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Aristotle
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Ancient Philosophical Influences on Christianity: Aristotle
In this course, Professor Lewis Ayres (University of Durham) explores Aristotle’s philosophy and influence on Christian thought. In the first module, we introduce Aristotle in context. In the second module, we examine Aristotle’s ideas about causality and his concept of hylomorphism. In the third module, we look at Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover. In the fourth and final module, we consider the influence of Aristotelian philosophy on Christian thought.
Aristotle
In this module, we introduce Aristotle, focusing in particular on (i) his early life and education (ii) differences in Aristotle’s approach from his teacher Plato (iii) Aristotle’s influence and revival (iv) empiricism and knowledge (v) key concepts in Aristotelian philosophy.
My name is Lewis Ayres.
00:00:06I'm professor of Catholic and historical theology at the
00:00:07University of Durham.
00:00:10And in these videos, I'm going to talk about Aristotle.
00:00:11Aristotle was born around the year three eighty four BC and
00:00:15lived until three twenty two BC.
00:00:20We don't know very much about his family,
00:00:23although we do know that his father died young.
00:00:25Perhaps the most important thing in Aristotle's early
00:00:29career was that around the age of seventeen,
00:00:32he went to study with Plato and spent around fifteen years
00:00:34as one of Plato's most important students.
00:00:39After that, he traveled widely,
00:00:42founded a philosophical school of his own,
00:00:45and even spent a few years, no one quite knows how long,
00:00:47as the tutor for Alexander the Great,
00:00:51who would be such an important figure, in his own life.
00:00:54Aristotle is a very different philosopher from Plato,
00:00:59and he's a very different philosopher in the way that he
00:01:03writes, at least in the text that we have that survive.
00:01:06We know that Aristotle also wrote some dialogues,
00:01:11but they don't survive.
00:01:14What we have from Aristotle are documents that are almost like
00:01:16lecture notes and may, in fact,
00:01:19have been lecture notes written by Aristotle or taken down by
00:01:22students and edited.
00:01:26They're often in very complicated Greek.
00:01:28They often use a lot of very complicated technical terminology,
00:01:31and you have to work out what that terminology means by
00:01:35reading closely many instances of its use rather than looking
00:01:38for clear technical descriptions.
00:01:42So Aristotle is a hard philosopher to read.
00:01:45Plato is hard because his Greek is elegant,
00:01:49and he writes in complicated dialogue and mythical forms.
00:01:51Aristotle is hard to read because it's highly dense,
00:01:55highly technical, and not particularly elegant.
00:01:58So even in their styles, they're very different philosophers.
00:02:02Aristotle is also rather different in the influence that he had.
00:02:07He was for many years not well known, and it's only in the
00:02:11first century BC that his writings were,
00:02:15if not rediscovered, suddenly given new prominence,
00:02:18re edited, and became very important,
00:02:22and we'll look at his influence in the last of these videos.
00:02:25I want to talk about some of the most important principles in Aristotle.
00:02:30You know Aristotle from your textbooks as a, quote, unquote,
00:02:35empiricist, and that's something that needs a little nuance.
00:02:39One of the most important principles in Aristotle,
00:02:44a principle that he actually shares with Plato,
00:02:47is that human beings are fitted for knowing.
00:02:50They find themselves in a universe that they can understand,
00:02:53and they find themselves in a structured universe that gives
00:02:57itself to understanding.
00:03:01So Aristotle is not, for instance, an extreme skeptic
00:03:03about the possibility of knowledge.
00:03:07He thinks that the world opens itself to us,
00:03:09and we have the capacities to understand it.
00:03:12Because of the way that he thinks about this,
00:03:16he's very interested in
00:03:18of phenomena in Greek, phenomena,
00:03:21very much the same sort of word that we have in English today.
00:03:23The world presents itself for understanding.
00:03:27So whereas it's often said that Aristotle is more interested in
00:03:31real things, actual things in front of us,
00:03:35and Plato is interested in grand ideas hidden from the
00:03:38visible universe,
00:03:41I think it's much more appropriate to say that
00:03:43Aristotle begins with the cataloging of phenomena
00:03:47and from there makes a host of deductions and reasoned arguments.
00:03:52Plato has a vision of the world which incorporates
00:03:57all that is, all that's visible,
00:04:01but moves in slightly different ways and in different directions.
00:04:04But Aristotle begins from phenomena,
00:04:08and one of the most interesting things about him as a mind is
00:04:11the sheer range of topics on which he wrote.
00:04:15So we have texts which deal with the most abstruse
00:04:18questions in metaphysics.
00:04:21You'll already have heard perhaps about the unmoved
00:04:23mover, and we'll come back to that.
00:04:26He also wrote texts in biology about the nature and
00:04:28constitution of animals.
00:04:32Plato was also interested in these things.
00:04:34If you're a close reader of the Timaeus, for example,
00:04:36there's a lot of discussion about how the mind works and
00:04:39how the physiology of a human being works.
00:04:42It was a very common interest of ancient philosophers.
00:04:45But in Aristotle,
00:04:48there's a thoroughgoing approach to try and understand
00:04:50the nature of the phenomenal world that is in some ways unmatched.
00:04:53You really get the sense not just of the penetrating power
00:04:58of his genius but the sheer scope of his genius as a thinker.
00:05:02But is he an empiricist?
00:05:07In some ways, yes.
00:05:10He likes to think that his arguments begin from the world
00:05:12as it presents itself to us and then moves beyond that.
00:05:15But he's not an empiricist in the sense that he only thinks
00:05:19that we can have knowledge about things which immediately
00:05:23present themselves to us.
00:05:26The mere mention of the phrase unmoved mover should give you
00:05:28some sense of why that's not a particularly helpful way of looking at him.
00:05:32If we seek to understand Aristotle, however,
00:05:38I think we need to look at two basic concepts,
00:05:41and I'm going to pursue those in the next two videos.
00:05:44One is his concept of hylomorphism,
00:05:47and the second is his concept of the unmoved mover.
00:05:51And we'll see a thinker who is different from Plato in many ways,
00:05:56but we will also see a thinker who was considered in antiquity
00:06:00to be almost the companion of Plato.
00:06:04The clear distinction with which you will be familiar
00:06:07is very much a modern invention,
00:06:11and we'll need to explore it as we go through.
00:06:13
Cite this Lecture
APA style
Ayres, L. (2024, August 07). Ancient Philosophical Influences on Christianity: Aristotle - Aristotle [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/courses/ancient-philosophical-influences-aristotle/the-unmoved-mover
MLA style
Ayres, L. "Ancient Philosophical Influences on Christianity: Aristotle – Aristotle." MASSOLIT, uploaded by MASSOLIT, 07 Aug 2024, https://massolit.io/courses/ancient-philosophical-influences-aristotle/the-unmoved-mover