in the Topics is a simple paraphrase test: if paraphrases yield distinct, non-interchangeable accounts, then the predicate is multivocal. So, for example, suitable paraphrases might be:

• Socrates is a virtuous person .
• Communism is a just social system .
• After a light meal, crème brûlée is tasty and satisfying .
• Trying harder after one has failed is always edifying .
• Maria’s singing reaches a high artistic standard , but Renata’s surpasses that standard by any measure .

Since we cannot interchange these paraphrases—we cannot say, for instance, that crème brûlée is a just social system— good must be non-univocal across this range of applications. If that is correct, then Platonists are wrong to assume univocity in this case, since goodness exhibits complexity ignored by their assumption.

So far, then, Aristotle’s appeals to homonymy or multivocity are primarily destructive, in the sense that they attempt to undermine a Platonic presumption regarded by Aristotle as unsustainable. Importantly, just as Aristotle sees a positive as well as a negative role for dialectic in philosophy, so he envisages in addition to its destructive applications a philosophically constructive role for homonymy. To appreciate his basic idea, it serves to reflect upon a continuum of positions in philosophical analysis ranging from pure Platonic univocity to disaggregated Wittgensteinean family resemblance. One might in the face of a successful challenge to Platonic univocity assume that, for instance, the various cases of goodness have nothing in common across all cases, so that good things form at best a motley kind, of the sort championed by Wittgensteineans enamored of the metaphor of family resemblances: all good things belong to a kind only in the limited sense that they manifest a tapestry of partially overlapping properties, as every member of a single family is unmistakably a member of that family even though there is no one physical attribute shared by all of those family members.

Aristotle insists that there is a tertium quid between family resemblance and pure univocity: he identifies, and trumpets, a kind of core-dependent homonymy (also referred to in the literature, with varying degrees of accuracy, as focal meaning and focal connexion ). [ 10 ] Core-dependent homonyms exhibit a kind of order in multiplicity: although shy of univocity, because homonymous, such concepts do not devolve into patchwork family resemblances either. To rely upon one of Aristotle’s own favorite illustrations, consider:

• Socrates is healthy.
• Socrates’ exercise regimen is healthy.
• Socrates’ complexion is healthy.

Aristotle assumes that his readers will immediately appreciate two features of these three predications of healthy . First, they are non-univocal, since the second is paraphraseable roughly as promotes health and the third as is indicative of health , whereas the first means, rather, something more fundamental, like is sound of body or is functioning well . Hence, healthy is non-univocal. Second, even so, the last two predications rely upon the first for their elucidations: each appeals to health in its core sense in an asymmetrical way. That is, any account of each of the latter two predications must allude to the first, whereas an account of the first makes no reference to the second or third in its account. So, suggests Aristotle, health is not only a homonym, but a core-dependent homonym : while not univocal neither is it a case of rank multivocity.

Aristotle’s illustration does succeed in showing that there is conceptual space between mere family resemblance and pure univocity. So, he is right that these are not exhaustive options. The interest in this sort of result resides in its exportability to richer, if more abstract philosophical concepts. Aristotle appeals to homonymy frequently, across a full range of philosophical concepts including justice , causation , love , life , sameness , goodness , and body . His most celebrated appeal to core-dependent homonymy comes in the case of a concept so highly abstract that it is difficult to gauge his success without extended metaphysical reflection. This is his appeal to the core-dependent homonymy of being , which has inspired both philosophical and scholarly controversy. [ 11 ] Aristotle denies that there could be a science of being, on the grounds that there is no single genus being under which all and only beings fall ( SE 11 172a13–15–15; APr. 92b14; Met. B 3, 998b22; EE i 8, 1217b33–35). One motivation for his reasoning this way may be that he regards the notion of a genus as ineliminably taxonomical and contrastive, [ 12 ] so that it makes ready sense to speak of a genus of being only if one can equally well speak of a genus of non-being—just as among living beings one can speak of the animals and the non-animals, viz. the plant kingdom. Since there are no non-beings, there accordingly can be no genus of non-being, and so, ultimately, no genus of being either. Consequently, since each science studies one essential kind arrayed under a single genus, there can be no science of being either.

Subsequently, without expressly reversing his judgment about the existence of a science of being, Aristotle announces that there is nonetheless a science of being qua being ( Met. iv 4), first philosophy, which takes as its subject matter beings insofar as they are beings and thus considers all and only those features pertaining to beings as such—to beings, that is, not insofar as they are mathematical or physical or human beings, but insofar as they are beings, full stop. Although the matter is disputed, his recognition of this science evidently turns crucially on his commitment to the core-dependent homonymy of being itself. [ 13 ] Although the case is not as clear and uncontroversial as Aristotle’s relatively easy appeal to health (which is why, after all, he selected it as an illustration), we are supposed to be able upon reflection to detect an analogous core-dependence in the following instances of exists :

• Socrates exists.
• Socrates’ location exists.
• Socrates’ weighing 73 kilos exists.
• Socrates’ being morose today exists.

Of course, the last three items on this list are rather awkward locutions, but this is because they strive to make explicit that we can speak of dependent beings as existing if we wish to do so—but only because of their dependence upon the core instance of being, namely substance. (Here it is noteworthy that ‘primary substance’ is the conventional and not very happy rendering of Aristotle’s protê ousia in Greek, which means, more literally, ‘primary being’). [ 14 ] According to this approach, we would not have Socrates’ weighing anything at all or feeling any way today were it not for the prior fact of his existence. So, exists in the first instance serves as the core instance of being, in terms of which the others are to be explicated. If this is correct, then, implies Aristotle, being is a core-dependent homonym; further, a science of being—or, rather, a science of being qua being—becomes possible, even though there is no genus of being, since it is finally possible to study all beings insofar as they are related to the core instance of being, and then also to study that core instance, namely substance, insofar as it serves as the prime occasion of being.

In speaking of beings which depend upon substance for their existence, Aristotle implicitly appeals to a foundational philosophical commitment which appears early in his thought and remains stable throughout his entire philosophical career: his theory of categories. In what is usually regarded as an early work, The Categories , Aristotle rather abruptly announces:

Of things said without combination, each signifies either: (i) a substance ( ousia ); (ii) a quantity; (iii) a quality; (iv) a relative; (v) where; (vi) when; (vii) being in a position; (viii) having; (ix) acting upon; or (x) a being affected. ( Cat . 1b25–27)

Aristotle does little to frame his theory of categories, offering no explicit derivation of it, nor even specifying overtly what his theory of categories categorizes. If librarians categorize books and botanists categorize plants, then what does the philosophical category theorist categorize?

Aristotle does not say explicitly, but his examples make reasonably clear that he means to categorize the basic kinds of beings there may be. If we again take some clues from linguistic data, without inferring that the ultimate objects of categorization are themselves linguistic, we can contrast things said “with combination”:

with things said ‘without combination’:

‘Man runs’ is truth-evaluable, whereas neither ‘man’ nor ‘runs’ is. Aristotle says that things of this sort signify entities, evidently extra-linguistic entities, which are thus, correlatively, in the first case sufficiently complex to be what makes the sentence ‘Man runs’ true, that is a man running , and in the second, items below the level of truth-making, so, e.g., an entity a man , taken by itself, and an action running , taken by itself. If that is correct, the entities categorized by the categories are the sorts of basic beings that fall below the level of truth-makers, or facts. Such beings evidently contribute, so to speak, to the facticity of facts, just as, in their linguistic analogues, nouns and verbs, things said ‘without combination’, contribute to the truth-evaluability of simple assertions. The constituents of facts contribute to facts as the semantically relevant parts of a proposition contribute to its having the truth conditions it has. Thus, the items categorized in Aristotle’s categories are the constituents of facts. If it is a fact that Socrates is pale , then the basic beings in view are Socrates and being pale . In Aristotle’s terms, the first is a substance and the second is a quality .

Importantly, these beings may be basic without being absolutely simple . After all, Socrates is made up of all manner of parts—arms and legs, organs and bones, molecules and atoms, and so on down. As a useful linguistic analogue, we may consider phonemes , which are basic, relative to the morphemes of a linguistic theory, and yet also complex, since they are made up of simpler sound components, which are irrelevant from the linguist’s point of view because of their lying beneath the level of semantic relevance.

The theory of categories in total recognizes ten sorts of extra-linguistic basic beings:

Although he does not say so overtly in the Categories , Aristotle evidently presumes that these ten categories of being are both exhaustive and irreducible, so that while there are no other basic beings, it is not possible to eliminate any one of these categories in favor of another.

Both claims have come in for criticism, and each surely requires defense. [ 15 ] Aristotle offers neither conviction a defense in his Categories . Nor, indeed, does he offer any principled grounding for just these categories of being, a circumstance which has left him open to further criticism from later philosophers, including famously Kant who, after lauding Aristotle for coming up with the idea of category theory, proceeds to excoriate him for selecting his particular categories on no principled basis whatsoever. Kant alleges that Aristotle picked his categories of being just as he happened to stumble upon them in his reveries ( Critique of Pure Reason , A81/B107). According to Kant, then, Aristotle’s categories are ungrounded . Philosophers and scholars both before and after Kant have sought to provide the needed grounding, whereas Aristotle himself mainly tends to justify the theory of categories by putting it to work in his various philosophical investigations.

We have already implicitly encountered in passing two of Aristotle’s appeals to category theory: (i) in his approach to time, which he comes to treat as a non-substantial being; and (ii) in his commitment to the core-dependent homonymy of being, which introduces some rather more contentious considerations. These may be revisited briefly to illustrate how Aristotle thinks that his doctrine of categories provides philosophical guidance where it is most needed.

Thinking first of time and its various puzzles, or aporiai , we saw that Aristotle poses a simple question: does time exist? He answers this question in the affirmative, but only because in the end he treats it as a categorically circumscribed question. He claims that ‘time is the measure of motion with respect to the before and after’ ( Phys . 219b1–2). By offering this definition, Aristotle is able to advance the judgment that time does exist, because it is an entity in the category of quantity: time is to motion or change as length is to a line. Time thus exists, but like all items in any non-substance category, it exists in a dependent sort of way. Just as if there were no lines there would be no length, so if there were no change there would be no time. Now, this feature of Aristotle’s theory of time has occasioned both critical and favorable reactions. [ 16 ] In the present context, however, it is important only that it serves to demonstrate how Aristotle handles questions of existence: they are, at root, questions about category membership. A question as to whether, e.g., universals or places or relations exist, is ultimately, for Aristotle, also a question concerning their category of being, if any.

As time is a dependent entity in Aristotle’s theory, so too are all entities in categories outside of substance. This helps explain why Aristotle thinks it appropriate to deploy his apparatus of core-dependent homonymy in the case of being . If we ask whether qualities or quantities exist, Aristotle will answer in the affirmative, but then point out also that as dependent entities they do not exist in the independent manner of substances. Thus, even in the relatively rarified case of being , the theory of categories provides a reason for uncovering core-dependent homonymy. Since all other categories of being depend upon substance, it should be the case that an analysis of any one of them will ultimately make asymmetrical reference to substance. Aristotle contends in his Categories , relying on a distinction that tracks essential ( said-of ) and accidental ( in ) predication, that:

All other things are either said-of primary substances, which are their subjects, or are in them as subjects. Hence, if there were no primary substances, it would be impossible for anything else to exist. ( Cat . 2b5–6)

If this is so, then, Aristotle infers, all the non-substance categories rely upon substance as the core of their being. So, he concludes, being qualifies as a case of core-dependent homonymy.

Now, one may challenge Aristotle’s contentions here, first by querying whether he has established the non-univocity of being before proceeding to argue for its core-dependence. Be that as it may, if we allow its non-univocity, then, according to Aristotle, the apparatus of the categories provides ample reason to conclude that being qualifies as a philosophically significant instance of core-dependent homonymy.

In this way, Aristotle’s philosophy of being and substance, like much else in his philosophy, relies upon an antecedent commitment to his theory of categories. Indeed, the theory of categories spans his entire career and serves as a kind of scaffolding for much of his philosophical theorizing, ranging from metaphysics and philosophy of nature to psychology and value theory.

For this reason, questions regarding the ultimate tenability of Aristotle’s doctrine of categories take on a special urgency for evaluating much of his philosophy.

For more detail on the theory of categories and its grounding, see the entry on Aristotle’s Categories .

Equally central to Aristotle’s thought is his four-causal explanatory scheme . Judged in terms of its influence, this doctrine is surely one of his most significant philosophical contributions. Like other philosophers, Aristotle expects the explanations he seeks in philosophy and science to meet certain criteria of adequacy. Unlike some other philosophers, however, he takes care to state his criteria for adequacy explicitly; then, having done so, he finds frequent fault with his predecessors for failing to meet its terms. He states his scheme in a methodological passage in the second book of his Physics :

One way in which cause is spoken of is that out of which a thing comes to be and which persists, e.g. the bronze of the statue, the silver of the bowl, and the genera of which the bronze and the silver are species. In another way cause is spoken of as the form or the pattern, i.e. what is mentioned in the account ( logos ) belonging to the essence and its genera, e.g. the cause of an octave is a ratio of 2:1, or number more generally, as well as the parts mentioned in the account ( logos ). Further, the primary source of the change and rest is spoken of as a cause, e.g. the man who deliberated is a cause, the father is the cause of the child, and generally the maker is the cause of what is made and what brings about change is a cause of what is changed. Further, the end ( telos ) is spoken of as a cause. This is that for the sake of which ( hou heneka ) a thing is done, e.g. health is the cause of walking about. ‘Why is he walking about?’ We say: ‘To be healthy’—and, having said that, we think we have indicated the cause. ( Phys . 194b23–35)

Although some of Aristotle’s illustrations are not immediately pellucid, his approach to explanation is reasonably straightforward.

Aristotle’s attitude towards explanation is best understood first by considering a simple example he proposes in Physics ii 3. A bronze statue admits of various different dimensions of explanation. If we were to confront a statue without first recognizing what it was, we would, thinks Aristotle, spontaneously ask a series of questions about it. We would wish to know what it is, what it is made of , what brought it about , and what it is for. In Aristotle’s terms, in asking these questions we are seeking knowledge of the statue’s four causes ( aitia ): the formal, material, efficient, and final. According to Aristotle, when we have identified these four causes, we have satisfied a reasonable demand for explanatory adequacy.

More fully, the four-causal account of explanatory adequacy requires an investigator to cite these four causes:

In Physics ii 3, Aristotle makes twin claims about this four-causal schema: (i) that citing all four causes is necessary for adequacy in explanation; and (ii) that these four causes are sufficient for adequacy in explanation. Each of these claims requires some elaboration and also some qualification.

As for the necessity claim, Aristotle does not suppose that all phenomena admit of all four causes. Thus, for example, coincidences lack final causes, since they do not occur for the sake of anything; that is, after all, what makes them coincidences. If a debtor is on his way to the market to buy milk and she runs into her creditor, who is on his way to the same market to buy bread, then she may agree to pay the money owed immediately. Although resulting in a wanted outcome, their meeting was not for the sake of settling the debt; nor indeed was it for the sake of anything at all. It was a simple co-incidence. Hence, it lacks a final cause. Similarly, if we think that there are mathematical or geometrical abstractions, for instance a triangle existing as an object of thought independent of any material realization, then the triangle will trivially lack a material cause. [ 17 ] Still, these significant exceptions aside, Aristotle expects the vast majority of explanations to conform to his four-causal schema. In non-exceptional cases, a failure to specify all four of causes, is, he maintains, a failure in explanatory adequacy.

The sufficiency claim is exceptionless, though it may yet be misleading if one pertinent issue is left unremarked. In providing his illustration of the material cause Aristotle first cites the bronze of a statue and the silver of a bowl, and then mentions also ‘the genera of which the bronze and the silver are species’ ( Phys . 194b25–27). By this he means the types of metal to which silver and bronze belong, or more generally still, simply metal . That is, one might specify the material cause of a statue more or less proximately, by specifying the character of the matter more or less precisely. Hence, when he implies that citing all four causes is sufficient for explanation, Aristotle does not intend to suggest that a citation at any level of generality suffices. He means to insist rather that there is no fifth kind of cause, that his preferred four cases subsume all kinds of cause. He does not argue for this conclusion fully, though he does challenge his readers to identify a kind of cause which qualifies as a sort distinct from the four mentioned ( Phys . 195a4–5).

So far, then, Aristotle’s four causal schema has whatever intuitive plausibility his illustrations may afford it. He does not rest content there, however. Instead, he thinks he can argue forcefully for the four causes as real explanatory factors, that is, as features which must be cited not merely because they make for satisfying explanations, but because they are genuinely operative causal factors, the omission of which renders any putative explanation objectively incomplete and so inadequate.

It should be noted that Aristotle’s arguments for the four causes taken individually all proceed against the backdrop of the general connection he forges between causal explanation and knowledge. Because he thinks that the four aitia feature in answers to knowledge-seeking questions ( Phys. 194b18; A Po . 71 b 9–11, 94 a 20), some scholars have come to understand them more as becauses than as causes —that is, as explanations rather than as causes narrowly construed. [ 18 ] Most such judgments reflect an antecedent commitment to one or another view of causation and explanation—that causation relates events rather than propositions; that explanations are inquiry-relative; that causation is extensional and explanation intensional; that explanations must adhere to some manner of nomic-deductive model, whereas causes need not; or that causes must be prior in time to their effects, while explanations, especially intentional explanations, may appeal to states of affairs posterior in time to the actions they explain.

Generally, Aristotle does not respect these sorts of commitments. Thus, to the extent that they are defensible, his approach to aitia may be regarded as blurring the canons of causation and explanation. It should certainly not, however, be ceded up front that Aristotle is guilty of any such conflation, or even that scholars who render his account of the four aitia in causal terms have failed to come to grips with developments in causal theory in the wake of Hume. Rather, because of the lack of uniformity in contemporary accounts of causation and explanation, and a persistent and justifiable tendency to regard causal explanations as foundational relative to other sorts of explanations, we may legitimately wonder whether Aristotle’s conception of the four aitia is in any significant way discontinuous with later, Humean-inspired approaches, and then again, to the degree that it is, whether Aristotle’s approach suffers for the comparison. Be that as it may, we will do well when considering Aristotle’s defense of his four aitia to bear in mind that controversy surrounds how best to construe his knowledge-driven approach to causation and explanation relative to some later approaches.

For more on the four causes in general, see the entry on Aristotle on Causality .

Central to Aristotle’s four-causal account of explanatory adequacy are the notions of matter ( hulê ) and form ( eidos or morphê ). Together, they constitute one of his most fundamental philosophical commitments, to hylomorphism :

• Hylomorphism = df ordinary objects are composites of matter and form.

The appeal in this definition to ‘ordinary objects’ requires reflection, but as a first approximation, it serves to rely on the sorts of examples Aristotle himself employs when motivating hylomorphism: statues and houses, horses and humans. In general, we may focus on artefacts and familiar living beings. Hylomorphism holds that no such object is metaphysically simple, but rather comprises two distinct metaphysical elements, one formal and one material.

Aristotle’s hylomorphism was formulated originally to handle various puzzles about change. Among the endoxa confronting Aristotle in his Physics are some striking challenges to the coherence of the very notion of change, owing to Parmenides and Zeno . Aristotle’s initial impulse in the face of such challenges, as we have seen, is to preserve the appearances ( phainomena ), to explain how change is possible. Key to Aristotle’s response to the challenges bequeathed him is his insistence that all change involves at least two factors: something persisting and something gained or lost. Thus, when Socrates goes to the beach and comes away sun-tanned, something continues to exist, namely Socrates, even while something is lost, his pallor, and something else gained, his tan. This is a change in the category of quality, whence the common locution ‘qualitative change’. If he gains weight, then again something remains, Socrates, and something is gained, in this case a quantity of matter. Accordingly, in this instance we have not a qualitative but a quantitative change.

In general, argues Aristotle, in whatever category a change occurs, something is lost and something gained within that category, even while something else, a substance, remains in existence, as the subject of that change. Of course, substances can come into or go out of existence, in cases of generation or destruction; and these are changes in the category of substance. Evidently even in cases of change in this category, however, something persists. To take an example favourable to Aristotle, in the case of the generation of a statue, the bronze persists, but it comes to acquire a new form, a substantial rather than accidental form. In all cases, whether substantial or accidental, the two-factor analysis obtains: something remains the same and something is gained or lost.

In its most rudimentary formulation, hylomorphism simply labels each of the two factors: what persists is matter and what is gained is form . Aristotle’s hylomorphism quickly becomes much more complex, however, as the notions of matter and form are pressed into philosophical service. Importantly, matter and form come to be paired with another fundamental distinction, that between potentiality and actuality . Again in the case of the generation of a statue, we may say that the bronze is potentially a statue, but that it is an actual statue when and only when it is informed with the form of a statue. Of course, before being made into a statue, the bronze was also in potentiality a fair number of other artefacts—a cannon, a steam-engine, or a goal on a football pitch. Still, it was not in potentiality butter or a beach ball. This shows that potentiality is not the same as possibility: to say that x is potentially F is to say that x already has actual features in virtue of which it might be made to be F by the imposition of a F form upon it. So, given these various connections, it becomes possible to define form and matter generically as

• form = df that which makes some matter which is potentially F actually F
• matter = df that which persists and which is, for some range of F s, potentially F

Of course, these definitions are circular, but that is not in itself a problem: actuality and potentiality are, for Aristotle, fundamental concepts which admit of explication and description but do not admit of reductive analyses.

Encapsulating Aristotle’s discussions of change in Physics i 7 and 8, and putting the matter more crisply than he himself does, we have the following simple argument for matter and form: (1) a necessary condition of there being change is the existence of matter and form; (2) there is change; hence (3) there are matter and form. The second premise is a phainomenon ; so, if that is accepted without further defense, only the first requires justification. The first premise is justified by the thought that since there is no generation ex nihilo , in every instance of change something persists while something else is gained or lost. In substantial generation or destruction, a substantial form is gained or lost; in mere accidental change, the form gained or lost is itself accidental. Since these two ways of changing exhaust the kinds of change there are, in every instance of change there are two factors present. These are matter and form.

For these reasons, Aristotle intends his hylomorphism to be much more than a simple explanatory heuristic. On the contrary, he maintains, matter and form are mind-independent features of the world and must, therefore, be mentioned in any full explanation of its workings.

We may mainly pass over as uncontroversial the suggestion that there are efficient causes in favor of the most controversial and difficult of Aristotle four causes, the final cause. [ 19 ] We should note before doing so, however, that Aristotle’s commitment to efficient causation does receive a defense in Aristotle’s preferred terminology; he thus does more than many other philosophers who take it as given that causes of an efficient sort are operative. Partly by way of criticizing Plato’s theory of Forms, which he regards as inadequate because of its inability to account for change and generation, Aristotle observes that nothing potential can bring itself into actuality without the agency of an actually operative efficient cause. Since what is potential is always in potentiality relative to some range of actualities, and nothing becomes actual of its own accord—no pile of bricks, for instance, spontaneously organizes itself into a house or a wall—an actually operative agent is required for every instance of change. This is the efficient cause. These sorts of considerations also incline Aristotle to speak of the priority of actuality over potentiality: potentialities are made actual by actualities, and indeed are always potentialities for some actuality or other. The operation of some actuality upon some potentiality is an instance of efficient causation.

That said, most of Aristotle’s readers do not find themselves in need of a defense of the existence of efficient causation. By contrast, most think that Aristotle does need to provide a defense of final causation. It is natural and easy for us to recognize final causal activity in the products of human craft: computers and can-openers are devices dedicated to the execution of certain tasks, and both their formal and material features will be explained by appeal to their functions. Nor is it a mystery where artefacts obtain their functions: we give artefacts their functions. The ends of artefacts are the results of the designing activities of intentional agents. Aristotle recognizes these kinds of final causation, but also, and more problematically, envisages a much greater role for teleology in natural explanation: nature exhibits teleology without design. He thinks, for instance, that living organisms not only have parts which require teleological explanation—that, for instance, kidneys are for purifying the blood and teeth are for tearing and chewing food—but that whole organisms, human beings and other animals, also have final causes.

Crucially, Aristotle denies overtly that the causes operative in nature are intention-dependent. He thinks, that is, that organisms have final causes, but that they did not come to have them by dint of the designing activities of some intentional agent or other. He thus denies that a necessary condition of x ’s having a final cause is x ’s being designed.

Although he has been persistently criticized for his commitment to such natural ends, Aristotle is not susceptible to a fair number of the objections standardly made to his view. Indeed, it is evident that whatever the merits of the most penetrating of such criticisms, much of the contumely directed at Aristotle is stunningly illiterate. [ 20 ] To take but one of any number of mind-numbing examples, the famous American psychologist B. F. Skinner reveals that ‘Aristotle argued that a falling body accelerated because it grew more jubilant as it found itself nearer its home’ (1971, 6). To anyone who has actually read Aristotle, it is unsurprising that this ascription comes without an accompanying textual citation. For Aristotle, as Skinner would portray him, rocks are conscious beings having end states which they so delight in procuring that they accelerate themselves in exaltation as they grow ever closer to attaining them. There is no excuse for this sort of intellectual slovenliness, when already by the late-nineteenth century, the German scholar Zeller was able to say with perfect accuracy that ‘The most important feature of the Aristotelian teleology is the fact that it is neither anthropocentric nor is it due to the actions of a creator existing outside the world or even of a mere arranger of the world, but is always thought of as immanent in nature’ (1883, §48).

Indeed, it is hardly necessary to caricature Aristotle’s teleological commitments in order to bring them into critical focus. In fact, Aristotle offers two sorts of defenses of non-intentional teleology in nature, the first of which is replete with difficulty. He claims in Physics ii 8:

For these [viz. teeth and all other parts of natural beings] and all other natural things come about as they do either always or for the most part, whereas nothing which comes about due to chance or spontaneity comes about always or for the most part. … If, then, these are either the result of coincidence or for the sake of something, and they cannot be the result of coincidence or spontaneity, it follows that they must be for the sake of something. Moreover, even those making these sorts of claims [viz. that everything comes to be by necessity] will agree that such things are natural. Therefore, that for the sake of which is present among things which come to be and exist by nature. ( Phys . 198b32–199a8)

The argument here, which has been variously formulated by scholars, [ 21 ] seems doubly problematic.

In this argument Aristotle seems to introduce as a phainomenon that nature exhibits regularity, so that the parts of nature come about in patterned and regular ways. Thus, for instance, humans tend to have teeth arranged in a predictable sort of way, with incisors in the front and molars in the back. He then seems to contend, as an exhaustive and exclusive disjunction, that things happen either by chance or for the sake of something, only to suggest, finally, that what is ‘always or for the most part’—what happens in a patterned and predictable way—is not plausibly thought to be due to chance. Hence, he concludes, whatever happens always or for the most part must happen for the sake of something, and so must admit of a teleological cause. Thus, teeth show up always or for the most part with incisors in the front and molars in the back; since this is a regular and predictable occurrence, it cannot be due to chance. Given that whatever is not due to chance has a final cause, teeth have a final cause.

If so much captures Aristotle’s dominant argument for teleology, then his view is unmotivated. The argument is problematic in the first instance because it assumes an exhaustive and exclusive disjunction between what is by chance and what is for the sake of something. But there are obviously other possibilities. Hearts beat not in order to make noise, but they do so always and not by chance. Second, and this is perplexing if we have represented him correctly, Aristotle is himself aware of one sort of counterexample to this view and is indeed keen to point it out himself: although, he insists, bile is regularly and predictably yellow, its being yellow is neither due simply to chance nor for the sake of anything. Aristotle in fact mentions many such counterexamples ( Part. An. 676b16–677b10, Gen. An. 778a29–b6). It seems to follow, then, short of ascribing a straight contradiction to him, either that he is not correctly represented as we have interpreted this argument or that he simply changed his mind about the grounds of teleology. Taking up the first alternative, one possibility is that Aristotle is not really trying to argue for teleology from the ground up in Physics ii 8, but is taking it as already established that there are teleological causes, and restricting himself to observing that many natural phenomena, namely those which occur always or for the most part, are good candidates for admitting of teleological explanation.

That would leave open the possibility of a broader sort of motivation for teleology, perhaps of the sort Aristotle offers elsewhere in the Physics , when speaking about the impulse to find non-intention-dependent teleological causes at work in nature:

This is most obvious in the case of animals other than man: they make things using neither craft nor on the basis of inquiry nor by deliberation. This is in fact a source of puzzlement for those who wonder whether it is by reason or by some other faculty that these creatures work—spiders, ants and the like. Advancing bit by bit in this same direction it becomes apparent that even in plants features conducive to an end occur—leaves, for example, grow in order to provide shade for the fruit. If then it is both by nature and for an end that the swallow makes its nest and the spider its web, and plants grow leaves for the sake of the fruit and send their roots down rather than up for the sake of nourishment, it is plain that this kind of cause is operative in things which come to be and are by nature. And since nature is twofold, as matter and as form, the form is the end, and since all other things are for sake of the end, the form must be the cause in the sense of that for the sake of which. ( Phys . 199a20–32)

As Aristotle quite rightly observes in this passage, we find ourselves regularly and easily speaking in teleological terms when characterizing non-human animals and plants. It is consistent with our so speaking, of course, that all of our easy language in these contexts is rather too easy: it is in fact lax and careless, because unwarrantedly anthropocentric. We might yet demand that all such language be assiduously reduced to some non-teleological idiom when we are being scientifically strict and empirically serious, though we would first need to survey the explanatory costs and benefits of our attempting to do so. Aristotle considers and rejects some views hostile to teleology in Physics ii 8 and Generation and Corruption i. [ 22 ]

Once Aristotle has his four-causal explanatory schema fully on the scene, he relies upon it in virtually all of his most advanced philosophical investigation. As he deploys it in various frameworks, we find him augmenting and refining the schema even as he applies it, sometimes with surprising results. One important question concerns how his hylomorphism intersects with the theory of substance advanced in the context of his theory of categories.

As we have seen, Aristotle insists upon the primacy of primary substance in his Categories . According to that work, however, star instances of primary substance are familiar living beings like Socrates or an individual horse ( Cat . 2a11014). Yet with the advent of hylomorphism, these primary substances are revealed to be metaphysical complexes: Socrates is a compound of matter and form. So, now we have not one but three potential candidates for primary substance: form, matter, and the compound of matter and form. The question thus arises: which among them is the primary substance? Is it the matter, the form, or the compound? The compound corresponds to a basic object of experience and seems to be a basic subject of predication: we say that Socrates lives in Athens, not that his matter lives in Athens. Still, matter underlies the compound and in this way seems a more basic subject than the compound, at least in the sense that it can exist before and after it does. On the other hand, the matter is nothing definite at all until enformed; so, perhaps form, as determining what the compound is, has the best claim on substantiality.

In the middle books of his Metaphysics , which contain some of his most complex and engaging investigations into basic being, Aristotle settles on form ( Met . vii 17). A question thus arises as to how form satisfies Aristotle’s final criteria for substantiality. He expects a substance to be, as he says, some particular thing ( tode ti ), but also to be something knowable, some essence or other. These criteria seem to pull in different directions, the first in favor of particular substances, as the primary substances of the Categories had been particulars, and the second in favor of universals as substances, because they alone are knowable. In the lively controversy surrounding these matters, many scholars have concluded that Aristotle adopts a third way forward: form is both knowable and particular. This matter, however, remains very acutely disputed. [ 23 ]

Very briefly, and not engaging these controversies, it becomes clear that Aristotle prefers form in virtue of its role in generation and diachronic persistence. When a statue is generated, or when a new animal comes into being, something persists, namely the matter, which comes to realize the substantial form in question. Even so, insists Aristotle, the matter does not by itself provide the identity conditions for the new substance. First, as we have seen, the matter is merely potentially some F until such time as it is made actually F by the presence of an F form. Further, the matter can be replenished, and is replenished in the case of all organisms, and so seems to be form-dependent for its own diachronic identity conditions. For these reasons, Aristotle thinks of the form as prior to the matter, and thus more fundamental than the matter. This sort of matter, the form-dependent matter, Aristotle regards as proximate matter ( Met. 1038b6, 1042b10), thus extending the notion of matter beyond its original role as metaphysical substrate.

Further, in Metaphysics vii 17 Aristotle offers a suggestive argument to the effect that matter alone cannot be substance. Let the various bits of matter belonging to Socrates be labeled as a , b , c , …, n . Consistent with the non-existence of Socrates is the existence of a , b , c , …, n , since these elements exist when they are spread from here to Alpha Centauri, but if that happens, of course, Socrates no longer exists. Heading in the other direction, Socrates can exist without just these elements, since he may exist when some one of a , b , c , …, n is replaced or goes out of existence. So, in addition to his material elements, insists Aristotle, Socrates is also something else, something more ( heteron ti ; Met. 1041b19–20). This something more is form , which is ‘not an element…but a primary cause of a thing’s being what it is’ ( Met. 1041b28–30). The cause of a thing’s being the actual thing it is, as we have seen, is form. Hence, concludes Aristotle, as the source of being and unity, form is substance.

Even if this much is granted—and to repeat, much of what has just been said is unavoidably controversial—many questions remain. For example, is form best understood as universal or particular? However that issue is to be resolved, what is the relation of form to the compound and to matter? If form is substance, then what is the fate of these other two candidates? Are they also substances, if to a lesser degree? It seems odd to conclude that they are nothing at all, or that the compound in particular is nothing in actuality; yet it is difficult to contend that they might belong to some category other than substance.

For an approach to some of these questions, see the entry on Aristotle’s Metaphysics .

However these and like issues are to be resolved, given the primacy of form as substance, it is unsurprising to find Aristotle identifying the soul, which he introduces as a principle or source ( archê ) of all life, as the form of a living compound. For Aristotle, in fact, all living things, and not only human beings, have souls: ‘what is ensouled is distinguished from what is unensouled by living’ ( DA 431a20–22; cf. DA 412a13, 423a20–6; De Part. An. 687a24–690a10; Met. 1075a16–25). It is appropriate, then, to treat all ensouled bodies in hylomorphic terms:

The soul is the cause and source of the living body. But cause and source are meant in many ways [or are homonymous]. Similarly, the soul is a cause in accordance with the ways delineated, which are three: it is (i) the cause as the source of motion [=the efficient cause], (ii) that for the sake of which [=the final cause], and (iii) as the substance of ensouled bodies. That it is a cause as substance is clear, for substance is the cause of being for all things, and for living things, being is life, and the soul is also the cause and source of life. ( DA 415b8–14; cf. PN 467b12–25, Phys . 255a56–10)

So, the soul and body are simply special cases of form and matter:

soul : body :: form : matter :: actuality : potentiality

Further, the soul, as the end of the compound organism, is also the final cause of the body. Minimally, this is to be understood as the view that any given body is the body that it is because it is organized around a function which serves to unify the entire organism. In this sense, the body’s unity derives from the fact it has a single end, or single life directionality, a state of affairs that Aristotle captures by characterizing the body as the sort of matter which is organic ( organikon ; DA 412a28). By this he means that the body serves as a tool for implementing the characteristic life activities of the kind to which the organism belongs ( organon = tool in Greek). Taking all this together, Aristotle offers the view that the soul is the ‘first actuality of a natural organic body’ ( DA 412b5–6), that it is a ‘substance as form of a natural body which has life in potentiality’ ( DA 412a20–1) and, again, that it ‘is a first actuality of a natural body which has life in potentiality’ ( DA 412a27–8).

Aristotle contends that his hylomorphism provides an attractive middle way between what he sees as the mirroring excesses of his predecessors. In one direction, he means to reject Presocratic kinds of materialism; in the other, he opposes Platonic dualism. He gives the Presocratics credit for identifying the material causes of life, but then faults them for failing to grasp its formal cause. By contrast, Plato earns praise for grasping the formal cause of life; unfortunately, as Aristotle sees things, he then proceeds to neglect the material cause, and comes to believe that the soul can exist without its material basis. Hylomorphism, in Aristotle’s view, captures what is right in both camps while eschewing the unwarranted mono-dimensionality of each. To account for living organisms, Aristotle contends, the natural scientist must attend to both matter and form.

Aristotle deploys hylomorphic analyses not only to the whole organism, but to the individual faculties of the soul as well. Perception involves the reception of sensible forms without matter, and thinking, by analogy, consists in the mind’s being enformed by intelligible forms. With each of these extensions, Aristotle both expands and taxes his basic hylomorphism, sometimes straining its basic framework almost beyond recognition.

For more detail on Aristotle’s hylomorphism in psychological explanation, see the entry on Aristotle’s Psychology .

Aristotle’s basic teleological framework extends to his ethical and political theories, which he regards as complementing one another. He takes it as given that most people wish to lead good lives; the question then becomes what the best life for human beings consists in. Because he believes that the best life for a human being is not a matter of subjective preference, he also believes that people can (and, sadly, often do) choose to lead sub-optimal lives. In order to avoid such unhappy eventualities, Aristotle recommends reflection on the criteria any successful candidate for the best life must satisfy. He proceeds to propose one kind of life as meeting those criteria uniquely and therefore promotes it as the superior form of human life. This is a life lived in accordance with reason.

When stating the general criteria for the final good for human beings, Aristotle invites his readers to review them ( EN 1094a22–27). This is advisable, since much of the work of sorting through candidate lives is in fact accomplished during the higher-order task of determining the criteria appropriate to this task. Once these are set, it becomes relatively straightforward for Aristotle to dismiss some contenders, including for instance hedonism, the perennially popular view that pleasure is the highest good for human beings.

According to the criteria advanced, the final good for human beings must: (i) be pursued for its own sake ( EN 1094a1); (ii) be such that we wish for other things for its sake ( EN 1094a19); (iii) be such that we do not wish for it on account of other things ( EN 1094a21); (iv) be complete ( teleion ), in the sense that it is always choiceworthy and always chosen for itself ( EN 1097a26–33); and finally (v) be self-sufficient ( autarkês ), in the sense that its presence suffices to make a life lacking in nothing ( EN 1097b6–16). Plainly some candidates for the best life fall down in the face of these criteria. According to Aristotle, neither the life of pleasure nor the life of honour satisfies them all.

What does satisfy them all is happiness eudaimonia . Scholars in fact dispute whether eudaimonia is best rendered as ‘happiness’ or ‘flourishing’ or ‘living well’ or simply transliterated and left an untranslated technical term. [ 24 ] If we have already determined that happiness is some sort of subjective state, perhaps simple desire fulfillment, then ‘happiness’ will indeed be an inappropriate translation: eudaimonia is achieved, according to Aristotle, by fully realizing our natures, by actualizing to the highest degree our human capacities, and neither our nature nor our endowment of human capacities is a matter of choice for us. Still, as Aristotle frankly acknowledges, people will consent without hesitation to the suggestion that happiness is our best good—even while differing materially about how they understand what happiness is. So, while seeming to agree, people in fact disagree about the human good. Consequently, it is necessary to reflect on the nature of happiness ( eudaimonia ):

But perhaps saying that the highest good is happiness ( eudaimonia ) will appear to be a platitude and what is wanted is a much clearer expression of what this is. Perhaps this would come about if the function ( ergon ) of a human being were identified. For just as the good, and doing well, for a flute player, a sculptor, and every sort of craftsman—and in general, for whatever has a function and a characteristic action—seems to depend upon function, so the same seems true for a human being, if indeed a human being has a function. Or do the carpenter and cobbler have their functions, while a human being has none and is rather naturally without a function ( argon )? Or rather, just as there seems to be some particular function for the eye and the hand and in general for each of the parts of a human being, should one in the same way posit a particular function for the human being in addition to all these? Whatever might this be? For living is common even to plants, whereas something characteristic ( idion ) is wanted; so, one should set aside the life of nutrition and growth. Following that would be some sort of life of perception, yet this is also common, to the horse and the bull and to every animal. What remains, therefore, is a life of action belonging to the kind of soul that has reason. ( EN 1097b22–1098a4)

In determining what eudaimonia consists in, Aristotle makes a crucial appeal to the human function ( ergon ), and thus to his overarching teleological framework.

He thinks that he can identify the human function in terms of reason, which then provides ample grounds for characterizing the happy life as involving centrally the exercise of reason, whether practical or theoretical. Happiness turns out to be an activity of the rational soul, conducted in accordance with virtue or excellence, or, in what comes to the same thing, in rational activity executed excellently ( EN 1098a161–17). It bears noting in this regard that Aristotle’s word for virtue, aretê , is broader than the dominant sense of the English word ‘virtue’, since it comprises all manner of excellences, thus including but extending beyond the moral virtues. Thus when he says that happiness consists in an activity in ‘accordance with virtue’ ( kat’ aretên ; EN 1098a18), Aristotle means that it is a kind of excellent activity, and not merely morally virtuous activity.

The suggestion that only excellently executed or virtuously performed rational activity constitutes human happiness provides the impetus for Aristotle’s virtue ethics. Strikingly, first, he insists that the good life is a life of activity; no state suffices, since we are commended and praised for living good lives, and we are rightly commended or praised only for things we ( do ) ( EN 1105b20–1106a13). Further, given that we must not only act, but act excellently or virtuously, it falls to the ethical theorist to determine what virtue or excellence consists in with respect to the individual human virtues, including, for instance, courage and practical intelligence. This is why so much of Aristotle’s ethical writing is given over to an investigation of virtue, both in general and in particular, and extending to both practical and theoretical forms.

For more on Aristotle’s virtue-based ethics, see the entry on Aristotle’s Ethics .

Aristotle concludes his discussion of human happiness in his Nicomachean Ethics by introducing political theory as a continuation and completion of ethical theory. Ethical theory characterizes the best form of human life; political theory characterizes the forms of social organization best suited to its realization ( EN 1181b12–23).

The basic political unit for Aristotle is the polis , which is both a state in the sense of being an authority-wielding monopoly and a civil society in the sense of being a series of organized communities with varying degrees of converging interest. Aristotle’s political theory is markedly unlike some later, liberal theories, in that he does not think that the polis requires justification as a body threatening to infringe on antecedently existing human rights. Rather, he advances a form of political naturalism which treats human beings as by nature political animals, not only in the weak sense of being gregariously disposed, nor even in the sense of their merely benefiting from mutual commercial exchange, but in the strong sense of their flourishing as human beings at all only within the framework of an organized polis . The polis ‘comes into being for the sake of living, but it remains in existence for the sake of living well’ ( Pol . 1252b29–30; cf. 1253a31–37).

The polis is thus to be judged against the goal of promoting human happiness. A superior form of political organization enhances human life; an inferior form hampers and hinders it. One major question pursued in Aristotle’s Politics is thus structured by just this question: what sort of political arrangement best meets the goal of developing and augmenting human flourishing? Aristotle considers a fair number of differing forms of political organization, and sets most aside as inimical to the goal human happiness. For example, given his overarching framework, he has no difficulty rejecting contractarianism on the grounds that it treats as merely instrumental those forms of political activity which are in fact partially constitutive of human flourishing ( Pol . iii 9).

In thinking about the possible kinds of political organization, Aristotle relies on the structural observations that rulers may be one, few, or many, and that their forms of rule may be legitimate or illegitimate, as measured against the goal of promoting human flourishing ( Pol . 1279a26–31). Taken together, these factors yield six possible forms of government, three correct and three deviant:

The correct are differentiated from the deviant by their relative abilities to realize the basic function of the polis : living well. Given that we prize human happiness, we should, insists Aristotle, prefer forms of political association best suited to this goal.

Necessary to the end of enhancing human flourishing, maintains Aristotle, is the maintenance of a suitable level of distributive justice. Accordingly, he arrives at his classification of better and worse governments partly by considerations of distributive justice. He contends, in a manner directly analogous to his attitude towards eudaimonia , that everyone will find it easy to agree to the proposition that we should prefer a just state to an unjust state, and even to the formal proposal that the distribution of justice requires treating equal claims similarly and unequal claims dissimilarly. Still, here too people will differ about what constitutes an equal or an unequal claim or, more generally, an equal or an unequal person. A democrat will presume that all citizens are equal, whereas an aristocrat will maintain that the best citizens are, quite obviously, superior to the inferior. Accordingly, the democrat will expect the formal constraint of justice to yield equal distribution to all, whereas the aristocrat will take for granted that the best citizens are entitled to more than the worst.

When sorting through these claims, Aristotle relies upon his own account of distributive justice, as advanced in Nicomachean Ethics v 3. That account is deeply meritocratic. He accordingly disparages oligarchs, who suppose that justice requires preferential claims for the rich, but also democrats, who contend that the state must boost liberty across all citizens irrespective of merit. The best polis has neither function: its goal is to enhance human flourishing, an end to which liberty is at best instrumental, and not something to be pursued for its own sake.

Still, we should also proceed with a sober eye on what is in fact possible for human beings, given our deep and abiding acquisitional propensities. Given these tendencies, it turns out that although deviant, democracy may yet play a central role in the sort of mixed constitution which emerges as the best form of political organization available to us. Inferior though it is to polity (that is, rule by the many serving the goal of human flourishing), and especially to aristocracy (government by the best humans, the aristoi , also dedicated to the goal of human flourishing), democracy, as the best amongst the deviant forms of government, may also be the most we can realistically hope to achieve.

For an in-depth discussion of Aristotle’s political theory, including his political naturalism, see the entry on Aristotle’s Politics .

Aristotle regards rhetoric and the arts as belonging to the productive sciences. As a family, these differ from the practical sciences of ethics and politics, which concern human conduct, and from the theoretical sciences, which aim at truth for its own sake. Because they are concerned with the creation of human products broadly conceived, the productive sciences include activities with obvious, artefactual products like ships and buildings, but also agriculture and medicine, and even, more nebulously, rhetoric, which aims at the production of persuasive speech ( Rhet . 1355b26; cf. Top. 149b5), and tragedy, which aims at the production of edifying drama ( Poet . 1448b16–17). If we bear in mind that Aristotle approaches all these activities within the broader context of his teleological explanatory framework, then at least some of the highly polemicized interpretative difficulties which have grown up around his works in this area, particularly the Poetics , may be sharply delimited.

One such controversy centers on the question of whether Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Poetics are primarily descriptive or prescriptive works. [ 25 ] To the degree that they are indeed prescriptive, one may wonder whether Aristotle has presumed in these treatises to dictate to figures of the stature of Sophocles and Euripides how best to pursue their crafts. To some extent—but only to some extent—it may seem that he does. There are, at any rate, clearly prescriptive elements in both these texts. Still, he does not arrive at these recommendations a priori . Rather, it is plain that Aristotle has collected the best works of forensic speech and tragedy available to him, and has studied them to discern their more and less successful features. In proceeding in this way, he aims to capture and codify what is best in both rhetorical practice and tragedy, in each case relative to its appropriate productive goal.

The general goal of rhetoric is clear. Rhetoric, says Aristotle, ‘is the power to see, in each case, the possible ways to persuade’ ( Rhet . 1355b26). Different contexts, however, require different techniques. Thus, suggests Aristotle, speakers will usually find themselves in one of three contexts where persuasion is paramount: deliberative ( Rhet . i 4–8), epideictic ( Rhet . i 9), and judicial ( Rhet . i 10–14). In each of these contexts, speakers will have at their disposal three main avenues of persuasion: the character of the speaker, the emotional constitution of the audience, and the general argument ( logos ) of the speech itself ( Rhet . i 3). Rhetoric thus examines techniques of persuasion pursuant to each of these areas.

When discussing these techniques, Aristotle draws heavily upon topics treated in his logical, ethical, and psychological writings. In this way, the Rhetoric illuminates Aristotle’s writings in these comparatively theoretical areas by developing in concrete ways topics treated more abstractly elsewhere. For example, because a successful persuasive speech proceeds alert to the emotional state of the audience on the occasion of its delivery, Aristotle’s Rhetoric contains some of his most nuanced and specific treatments of the emotions. Heading in another direction, a close reading of the Rhetoric reveals that Aristotle treats the art of persuasion as closely akin to dialectic (see §4.3 above). Like dialectic, rhetoric trades in techniques that are not scientific in the strict sense (see §4.2 above), and though its goal is persuasion, it reaches its end best if it recognizes that people naturally find proofs and well-turned arguments persuasive ( Rhet . 1354a1, 1356a25, 1356a30). Accordingly, rhetoric, again like dialectic, begins with credible opinions ( endoxa ), though mainly of the popular variety rather than those endorsed most readily by the wise ( Top . 100a29–35; 104a8–20; Rhet . 1356b34). Finally, rhetoric proceeds from such opinions to conclusions which the audience will understand to follow by cogent patterns of inference ( Rhet . 1354a12–18, 1355a5–21). For this reason, too, the rhetorician will do well understand the patterns of human reasoning.

For more on Aristotle’s rhetoric, see the entry on Aristotle’s Rhetoric .

By highlighting and refining techniques for successful speech, the Rhetoric is plainly prescriptive—but only relative to the goal of persuasion. It does not, however, select its own goal or in any way dictate the end of persuasive speech: rather, the end of rhetoric is given by the nature of the craft itself. In this sense, the Rhetoric is like both the Nicomachean Ethics and the Politics in bearing the stamp of Aristotle’s broad and encompassing teleology.

The same holds true of the Poetics , but in this case the end is not easily or uncontroversially articulated. It is often assumed that the goal of tragedy is catharsis —the purification or purgation of the emotions aroused in a tragic performance. Despite its prevalence, as an interpretation of what Aristotle actually says in the Poetics this understanding is underdetermined at best. When defining tragedy in a general way, Aristotle claims:

Tragedy, then, is an imitation of an action that is serious and complete, and which has some greatness about it. It imitates in words with pleasant accompaniments, each type belonging separately to the different parts of the work. It imitates people performing actions and does not rely on narration. It achieves, through pity and fear, the catharsis of these sorts of feelings. ( Poet . 1449b21–29)

Although he has been represented in countless works of scholarship as contending that tragedy is for the sake of catharsis , Aristotle is in fact far more circumspect. While he does contend that tragedy will effect or accomplish catharsis, in so speaking he does not use language which clearly implies that catharsis is in itself the function of tragedy. Although a good blender will achieve a blade speed of 36,000 rotations per minute, this is not its function; rather, it achieves this speed in service of its function, namely blending. Similarly, then, on one approach, tragedy achieves catharsis, though not because it is its function to do so. This remains so, even if it is integral to realizing its function that tragedy achieve catharsis—as it is equally integral that it makes us of imitation ( mimêsis ), and does so by using words along with pleasant accompaniments (namely, rhythm, harmony, and song; Poet . 1447b27).

Unfortunately, Aristotle is not completely forthcoming on the question of the function of tragedy. One clue towards his attitude comes from a passage in which he differentiates tragedy from historical writing:

The poet and the historian differ not in that one writes in meter and the other not; for one could put the writings of Herodotus into verse and they would be history none the less, with or without meter. The difference resides in this: the one speaks of what has happened, and the other of what might be. Accordingly, poetry is more philosophical and more momentous than history. The poet speaks more of the universal, while the historian speaks of particulars. It is universal that when certain things turn out a certain way someone will in all likelihood or of necessity act or speak in a certain way—which is what the poet, though attaching particular names to the situation, strives for ( Poet . 1451a38–1451b10).

In characterizing poetry as more philosophical, universal, and momentous than history, Aristotle praises poets for their ability to assay deep features of human character, to dissect the ways in which human fortune engages and tests character, and to display how human foibles may be amplified in uncommon circumstances. We do not, however, reflect on character primarily for entertainment value. Rather, and in general, Aristotle thinks of the goal of tragedy in broadly intellectualist terms: the function of tragedy is ‘learning, that is, figuring out what each thing is’ ( Poet . 1448b16–17). In Aristotle’s view, tragedy teaches us about ourselves.

That said, catharsis is undoubtedly a key concept in Aristotle’s Poetics , one which, along with imitation ( mimêsis ), has generated enormous controversy. [ 26 ] These controversies center around three poles of interpretation: the subject of catharsis, the matter of the catharsis, and the nature of catharsis. To illustrate what is meant: on a naïve understanding of catharsis—which may be correct despite its naïveté—the audience (the subject) undergoes catharsis by having the emotions (the matter) of pity and fear it experiences purged (the nature). By varying just these three possibilities, scholars have produced a variety of interpretations—that it is the actors or even the plot of the tragedy which are the subjects of catharsis, that the purification is cognitive or structural rather than emotional, and that catharsis is purification rather than purgation. On this last contrast, just as we might purify blood by filtering it, rather than purging the body of blood by letting it, so we might refine our emotions, by cleansing them of their more unhealthy elements, rather than ridding ourselves of the emotions by purging them altogether. The difference is considerable, since on one view the emotions are regarded as in themselves destructive and so to be purged, while on the other, the emotions may be perfectly healthy, even though, like other psychological states, they may be improved by refinement. The immediate context of the Poetics does not by itself settle these disputes conclusively.

Aristotle says comparatively more about the second main concept of the Poetics , imitation ( mimêsis ). Although less controversial than catharsis, Aristotle’s conception of mimêsis has also been debated. [ 27 ] Aristotle thinks that imitation is a deeply ingrained human proclivity. Like political association, he contends, mimêsis is natural . We engage in imitation from an early age, already in language learning by aping competent speakers as we learn, and then also later, in the acquisition of character by treating others as role models. In both these ways, we imitate because we learn and grow by imitation, and for humans, learning is both natural and a delight ( Poet . 1148b4–24). This same tendency, in more sophisticated and complex ways, leads us into the practice of drama. As we engage in more advanced forms of mimêsis , imitation gives way to representation and depiction , where we need not be regarded as attempting to copy anyone or anything in any narrow sense of the term. For tragedy does not set out merely to copy what is the case, but rather, as we have seen in Aristotle’s differentiation of tragedy from history, to speak of what might be, to engage universal themes in a philosophical manner, and to enlighten an audience by their depiction. So, although mimêsis is at root simple imitation, as it comes to serve the goals of tragedy, it grows more sophisticated and powerful, especially in the hands of those poets able to deploy it to good effect.

Aristotle’s influence is difficult to overestimate. After his death, his school, the Lyceum, carried on for some period of time, though precisely how long is unclear. In the century immediately after his death, Aristotle’s works seem to have fallen out of circulation; they reappear in the first century B.C.E., after which time they began to be disseminated, at first narrowly, but then much more broadly. They eventually came to form the backbone of some seven centuries of philosophy, in the form of the commentary tradition , much of it original philosophy carried on in a broadly Aristotelian framework. They also played a very significant, if subordinate role, in the Neoplatonic philosophy of Plotinus and Porphyry . Thereafter, from the sixth through the twelfth centuries, although the bulk of Aristotle’s writings were lost to the West, they received extensive consideration in Byzantine Philosophy , and in Arabic Philosophy, where Aristotle was so prominent that be became known simply as The First Teacher (see the entry on the influence of Arabic and Islamic philosophy on the Latin West ). In this tradition, the notably rigorous and illuminating commentaries of Avicenna and Averroes interpreted and developed Aristotle’s views in striking ways. These commentaries in turn proved exceedingly influential in the earliest reception of the Aristotelian corpus into the Latin West in the twelfth century.

Among Aristotle’s greatest exponents during the early period of his reintroduction to the West, Albertus Magnus , and above all his student Thomas Aquinas , sought to reconcile Aristotle’s philosophy with Christian thought. Some Aristotelians disdain Aquinas as bastardizing Aristotle, while some Christians disown Aquinas as pandering to pagan philosophy. Many others in both camps take a much more positive view, seeing Thomism as a brilliant synthesis of two towering traditions; arguably, the incisive commentaries written by Aquinas towards the end of his life aim not so much at synthesis as straightforward exegesis and exposition, and in these respects they have few equals in any period of philosophy. Partly due to the attention of Aquinas, but for many other reasons as well, Aristotelian philosophy set the framework for the Christian philosophy of the twelfth through the sixteenth centuries, though, of course, that rich period contains a broad range of philosophical activity, some more and some less in sympathy with Aristotelian themes. To see the extent of Aristotle’s influence, however, it is necessary only to recall that the two concepts forming the so-called binarium famosissimum (“the most famous pair”) of that period, namely universal hylomorphism and the doctrine of the plurality of forms, found their first formulations in Aristotle’s texts.

Interest in Aristotle continued unabated throughout the renaissance in the form of Renaissance Aristotelianism . The dominant figures of this period overlap with the last flowerings of Medieval Aristotelian Scholasticism, which reached a rich and highly influential close in the figure of Suárez, whose life in turn overlaps with Descartes. From the end of late Scholasticism, the study of Aristotle has undergone various periods of relative neglect and intense interest, but has been carried forward unabated down to the present day.

Today, philosophers of various stripes continue to look to Aristotle for guidance and inspiration in many different areas, ranging from the philosophy of mind to theories of the infinite, though perhaps Aristotle’s influence is seen most overtly and avowedly in the resurgence of virtue ethics which began in the last half of the twentieth century. It seems safe at this stage to predict that Aristotle’s stature is unlikely to diminish anytime in the foreseeable future. If it is any indication of the direction of things to come, a quick search of the present Encyclopedia turns up more citations to ‘Aristotle’ and ‘Aristotelianism’ than to any other philosopher or philosophical movement. Only Plato comes close.

This bibliography limits itself to translations general works on Aristotle, and works cited in this entry. Please see the subjective-specific bibliographies in the entries under General and Special Topics for references to works pertinent to more specific areas of Aristotle’s philosophy.

The Standard English Translation of Aristotle’s Complete Works into English is:

• Barnes, J., ed. The Complete Works of Aristotle , Volumes I and II, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984.

An excellent translation of selections of Aristotle’s works is:

• Irwin, T. and Fine., G., Aristotle: Selections, Translated with Introduction, Notes, and Glossary , Indianapolis: Hackett, 1995.

The best set of English translations with commentaries is the Clarendon Aristotle Series:

• Ackrill, J., Categories and De Interpretatione , translated with notes, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963.
• Annas, J., Metaphysics Books M and N , translated with a commentary, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.
• Balme, D., De Partibus Animalium I and De Generatione Animalium I , (with passages from Book II. 1–3), translated with an introduction and notes, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.
• Barnes, J., Posterior Analytics , second edition, translated with a commentary, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.
• Bostock, D., Metaphysics Books Z and H , translated with a commentary, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.
• Charlton, W., Physics Books I and II , translated with introduction, commentary, Note on Recent Work, and revised Bibliography, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.
• Graham, D., Physics, Book VIII , translated with a commentary, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
• Hamlyn, D., De Anima II and III, with Passages from Book I , translated with a commentary, and with a review of recent work by Christopher Shields, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
• Hussey, E., Physics Books III and IV , translated with an introduction and notes, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983; new impression with supplementary material, 1993.
• Judson, L., Metaphysics Book Λ , edited, translated with an introduction and commentary, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019.
• Keyt, D., Politics, Books V and VI Animals , translated with a commentary, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
• Kirwan, C., Metaphysics: Books gamma, delta, and epsilon , second edition, translated with notes, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.
• Kraut, R., Politics Books VII and VIII , translated with a commentary, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
• Lennox, J., On the Parts of Animals , translated with a commentary, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
• Madigan, A., Aristotle: Metaphysics Books B and K 1–2 , translated with a commentary, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
• Makin, S., Metaphysics Theta , translated with an introduction and commentary, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
• Pakaluk, M., Nicomachean Ethics, Books VIII and IX , translated with a commentary, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
• Robinson, R., Politics: Books III and IV , translated with a commentary by Richard Robinson; with a supplementary essay by David Keyt, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
• Saunders, T., Politics: Books I and II , translated with a commentary, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
• Shields, Christopher, De Anima , translated with an introduction and commentary, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
• Smith, R., Topics Books I and VIII , With excerpts from related texts, translated with a commentary, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
• Striker, G., Prior Analytics , translated with a commentary, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.
• Taylor, C., Nicomachean Ethics, Books II-IV , translated with an introduction and commentary, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
• Williams, C., De Generatione et Corruptione , translated with a commentary, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983.
• Woods, M., Eudemian Ethics Books I, II, and VIII , second edition, edited, and translated with a commentary, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.

1. Comprehensive Introductions to Aristotle

• Ackrill, J., Aristotle the Philosopher , Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981.
• Jaeger, W., Aristotle: Fundamentals of the History of his Development , Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1934.
• Lear, J., Aristotle: the Desire to Understand , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
• Ross, W. D., Aristotle , London: Methuen and Co., 1923.
• Shields, C., Aristotle 2nd edition, London: Routledge, 2014.

2. General Guide Books to Aristotle

• Barnes, J., The Cambridge Companion to Aristotle , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
• Anagnostopoulos, G., The Blackwell Guide to Aristotle , Oxford: Blackwell, 2007.
• Shields, C., The Oxford Handbook on Aristotle , Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.

3. Aristotle’s Life

• Natali, C., Aristotle: His Life and School , D. Hutchinson (ed.), Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013.
• Annas, J., 1982, ‘Aristotle on inefficient causes,’ Philosophical Quarterly , 32: 311–326.
• Bakker, Paul J. J. M., 2007, ‘Natural Philosophy, Metaphysics, or Something in Between: Agostino Nifo, Pietro Pompanazzi, and Marcantonio Genua on the Nature and Place of the Science of Soul,’ in J. J. M. Bakker and Johannes M. M. H. Thijssen (eds.), Mind, Cognition, and Representation: The Tradition of Commentaries on Aristotle’s De Anima , London: Ashgate, pp. 151–177.
• Barnes, Jonathan, 1994, Posterior Analytics , second edition, translated with a commentary, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Biondi, Paolo C. (ed. and trans.), (2004), Aristotle: Posterior Analytics ii 19 , Paris: Librairie-Philosophique-J-Vrin.
• Bostock, David, 1980/2006, ‘Aristotle’s Account of Time,‘ in Space, Time, Matter, and Form: Essays on Aristotle’s Physics , Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 135–157.
• Charles, David, 2001, “Teleological Causation in the Physics ,” in L. Judson (ed.), Aristotle’s Physics: A Collection of Essays , Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 101–128.
• Cleary, John, 1994, ‘ Phainomena in Aristotle’s Philosophic Method,’ International Journal of Philosophical Studies , 2: 61–97.
• Coope, Ursula, 2005, Time for Aristotle: Physics IV 10–14 , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Duarte, Shane, 2014, ‘Aristotle’s Theology and its Relation to the Science of Being qua Being,’ Apeiron , 40: 267–318
• Frede, M., 1980, ‘The Original Notion of Cause,’ in M. Schofield, M. Burnyeat, and J. Barnes (ed.), Doubt and Dogmatism , Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 217–249.
• Furley, D. J., ‘What Kind of Cause is Aristotle’s Final Cause?,’ in M. Frede and G. Stricker (eds.), Rationality in Greek Thought , Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 59–79.
• Gill, M. L., ‘Aristotle’s Metaphysics Reconsidered,’ Journal of the History of Philosophy , 43 (2005): 223–251.
• Gotthelf, A., 1987, ‘Aristotle’s Conception of Final Causality,’ in A. Gotthelf and J. G. Lennox (eds.), Philosophical Issues in Aristotle’s Biology , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 204–242.
• Grote, George, 1880, Aristotle , London: Thoemmes Continuum.
• Halliwell, Stephen, 1986, Aristotle’s Poetics , Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
• Hocutt, M., 1974, ‘Aristotle’s Four Becauses.’ Philosophy , 49: 385–399.
• Irwin, Terence, 1981, ‘Homonymy in Aristotle,’ Review of Metaphysics , 34: 523–544.
• –––, 1988, Aristotle’s First Principles , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Johnson, Monte Ransom, 2005, Aristotle on Teleology , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Kraut, Richard, 1979, ‘Two Conceptions of Happiness, Philosophical Review , 88: 167–197.
• Lewis, Frank A., 2004, ‘Aristotle on the Homonymy of Being,’ Philosophy and Phenomenological Research , 68: 1–36.
• Loux, Michael, 1973, ‘Aristotle on the Transcendentals,’ Phronesis , 18: 225–239.
• Moravcsik, J., 1975, ‘“ Aitia ” as generative factor in Aristotle’s philosophy,’ Dialogue , 14: 622–638.
• Owen, G. E. L., 1960, ‘Logic and Metaphysics in Some Earlier Works of Aristotle,’ in I. During and G. E. L. Owen (eds.), Plato and Aristotle in the Mid-Fourth Century , Göteborg: Almquist and Wiksell, pp. 163–190.
• –––, 1961/1986, ‘ Tithenai ta phainomena ,’ Logic, Science and Dialectic , London: Duckworth, pp. 239–251.
• Owens, Joseph, 1978, The Doctrine of Being in the Aristotelian Metaphysics , 3 rd edition, Toronto: The Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies.
• Patzig, Gunther, 1979, ‘Theology and Ontology in Aristotle’s Metaphysics, in J. Barnes, M. Schofied, and R. Sorabji (eds.), Articles on Aristotle , Volume 3: Metaphysics, London: Duckworth, pp. 33–49.
• Pellegrin, Pierre, 1996/2003, ‘Aristotle,’ in J. Brunschwig and G. E. R. Lloyd (eds.), A Guide to Greek Thought , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 32–53.
• Ross, W. D., 1923, Aristotle , London: Methuen and Co.
• Sauvé Meyer, S., 1992, ‘Aristotle, Teleology, and Reduction,’ Philosophical Review , 101: 791–825.
• Shields, Christopher, 1999, Order in Multiplicity: Homonymy in the Philosophy of Aristotle , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• –––, 2014, Aristotle , London: Routledge.
• Shute, Richard, 1888, On the Process by which the Aristotelian Writings Arrived at their Present Form , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Ward, Julie K., 2008, Aristotle on Homonymy , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Zeller, Eduard, 1883/1955, Outlines of the History of Greek Philosophy , rev. by W. Nestle, trans. L. Palmer, London: Routledge.

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• Aristotle , maintained by Marc Cohen (Philosophy/University of Washington).
• Aristotle , a podcast in the History of Philosophy without Gaps project, overseen by Peter Adamson.

Arabic and Islamic Philosophy, historical and methodological topics in: influence of Arabic and Islamic Philosophy on the Latin West | Aristotle, commentators on | Aristotle, General Topics: aesthetics | Aristotle, General Topics: biology | Aristotle, General Topics: categories | Aristotle, General Topics: ethics | Aristotle, General Topics: logic | Aristotle, General Topics: metaphysics | Aristotle, General Topics: political theory | Aristotle, General Topics: psychology | Aristotle, General Topics: rhetoric | Aristotle, Special Topics: causality | Aristotle, Special Topics: mathematics | Aristotle, Special Topics: natural philosophy | Aristotle, Special Topics: on non-contradiction | -->Aristotle, Special Topics: textual transmission of Aristotelian corpus --> | essential vs. accidental properties | form vs. matter | happiness | Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich: dialectics | human nature | substance

Acknowledgments

I thank Thomas Ainsworth, John Cooper, Fred Miller, Nathanael Stein, Edward Zalta, and an anonymous reader for SEP for their valuable assistance in the preparation of this entry. Additionally, I thank the twenty or so undergraduates in Cornell and Oxford Universities who provided instructive feedback on earlier drafts.

Copyright © 2020 by Christopher Shields < cjshields @ ucsd . edu >

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The Greatest Books of All Time on Philosophy

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Philosophy is a category of books that explores fundamental questions about existence, knowledge, ethics, and reality. It encompasses a wide range of topics, from the nature of consciousness and the meaning of life to the principles of logic and the foundations of morality. Philosophy books often challenge readers to think deeply and critically about the world around them, and to consider different perspectives and arguments in order to arrive at their own conclusions.

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1. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

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4. The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

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5. Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges

"Collected Fiction" is a compilation of stories by a renowned author that takes readers on a journey through a world of philosophical paradoxes, intellectual humor, and fantastical realities. The book features a range of narratives, from complex, multi-layered tales of labyrinths and detective investigations, to metaphysical explorations of infinity and the nature of identity. It offers an immersive and thought-provoking reading experience, blurring the boundaries between reality and fiction, past and present, and the self and the universe.

6. The Life And Opinions Of Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne

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7. Candide by Voltaire

Or optimism.

"Candide" is a satirical novel that follows the adventures of a young man, Candide, who is living a sheltered life in an Edenic paradise and being indoctrinated with Leibnizian optimism by his mentor. When he is expelled from the paradise for kissing a baron's daughter, he embarks on a journey around the world, witnessing the horrors of war, natural disasters, and human cruelty. Throughout his journey, Candide maintains his optimistic philosophy, despite the constant hardships he faces, ultimately concluding that one must cultivate their own garden, a metaphor for taking control of one's own destiny.

8. Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The book is a tragic play in two parts that tells the story of a scholarly man named Faust, who becomes dissatisfied with his life and makes a pact with the devil, Mephistopheles. In exchange for unlimited knowledge and worldly pleasures, Faust agrees to give his soul to Mephistopheles after death. The narrative explores themes of ambition, despair, love, and redemption, ultimately leading to Faust's salvation.

9. Essays by Michel de Montaigne

The complete essays.

This collection of essays explores a wide range of topics such as solitude, cannibals, the power of the imagination, the education of children, and the nature of friendship. The author employs a unique and personal approach to philosophy, using anecdotes and personal reflections to illustrate his points. The essays provide a profound insight into human nature and condition, and are considered a significant contribution to both literature and philosophy.

10. Walden by Henry David Thoreau

Or, life in the woods.

This work is a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, inspired by the author's two-year experience of living in a cabin near a woodland pond. Filled with philosophical insights, observations on nature, and declarations of independence from societal expectations, the book is a critique of the complexities of modern civilization and a call to appreciate the beauty and simplicity of the natural world. It explores themes such as self-reliance, solitude, and the individual's relationship with nature.

11. Demons by Fyodor Dostoevsky

The possessed.

"The Possessed" is a complex political novel set in a provincial Russian town, exploring the destructive influence of radical ideologies on society. The narrative revolves around a group of revolutionaries, their philosophical debates and their destructive actions, driven by nihilism and anarchism. The story is a critique of the political and social chaos of the time, showcasing the author's deep understanding of human psychology and his profound insights into the human condition. It is an exploration of faith, reason, and the nature of freedom and is considered one of the most significant works of Russian literature.

12. The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir

This influential work explores the treatment and perception of women throughout history, arguing that women have been repressed and defined only in relation to men. The author presents a detailed analysis of women's roles in society, family, work, and in the creation of their own identities. She discusses the concept of 'the other' and how this has been used to suppress women, while also examining the biological, psychological, and societal impacts of this oppression. The book is a seminal text in feminist theory, challenging traditional notions of femininity and calling for equality and freedom for women.

13. Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann

The life of the german composer adrian leverkühn, told by a friend.

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A sort of introduction.

"The Man Without Qualities" is a satirical novel set in Vienna during the last days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It follows the life of Ulrich, a thirty-two-year-old mathematician, who is in search of a sense of life and reality but is caught up in the societal changes and political chaos of his time. The book explores themes of existentialism, morality, and the search for meaning in a rapidly changing world.

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This comedic science fiction novel follows the intergalactic adventures of an unwitting human, Arthur Dent, who is rescued just before Earth's destruction by his friend Ford Prefect, a researcher for a galactic travel guide. Together, they hitch a ride on a stolen spaceship, encountering a range of bizarre characters, including a depressed robot and a two-headed ex-president of the galaxy. Through a series of satirical and absurd escapades, the book explores themes of existentialism, bureaucracy, and the absurdity of life, all while poking fun at the science fiction genre and offering witty commentary on the human condition.

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A novel of suspense.

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The confessions of saint augustine.

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A spectre is haunting europe.

This influential political pamphlet advocates for the abolition of private property, the rights of the proletariat, and the eventual establishment of a classless society. The authors argue that all of history is a record of class struggle, culminating in the conflict between the bourgeoisie, who control the means of production, and the proletariat, who provide the labor. They predict that this struggle will result in a revolution, leading to a society where property and wealth are communally controlled.

21. Molloy by Samuel Beckett

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22. Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis

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The histories of gargantua and pantagruel.

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24. The Republic by Plato

"The Republic" is a philosophical text that explores the concepts of justice, order, and character within the context of a just city-state and a just individual. It presents the idea of a utopian society ruled by philosopher-kings, who are the most wise and just. The dialogue also delves into theories of education, the nature of reality, and the role of the philosopher in society. It is a fundamental work in Western philosophy and political theory.

25. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn

This influential book examines the history of science, focusing on the process of scientific revolutions. The author argues that scientific progress is not a linear, continuous accumulation of knowledge, but rather a series of peaceful interludes punctuated by intellectually violent revolutions. During these revolutions, known as paradigm shifts, the old scientific worldview is replaced by a new one. The book also popularized the term 'paradigm shift' and challenged the previously accepted view of science as a steadily progressive discipline.

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“Professional philosophy can seem abstract, esoteric, and hyper-specialized. But we all ask and try to answer philosophical questions myriad times daily: philosophy is the purview not just of the expert, but of all thoughtful people. 1000-Word Philosophy: An Introductory Anthology is an open-access journal of philosophy. Its essays are introductions rather than argumentative articles. Its intended audience is the general reader and students in philosophy, and philosophical, courses. Our goal in writing and sharing these essays is to provide high-quality introductions to great philosophical questions and debates. We hope that philosophers and non-philosophers alike will benefit from perusing these essays.”

• About 1000-Word Philosophy: An Introductory Anthology

Today we will interview the editors of 1000-Word Philosophy: An Introductory Anthology ( 1000WordPhilosophy.com ), an open-access project dedicated to providing excellent introductions to philosophical issues that are ideal for students and public philosophy purposes.

APA blog : How did 1000-Word Philosophy start?  

Andrew Chapman started 1000-Word Philosophy while he was a doctoral student at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Grad students find themselves teaching a lot of topics that they’ve never taught before, and so grad students with different specialities often ask one another for a 5-minute refresher course on a specific topic. He noticed how adept his colleagues were at coming up with these amazing summaries of complicated issues off of the tops of their heads and thought that it would be tremendously helpful—for other philosophers and for nonphilosophers—if these summaries were collected and shared somewhere. And thus 1000-Word Philosophy was born.

The specific number of words, 1000, was intended to correspond with about 5 minutes of reading time, although it’s also just a nice, round number. It became apparent though that 1000 words was around the number needed to do a thorough but not overly technical or overly specific job at introducing a topic. And 1000 words is the perfect length for an essay that introduces undergraduates who otherwise would struggle with a long essay to material that is graspable in a much shorter format. That was a serendipitous development!

APA blog : What areas of philosophy do you publish essays in?

We currently have over 80 essays published in 17 categories, and we add more categories when we publish new essays in new areas. We’ve recently added the categories of Philosophy of Race , Philosophy of Education , Buddhist Philosophy , Chinese Philosophy , and Logic and Reasoning .

For a long time we’ve had the categories of Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art , Ethics , Epistemology , Historical Philosophy , Metaphilosophy , Metaphysics , Phenomenology and Existentialism , Philosophy of Mind and Language , Philosophy of Religion , Philosophy of Science , Philosophy of Sex and Gender , and Social and Political Philosophy.

Some essays are placed in multiple categories. The Ethics and Philosophy of Religion categories have the most essays.

APA blog :Who reads these essays?

Philosophy instructors, students and general readers from around the globe. We get the most views first from the US, then the UK, Canada, India, the Philippines, and then European and African countries.

Many philosophy instructors use our essays in classes: they often mention that when they contact us about submitting an essay. The accessibility level of the essays ensure that teachers can easily generate discussion, and their length means that students can read about an important topic without being overwhelmed.

From contact we’ve had with general readers, it seems that some of them have less access to formal higher education or are autodidacts. They are just interested in learning more about philosophy and appreciate finding these introductory essays.

The essays are also useful for supplemental readings, beyond the main texts for a class. So they work great for background readings, “if you want to learn more”-type readings (especially since they have suggestions for further readings in them) and readings for when class discussion goes on tangents to interesting, but unexpected, topics.

APA blog : What are some of the most popular essays?

One measure of popularly is number of views. The essay “ Karl Marx’s Conception of Alienation ” has around 70,000 views. The essay on abortion has around 35,000 views. Some of the earlier essays have tens of thousands of views.

The recent essays that address issues about race and gender have been especially particular popular, in terms of shares and discussion on Twitter and Facebook . The essay on Mary Astell , an early modern woman philosopher, was posted just a few months ago and was (and remains) especially popular.

APA blog : Who can contribute?

Nearly all of our essays are by philosophy professors or advanced graduate students in philosophy. People typically are able to develop essays packed with philosophical content, presented in a manner readily understood by nearly anyone, only if they have had significant teaching experience involving dialogue with students. That interaction allows for a better sense for how non-experts often see and understand issues and so allows an author to write effectively for that audience.

APA blog : How are the essays reviewed?

The essays are all reviewed by the editors, all of whom have contributed multiple essays to the anthology and have taken an interest in its growth and success. The essays are also often evaluated by outsider reviewers.

Feedback ranges from concerns about “the big picture” of the essay and its goals and organizations to the extreme details of each word choice: with a 1000 word limit, each word has to count: there’s no room for anything distracting or not necessary for the purposes of the essay.

We do the reviewing and editing using Google docs, which allows for real-time discussion (and debate, sometimes) on what would improve the essay. We hope that this scrutiny from so many different “eyes” results in essays that are really strong introductions to the topics for our intended audience.

APA blog : What’s rewarding about this project?

It’s rewarding to help an author develop an essay that is incredibly clear, concise, direct and vivid, so it is very easy to read and understand for anyone, including students and general readers. This format results in essays that, we hope, have a certain kind of beauty, in being so clear and direct.

It’s also a great pleasure to teach using these essays, since students are really able to understand them and access the ideas and arguments much more quickly and easily, compared to many traditional readings.

For example, one of us recently taught Descartes’ Meditations using Marc Bobro’s pair of essays ; we read them out loud in class, meditating along with Descartes and discussing along the way. In the end, students were much more able to explain the overall argument of the Meditations, compared to when this activity was done with traditional translations. For students who are overwhelmed by longer, more complex readings, this format really helps.

APA blog : What is challenging about this project?

While we get many submissions, it is a “challenge” that we don’t get more submissions. There are many skilled philosophers who could contribute expertly-done essays on important and interesting topics, especially in areas where there are few introductory-level writings on the topics. We can hope that many of them haven’t contributed only because they are unaware of the anthology. Now more of them are aware!

APA blog : What are the current goals for the anthology?

We are working to diversify the set of essays, in many ways, and diversifying the team of people working on the project. We are seeking more essays by women and philosophers of color, on any and all topics. And we are seeking essays that introduce important areas and issues in philosophy that have been underrepresented.

For example, there are calls for including “global philosophy” in courses or “diversifying the canon.” We suspect that a lot of instructors would really like to do that, but really don’t know where to begin. So we hope to publish excellent introductions to unfamiliar traditions that instructors can use to “get their feet wet,” which would then lead to learning about and teaching (and researching) more advanced sources. We have made some progress with this – with essays on Chinese ethics and political philosophy and Buddhism – but this is just a start and so much more is needed.

Although this is a globally-accessible project, it is US-based, and so we are also very interested in essays that address unique philosophical issues of underrepresented racial and ethnic groups in America, such as African-American philosophy and Native-American philosophy, among other traditions.

Finally, we have a good foundation in many “traditional” areas of philosophy, historical and contemporary, but there are still many essays needed to really fill that in. To use the page for an introductory philosophy or ethics course, we have a lot of what someone would want to use, but not everything. We are working on identifying what’s essential for that teaching purpose, but missing, and getting those essays commissioned.

APA blog : What are the future goals for the anthology?

We will always keep the material online and freely (and globally) accessible to all, but we also want to have the materials available in low-cost print book or books.

We would also like to do some technical upgrades so the webpage and essays are found by more people who are looking for this type of material. There is high demand for “public philosophy” and great introductory materials, and we need to do more so people who are seeking will find our essays and authors. If anyone can help us with any of our goals, we’d appreciate it!

Editorial Board for 1000-Word Philosophy: An Introductory Anthology :

Founder, Editor: Andrew D. Chapman, University of Colorado, Boulder

Editor: Shane Gronholz, Gonzaga University, Washington

Editor: Chelsea Haramia, Spring Hill College, Alabama

Editor: Dan Lowe, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Editor: Thomas Metcalf, Spring Hill College, Alabama

Editor-in-Chief: Nathan Nobis, Morehouse College, Atlanta, Georgia

• 1000 Word Philosophy
• Editor: Nathan Oseroff
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[…] Nathan Nobis is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Morehouse College. He is also Editor-in-Chief of 1000-Word Philosophy: An Introductory Anthology. […]

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Eminent Philosophers Name the 43 Most Important Philosophy Books Written Between 1950–2000: Wittgenstein, Foucault, Rawls & More

in Books , Philosophy | April 16th, 2018 39 Comments

Image by Aus­tri­an Nation­al Library, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Faced with the ques­tion, “who are the most impor­tant philoso­phers of the 20th cen­tu­ry?,” I might find myself com­pelled to ask in turn, “in respect to what?” Ethics? Polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy? Phi­los­o­phy of lan­guage, mind, sci­ence, reli­gion, race, gen­der, sex­u­al­i­ty? Phe­nom­e­nol­o­gy, Fem­i­nism, Crit­i­cal the­o­ry? The domains of phi­los­o­phy have so mul­ti­plied (and some might say siloed), that a num­ber of promi­nent authors, includ­ing emi­nent phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sor Robert Solomon , have writ­ten vehe­ment cri­tiques against its entrench­ment in acad­e­mia, with all of the atten­dant pres­sures and rewards. Should every philoso­pher of the past have had to run the gaunt­let of doc­tor­al study, teach­ing, tenure, aca­d­e­m­ic pol­i­tics and con­tin­u­ous pub­li­ca­tion, we might nev­er have heard from some of history’s most lumi­nous and orig­i­nal thinkers.

Solomon main­tains that “noth­ing has been more harm­ful to phi­los­o­phy than its ‘pro­fes­sion­al­iza­tion,’ which on the one hand has increased the abil­i­ties and tech­niques of its prac­ti­tion­ers immense­ly, but on the oth­er has ren­dered it an increas­ing­ly imper­son­al and tech­ni­cal dis­ci­pline, cut off from and for­bid­ding to every­one else.” He cham­pi­oned “the pas­sion­ate life” (say, of Niet­zsche or Camus), over “the dis­pas­sion­ate life of pure rea­son…. Let me be out­ra­geous and insist that phi­los­o­phy mat­ters . It is not a self-con­tained sys­tem of prob­lems and puz­zles, a self-gen­er­at­ing pro­fes­sion of con­jec­tures and refu­ta­tions.” I am sym­pa­thet­ic to his argu­ments even as I might object to his whole­sale rejec­tion of all aca­d­e­m­ic thought as “sophis­ti­cat­ed irrel­e­van­cy.” (Solomon him­self enjoyed a long career at UCLA and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Texas, Austin.)

But if forced to choose the most impor­tant philoso­phers of the late 20th cen­tu­ry, I might grav­i­tate toward some of the most pas­sion­ate thinkers, both inside and out­side acad­e­mia, who grap­pled with prob­lems of every­day per­son­al, social, and polit­i­cal life and did not shy away from involv­ing them­selves in the strug­gles of ordi­nary peo­ple. This need not entail a lack of rig­or. One of the most pas­sion­ate of 20th cen­tu­ry thinkers, Lud­wig Wittgen­stein , who worked well out­side the uni­ver­si­ty sys­tem, also hap­pens to be one of the most dif­fi­cult and seem­ing­ly abstruse. Nonethe­less, his thought has rad­i­cal impli­ca­tions for ordi­nary life and prac­tice. Per­haps non-spe­cial­ists will tend, in gen­er­al, to accept argu­ments for philosophy’s every­day rel­e­vance, acces­si­bil­i­ty, and “pas­sion.” But what say the spe­cial­ists?

One phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sor, Chen Bo of Peking Uni­ver­si­ty, con­duct­ed a sur­vey along with Susan Haack of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Mia­mi, at the behest of a Chi­nese pub­lish­er seek­ing impor­tant philo­soph­i­cal works for trans­la­tion. As Leit­er Reports read­er Tra­cy Ho notes , the two pro­fes­sors emailed six­teen philoso­phers in the U.S., Eng­land, Aus­tralia, Ger­many, Fin­land, and Brazil, ask­ing specif­i­cal­ly for “ten of the most impor­tant and influ­en­tial philo­soph­i­cal books after 1950.” “They received rec­om­men­da­tions,” writes Ho, “from twelve philoso­phers, includ­ing: Susan Haack, Don­ald M. Borchert (Ohio U.), Don­ald David­son, Jur­gen Haber­mas, Ruth Bar­can Mar­cus, Thomas Nagel, John Sear­le, Peter F. Straw­son, Hilary Put­nam, and G.H. von Wright.” (Ho was unable to iden­ti­fy two oth­er names, typed in Chi­nese.)

The results, ranked in order of votes, are as fol­lows:

1. Lud­wig Wittgen­stein,  Philo­soph­i­cal Inves­ti­ga­tions

2. W. V. Quine,  Word and Object

3. Peter F. Straw­son,  Indi­vid­u­als: An Essay in Descrip­tive Meta­physics

4. John Rawls,  A The­o­ry of Jus­tice

5. Nel­son Good­man,  Fact, Fic­tion and Fore­cast

6. Saul Krip­ke,  Nam­ing and Neces­si­ty

7. G.E.M. Anscombe,  Inten­tion

8. J. L. Austin,  How to do Things with Words

9. Thomas Kuhn,  The Struc­ture of Sci­en­tif­ic Rev­o­lu­tions

10. M. Dum­mett,  The Log­i­cal Basis of Meta­physics

11. Hilary Put­nam,  The Many Faces of Real­ism

12. Michel Fou­cault,  The Order of Things: An Archae­ol­o­gy of the Human Sci­ences

13. Thomas Nagel,  The View From Nowhere

14. Robert Noz­ick,  Anar­chy, State and Utopia

15. R. M. Hare,  The Lan­guage of Morals  and  Free­dom and Rea­son

16. John R. Sear­le, Inten­tion­al­i­ty  and  The Redis­cov­ery of the Mind

17. Bernard Williams,  Ethics and the Lim­its of Phi­los­o­phy ,  Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry  and Moral Luck: Philo­soph­i­cal Papers 1973–1980

18. Karl Pop­per, Con­jec­ture and Refu­ta­tions

19. Gilbert Ryle,  The Con­cept of Mind

20. Don­ald David­son,  Essays on Action and Event  and  Inquiries into Truth and Inter­pre­ta­tion

21. John McDow­ell,  Mind and World

22. Daniel C. Den­nett,  Con­scious­ness Explained  and  The Inten­tion­al Stance

23. Jur­gen Haber­mas,  The­o­ry of Com­mu­nica­tive Action  and  Between Facts and Norm

24. Jacques Der­ri­da,  Voice and Phe­nom­e­non  and  Of Gram­ma­tol­ogy

25. Paul Ricoeur,  Le Metaphore Vive  and  Free­dom and Nature

26. Noam Chom­sky, Syn­tac­tic Struc­tures  and Carte­sian Lin­guis­tics

27. Derek Parfitt,  Rea­sons and Per­sons

28. Susan Haack,  Evi­dence and Inquiry

29. D. M. Arm­strong,  Mate­ri­al­ist The­o­ry of the Mind  and  A Com­bi­na­to­r­i­al The­o­ry of Pos­si­bil­i­ty

30. Her­bert Hart,  The Con­cept of Law  and  Pun­ish­ment and Respon­si­bil­i­ty

31. Ronald Dworkin,  Tak­ing Rights Seri­ous­ly  and  Law’s Empire

As an adden­dum, Ho adds that “most of the works on the list are ana­lyt­ic phi­los­o­phy,” there­fore Prof. Chen asked Haber­mas to rec­om­mend some addi­tion­al Euro­pean thinkers, and received the fol­low­ing: “Axel Hon­neth, Kampf um Anerken­nung (1992), Rain­er Forst, Kon­texte der Cerechtigkeit (1994) and Her­bert Schnadel­bach, Kom­men­tor zu Hegels Rechtephiloso­phie (2001).”

The list is also over­whelm­ing­ly male and pret­ty exclu­sive­ly white, point­ing to anoth­er prob­lem with insti­tu­tion­al­iza­tion that Solomon does not acknowl­edge: it not only excludes non-spe­cial­ists but can also exclude those who don’t belong to the dom­i­nant group (and so, per­haps, excludes the every­day con­cerns of most of the world’s pop­u­la­tion). But there you have it, a list of the most impor­tant, post-1950 works in phi­los­o­phy accord­ing to some of the most emi­nent liv­ing philoso­phers. What titles, read­ers, might get your vote, or what might you add to such a list, whether you are a spe­cial­ist or an ordi­nary, “pas­sion­ate” lover of philo­soph­i­cal thought?

via Leit­er Reports

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy in 81 Video Lec­tures: From Ancient Greece to Mod­ern Times 

Oxford’s Free Intro­duc­tion to Phi­los­o­phy: Stream 41 Lec­tures

Intro­duc­tion to Polit­i­cal Phi­los­o­phy: A Free Yale Course 

135 Free Phi­los­o­phy eBooks

Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

44 Essen­tial Movies for the Stu­dent of Phi­los­o­phy

Josh Jones  is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at  @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Comments (39) |

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Comments (39), 39 comments so far.

Leo Strauss: “Nat­ur­al Right and His­to­ry” and “Per­se­cu­tion and the Art of Writ­ing”

Ryle’s great work actu­al­ly came out in 1949. I sug­gest that the fol­low­ing deserve strong con­sid­er­a­tion: Fey­er­abend’s Against Method, Gadamer’s Truth and Method, and Dray’s Laws and Expla­na­tion in His­to­ry.

I’m at a loss to under­stand how the most com­pre­hen­sive, con­sis­tent, and fun­da­men­tal­ly based philoso­pher of all time, cov­er­ing meta­physics, epis­te­mol­o­gy, ethics, pol­i­tics, and aes­thet­ics, could be left off the list of most impor­tant philoso­phers and philoso­phies since 1950. I am refer­ring to Ayn Rand and Objec­tivism.

For bet­ter or worse, Ms. Rand’s work has not been influ­en­tial with­in aca­d­e­m­ic phi­los­o­phy. Most philoso­phers would prob­a­bly regard her as just a pop­u­lar author. They would not regard her as hav­ing writ­ten any­thing schol­ar­ly on, say, ethics–her Objec­tivism, as I recall, is just gar­den vari­ety eth­i­cal ego­ism. And they would prob­a­bly not think of her as hav­ing writ­ten any­thing *at all* on, say, meta­physics or epis­te­mol­o­gy. Did she write on these? On sub­jects like the nature of prop­er­ties and rela­tions? Or on modal meta­physics, con­scious­ness, inten­sion and exten­sion, the analytic/synthetic dis­tinc­tion, apri­or­i­ty & apos­te­ri­or­i­ty, the­o­ries of epis­temic jus­ti­fi­ca­tion, con­fir­ma­tion­al holism, Molin­ist refu­ta­tions of the prob­lem of evil, nat­ur­al the­o­log­i­cal argu­ments, the nature of expla­na­tion, or any oth­er high­ly tech­ni­cal such top­ics that have been at the fore of philo­soph­i­cal dis­cus­sion for the past half-cen­tu­ry? I am not aware of her hav­ing writ­ten any­thing on any of those.

Sure­ly Ayer’s Lan­guage, Truth and Log­ic should fea­ture on the list — huge­ly influ­en­tial.

Kei­ji Nishi­tani, “Reli­gion and Noth­ing­ness” and “The Self-Over­com­ing of Nihilism”

The num­ber of aca­d­e­m­ic phi­los­o­phy depart­ments mul­ti­plied, not the domains of phi­los­o­phy, when spe­cial inter­ests or activists began to use “the­o­ry” as a means in their fight for pow­er.

That’s because she’s shal­low.

Jean Piaget and Bar­bel Inhelder, The Psy­chol­o­gy of the Child, 1950 Alan Tur­ing, Com­put­ing machin­ery and intel­li­gence, 1950 Isa­iah Berlin, The Age of Enlight­en­ment, 1956 Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, 1957 Claude Levi-Strauss, Struc­tur­al Anthro­pol­o­gy, 1959 Carl Rogers, On Becom­ing a Per­son: A Ther­a­pist’s View of Psy­chother­a­py, 1961 Mur­ray Roth­bard, Man, Econ­o­my, and State, 1962 Fer­nand Braudel, Civil­i­sa­tion matérielle, 1967 Brent Berlin and Paul Kay, Basic Col­or Terms: Their Uni­ver­sal­i­ty and Evo­lu­tion, 1969 Paul Karl Fey­er­abend, Against Method: Out­line of an Anar­chis­tic The­o­ry of Knowl­edge, 1970 Nico­las Bour­ba­ki, Élé­ments de math­é­ma­tique, 1970 B. F. Skin­ner, Beyond Free­dom and Dig­ni­ty, 1971 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guat­tari, Anti-Oedi­pus: Cap­i­tal­ism and Schiz­o­phre­nia, 1972 A. J. Ayer, The Cen­tral Ques­tions Of Phi­los­o­phy, 1973 Imre Lakatos, Proofs and Refu­ta­tions, 1976 Lar­ry Lau­dan, Progress and Its Prob­lems: Towards a The­o­ry of Sci­en­tif­ic Growth, 1977 Stan­ley Cavell, The Claim of Rea­son: Wittgen­stein, Skep­ti­cism, Moral­i­ty, and Tragedy, 1979 Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Intel­li­gent Machines, 1990 J.L. Schel­len­berg, Divine Hid­den­ness and Human Rea­son Fran­cis Fukuya­ma, The End of His­to­ry and the Last Man, 1992

User’s book came out in 1936; this list is 1950–2000.

quentin meil­las­soux after fini­tude !

That’s Ayer’s.

Meil­las­soux’s book came out in 2008. C’mon, peo­ple, read the head­line!

Ayer’s Lan­guage, Truth, and Log­ic came out in 1936. The Cen­tral Ques­tions of Phi­los­o­phy was a lat­er, and much more wide-rang­ing book, in which he actu­al­ly rejects many of his old ideas expressed in Lan­guage, Truth, and Log­ic.

Quentin Meil­las­soux, After Fini­tude was pub­lished after 2000.

Rand. Ha ha ha.

[The list is also over­whelm­ing­ly male and pret­ty exclu­sive­ly white, point­ing to anoth­er prob­lem with insti­tu­tion­al­iza­tion that Solomon does not acknowl­edge: …]

Any non-white / non male author who should be includ­ed ?

The head­line is “The 43 Most Impor­tant Phi­los­o­phy Books Writ­ten Between 1950–2000”. The list is over­whelm­ing­ly male and white because the 43 Most Impor­tant Phi­los­o­phy Books Writ­ten Between 1950–2000 were writ­ten by over­whelm­ing­ly male and pret­ty exclu­sive­ly white peo­ple. Non-White non-males are free to write impor­tant phi­los­o­phy books if they want. There’s as muc stop­ping them as there is any aver­age per­son, who will most like­ly not write one of the 43 most impor­tant phi­los­o­phy books of the last half-cen­tu­ry.

For those who would Know.

Ayn Rand died in 1983 with her phi­los­o­phy com­plet­ed but not well orga­nized in a sin­gle book. Leonard Peikoff, a stu­dent of hers, cod­i­fied her phi­los­o­phy in his book “OBJECTIVISM: the phi­los­o­phy of AYN RAND”, pub­lished in 1991. For those who would like to make their own deci­sions I rec­om­mend study­ing this book. Cur­rent­ly, Objec­tivism is being pro­mot­ed by The Ayn Rand Insti­tute in Irvine, Cal­i­for­nia.

Hi, there are two typos in the name of Ricoeur’s book (#25). It should be “La Métaphore Vive”, not “Le Metaphore Vive”.

For those who would know, adden­dum.

It occured to me that cer­tain of Ayn Rand’s talks and writ­ings before her death would cer­tain­ly be of inter­est to you. Of these “Phi­los­o­phy: Who Needs It?”, tops the list. This book begins with a talk Miss Rand gave to a grad­u­at­ing class at West Point Mil­i­tary Acad­e­my in 1974, and con­tains some 18 short arti­cles on var­i­ous aspects of Objec­tivism.

Some­what sur­prised Rorty’s Phi­los­o­phy and the Mir­ror of Nature did­n’t make it, but I guess a lot of pro­fes­sion­al philoso­phers still have some kind of grudge against RR.

Ayn Rand isn’t on the list because no pro­fes­sion­al philoso­phers take her seri­ous­ly. They don’t take her seri­ous­ly because her work is, philo­soph­i­cal­ly speak­ing, worth­less. (Her lit­er­ary attempts are also worth­less, but I guess that’s a dif­fer­ent con­ver­sa­tion.)

The prob­lem with Rand’s work is not that it’s worth­less. Uno­rig­i­nal, maybe. Unpop­u­lar, cer­tain­ly. But what philoso­phers mean when they say her work is worth­less is that they don’t agree with it. It’s been like that through­out the his­to­ry of phi­los­o­phy.

I am one of the ordi­nary type of phi­los­o­phy lovers. I think Joel has a point about the Rand crit­ics. Their rather rude dis­missal here smacks of pil­ing on. In terms of strat­e­gy it reminds me of Hobbes deci­sion to label any­thing that con­tra­dict­ed his mate­ri­al­is­tic premis­es as “mean­ing­less”. Prob­lem solved, I sup­pose, but per­haps Hobbes’s move, in ret­ro­spect, was reduc­tive think­ing which restrict­ed the field unnec­es­sar­i­ly. Mind you, I’m not say­ing Rand is a great philoso­pher, or even a coher­ent one. But, she does have her admir­ers some of whom we’ve heard from. I would think that her exclu­sion from this list of the “greats” of this 50-year span should have sat­is­fied her crit­ics.

“But what philoso­phers mean when they say her work is worth­less is that they don’t agree with it. It’s been like that through­out the his­to­ry of phi­los­o­phy.” — This is whol­ly incor­rect. An enor­mous part of the activ­i­ty of philoso­phers con­sists in iden­ti­fy­ing points of dis­agree­ment with oth­er philoso­phers, explain­ing why they’re wrong, and propos­ing alter­na­tives. This has noth­ing to do with declar­ing the crit­i­cized phi­los­o­phy worth­less; on the con­trary, the engage­ment with it shows that it is con­sid­ered to have val­ue as phi­los­o­phy; that activ­i­ty of dis­agree­ment and argu­ment is itself a huge part of what phi­los­o­phy is. Aris­to­tle did­n’t agree with Pla­to on many ques­tions; Aris­to­tle did not there­by regard Pla­to’s work as worth­less. This is how it’s been through­out the his­to­ry of phi­los­o­phy.

With regard to Rand, the dis­re­gard for her work is shown pre­cise­ly by the lack (for the most part) of this kind of engage­ment with it. From the Stan­ford Ency­clo­pe­dia of Phi­los­o­phy: “Where­as Rand’s ideas and mode of pre­sen­ta­tion make Rand pop­u­lar with many non-aca­d­e­mics, they lead to the oppo­site out­come with aca­d­e­mics. She devel­oped some of her views in response to ques­tions from her read­ers, but nev­er took the time to defend them against pos­si­ble objec­tions or to rec­on­cile them with the views expressed in her nov­els. Her philo­soph­i­cal essays lack the self-crit­i­cal, detailed style of ana­lyt­ic phi­los­o­phy, or any seri­ous attempt to con­sid­er pos­si­ble objec­tions to her views. Her polem­i­cal style, often con­temp­tu­ous tone, and the dog­ma­tism and cult-like behav­ior of many of her fans also sug­gest that her work is not worth tak­ing seri­ous­ly.”

For Those who would Know III.

Those who reject Ayn Rand’s phi­los­o­phy are the Intel­lec­tu­als, who pre­sum­ably have read it, who have their per­son­al rea­sons, and the Lay­men, many of whom have not read her phi­los­o­phy, and are recit­ing what they’ve been told.

How much bet­ter to have read it and to make your own judge­ment? Per­haps to start by read­ing her “Phi­los­o­phy: Who Needs It”.

Con­sid­er­ing life is already far too short to read every­thing that’s actu­al­ly worth read­ing, I’d say it’s bet­ter not to waste your time read­ing some­one whose work has been essen­tial­ly unan­i­mous­ly reject­ed by those trained in the field.

Rand was intel­li­gent and tal­ent­ed, but she was a crank, and her work attracts cranks. Or intel­li­gent, dis­af­fect­ed teenagers, who in most cas­es go through a Rand phase before out­grow­ing her imma­ture vision of the soli­tary, mis­un­der­stood genius/hero who has to make his (and it usu­al­ly is his) lone­ly, unas­sist­ed way through a world designed by and for the mediocre.

It would­n’t mat­ter, except that some of the peo­ple who nev­er out­grew this have ascend­ed to posi­tions of polit­i­cal pow­er in the US, where they are able put this ide­ol­o­gy in prac­tice in the ser­vice of the pecu­liar­ly Amer­i­can notion that unfet­tered, dereg­u­lat­ed cap­i­tal­ism, uni­ver­sal pri­va­ti­za­tion, and the fur­ther enrich­ment of the already rich are some­how iden­ti­cal to human free­dom as such. Rand is con­so­nant with that, espe­cial­ly for peo­ple who don’t have any real philo­soph­i­cal acu­men.

Of course, there are intel­lec­tu­al­ly respon­si­ble ver­sions of the ideas Rand was get­ting at. Noz­ick­’s Anar­chy, State, and Utopia (#14 in the list); Mil­ton Fried­man; some of Niet­zsche. Odd­ly enough, you don’t have to go to a Noz­ick Insti­tute or Fried­man Insti­tute or Niet­zsche Insti­tute to find peo­ple who take them seri­ous­ly.

I only see 31, not 43. The list stops at “31. Ronald Dworkin, Tak­ing Rights Seri­ous­ly and Law’s Empire

As an adden­dum, Ho adds that “most of the works on the list are ana­lyt­ic phi­los­o­phy,” there­fore Prof. Chen asked .….” No more num­bered items.

Appar­ent­ly some­thing should be between “.… Law’s Empire” and “As an adden­dum.….”

Thanks a lot for the list!

I’ll respond to one para­graph at a time:

“…bet­ter not to waste your time read­ing some­one whose work has been essen­tial­ly unan­i­mous­ly reject­ed by those trained in the field.”

You’ve heard of ad vere­cun­di­am and ad pop­u­lum, haven’t you?

“…but she was a crank, and her work attracts cranks. Or intel­li­gent, dis­af­fect­ed teenagers, who in most cas­es go through a Rand phase before out­grow­ing her imma­ture vision…”

If we’re going to dis­qual­i­fy philoso­phers who were cranks, I’m afraid we would­n’t be left with many (also, google ‘ad hominem’ please). And about grow­ing out of a ‘Rand Phase…”, you’ve heard of Niet­zsche, right?

“…pecu­liar­ly Amer­i­can notion that unfet­tered, dereg­u­lat­ed cap­i­tal­ism, uni­ver­sal pri­va­ti­za­tion, and the fur­ther enrich­ment of the already rich…” Ah! Now we’ve got­ten to the meat of the mat­ter. Anti-Rand sen­ti­ment real­ly stems from oppo­si­tion to Amer­i­ca and cap­i­tal­ism. That’s what it’s real­ly about, most of the time. Ask those Marx­ist pro­fes­sors how their polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy worked out in the Sovi­et Union and else­where.

re Joel Dick:

Ad pop­u­lum does­n’t fit here as I am appeal­ing specif­i­cal­ly to the opin­ions of experts, not “a lot of peo­ple.”

And that appeal on my part is of course not intend­ed to have log­i­cal­ly con­clu­sive force, but to serve as a use­ful heuris­tic, giv­en that we all have to make deci­sions as to how to allo­cate the very lim­it­ed resource of our time avail­able for read­ing. Tak­ing into account an over­whelm­ing con­sen­sus of expert opin­ion is an appro­pri­ate tac­tic for that.

How­ev­er, I am hap­py to cop to engag­ing in ad hominem dis­course against Ms. Rand, because that is the only lev­el of engage­ment her work deserves, par­tic­u­lar­ly con­sid­er­ing her own ad hominem dis­missal of the most impor­tant fig­ures in West­ern phi­los­o­phy as “witch doc­tors.”

As for anti-cap­i­tal­ism, I went out of my way to con­trast Rand with two influ­en­tial the­o­rists of cap­i­tal­ism in its most mar­ket-friend­ly, lib­er­tar­i­an form — Noz­ick and Fried­man. I don’t agree with them either, but at least their work deserves seri­ous intel­lec­tu­al engage­ment and response.

Niet­zsche is a some­what dif­fer­ent case as his work does­n’t real­ly address cap­i­tal­ism or “polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy” in the usu­al aca­d­e­m­ic sense, but he can be read in places as advo­cat­ing a kind of eth­i­cal ego­ism that you could also asso­ciate with Rand.

Niet­zsche was a much bet­ter writer, and broad­er and deep­er thinker, than Rand, of course. Rel­e­gat­ing him to an imma­ture phase that teenagers go through is igno­rant and/or dis­hon­est.

Her­bert Mar­cuse, One Dimen­sion­al Man; Mar­tin Hei­deg­ger, Die Tech­nik und die Kehre; Albert Borgmann, Tech­nol­o­gy and the Char­ac­ter of Con­tem­po­rary Life; Moishe Pos­tone, Time, Labor, and Social Dom­i­na­tion

Han­nah Arendt, The Human Con­di­tion (1958); Raya Dunayevskaya, Phi­los­o­phy and Rev­o­lu­tion (1973); Gillian Rose, Hegel con­tra Soci­ol­o­gy (1981). I was going to add de Beau­voir but her most sig­nif­i­cant philo­soph­i­cal writ­ing was pre-1950.

I just want­ed to say thanks to Niez­nany for set­ting Joel straight. Rand fanat­ics always act like she’s dis­liked because of her polit­i­cal views, yet refuse to acknowl­edge the wide­spread respect and admi­ra­tion among aca­d­e­m­ic philoso­phers for Noz­ick, who espoused quite lib­er­tar­i­an views but did it in a rig­or­ous, thought­ful, and philo­soph­i­cal­ly sub­stan­tive way. Rand was a dog­ma­tist who could­n’t write a half-decent argu­ment and who could­n’t engage with any sort of dis­agree­ment, which helps to explain why essen­tial­ly all of her diehard fans are peo­ple who haven’t read much oth­er phi­los­o­phy.

Typos / erra­ta in penul­ti­mate para­graph: ‘As an adden­dum, Ho adds that “most of the works on the list are ana­lyt­ic phi­los­o­phy,” there­fore Prof. Chen asked Haber­mas to rec­om­mend some addi­tion­al Euro­pean thinkers, and received the fol­low­ing: “Axel Hon­neth, Kampf um Anerken­nung (1992), Rain­er Forst, Kon­texte der Gerechtigkeit [not “Cerechtigkeit”] (1994) and Her­bert Schnädel­bach [not “Schnadel­bach”], Kom­men­tor zu Hegels Recht­sphiloso­phie [not “Rechtephilosophie”](2001).”’

PS: At least two of these has been trans­lat­ed into Eng­lish.

Axel Hon­neth, Kampf um Anerken­nung > The Strug­gle for Recog­ni­tion: The Moral Gram­mar of Social Con­flicts. Poli­ty Press, 1995

Rain­er Forst, Kon­texte der Gerechtigkeit > Con­texts of Jus­tice. Polit­i­cal Phi­los­o­phy beyond Lib­er­al­ism and Com­mu­ni­tar­i­an­ism. Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia Press, 2002

One of the books men­tioned I do not see with sim­ple web search­es; per­haps Haber­mas had in mind Her­bert Schnädel­bach, Hegels Philoso­phie – Kom­mentare zu den Hauptwerken. 3 Bände: Band 2: Hegels prak­tis­che Philoso­phie.

No a for no kant hegel Marx Spin­oza… I cod­go on.

No Bud­dhism or Vedic thought. This us an absurd list

Mario Bunge is one of the great­est SCIENTIFIC PHILOSOPHERS today. His most impor­tant wirk: “Teatrise on Basic Philosoohy”

Since Orte­ga y Gas­set died in 1955, and some works were pub­lished posthu­mous­ly as well, I should have liked to seen his name on the list. Oth­er names list­ed, I for my part, do not think all that con­trib­u­to­ry of crit­i­cal new thought, like Rawls for one. Orte­ga’s His­tor­i­cal Rea­son was a new rev­e­la­tion over­turn­ing Carte­sian ide­al­ism and method­ol­o­gy; and his Phi­los­o­phy paves the way for the Car­son­ian epoch, with atten­tion upon the cir­cum­stances of envi­ron­ment and cli­mate as co-exist­ing with the vital rad­i­cal real­i­ty that is the human indi­vid­ual liv­ing in hap­pen­stance. Or so I think. For me, Orte­ga y Gas­set’s works are foun­da­tion­al, no less than Par­menides, Aris­to­tle, and Descartes. Jacques Barzun, cul­tur­al his­to­ri­an and author of ‘From Dawn to Deca­dence,’ wrote that soon­er or lat­er, peo­ple would have to lis­ten to Orte­ga y Gas­set. I could­n’t agree more, Orte­ga is the Philoso­pher for the Car­son­ian rev­e­la­tion and epoch.

What is _The Con­cept of Mind_, pub­lished in 1949, doing in a list of books pub­lished between 1950 and 2000?

Also, what val­ue — or at least rep­re­sen­ta­tive val­ue — in a sur­vey that polled six­teen philoso­phers and got twelve respons­es!

All in all: this enter­prise seems a mess.

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