10 Examples of Aristotle's Contributions

Aristotle of Estagira (384 a. C.-322 a. C.) was a Macedonian philosopher of ancient Greek civilization, considered among the main thinkers of the West and whose ideas, collected in around 200 treatises of which only 31 are still preserved, have had validity and influence on our intellectual history for more than two thousand years. For example: he postulated the principle of non-contradiction, he proposed an ethic of virtues.

Their writings dealt with a large number of interests, from logic, politics, ethics, the physical and rhetoric, even poetics, astronomy and biology; areas of knowledge in which he played a transformative role, in some cases even foundational: his were the first systematic studies of logic and biology in history.

She was disciple other important philosophers such as Plato and Eudoxus, during the twenty years in which he was trained at the Academy of Athens, the same city in which He would later found the Lyceum, a place where he would teach until the fall of his disciple, Alexander of Macedonia, also known as Alexander Great. He then he would go to the city of Chalcis, where he was to die the following year.

The trajectory Aristotle's is a cornerstone of contemporary sciences and philosophies, and is often honored in international conferences, treatises, and publications.

Works of Aristotle

The works written by Aristotle that have survived to us are 31, although the authorship of some of them is currently in dispute. The call Corpus aristotelicum(Aristotelian body), however, is studied in its Prussian edition by Inmanuel Bekker, produced between 1831-1836 and many of his titles are still kept in Latin.

Examples of Aristotle's contributions

1. He built a philosophical system of his own. Opposed to the ideas of his teacher Plato, for whom the world was made up of two planes: the sensible and the intelligible, Aristotle proposed that the world had no compartments. He thus criticized the "Theory of Forms" of his teacher, who postulated that the world of ideas was the true world and that the perceptible world was only a reflection of it. For Aristotle, things are made up of a matter and a form, irremediably together in the essence of reality, and its truth can be reached only empirically, that is, through experience.

1. He is the founding father of logic. The first research systems on the principles of validity or invalidity of reasoning are attributed to this Greek philosopher, through the construction of the category of syllogism (deduction). In his own words, this is “a speech (logos) in which, established certain things, it necessarily results from them, for being what they are, something else different ”; that is, an inference mechanism of conclusions from a set of premises. This system made it possible to study the reasoning mechanism itself from the validity or invalidity of the premises. A model that remains in force until today.

1. He postulated the principle of non-contradiction. Another great contribution to logic was the principle of non-contradiction, which stipulates that a proposition and its negation cannot be true at the same time and in the same sense. Hence, any reasoning that implies a contradiction may be considered false. Aristotle also devoted his efforts to the study of the fallacies (invalid reasonings), of which he identified and classified thirteen main types.

1. He proposed a division of philosophy. In those times, philosophy was understood as the "study of truth", so its object of interest was quite broad. Aristotle instead proposed a series of disciplines based on it: logic, which he considered a preparatory discipline; theoretical philosophy, made up of physics, mathematics and metaphysics; and practical philosophy, which consisted of ethics and politics.

1. He proposed an ethic of virtues. Aristotle defended as primordial the virtues of the spirit, that is, those that had to do with human reason, which for him was divided into two: the intellect and the will. Through them, man could control the irrational part of him. These precepts would serve a whole stream of philosophical schools to come, whose division of man between one aspect rational and irrational would incarnate in other forms, such as the Christian division between the imperishable soul and the body mortal.

1. He expounded the classical theory of forms of government. This theory was taken up practically unchanged in much later centuries and underpins much of our current system of political classifications. Aristotle proposed six forms of government, classified according to whether or not they sought the common good and the number of existing rulers, namely:

This Aristotelian text and its abundant examples have served historians to reconstruct much of the Greek society of the time.

1. He proposed a geocentric astronomical model. This model thought of the earth as a fixed entity (although round) around which the stars revolved in a spherical vault. This model remained in force throughout the centuries, until Nicolás Copernicus in the 16th century introduced a model that posed the Sun as the center of the universe.

1. He developed a physical theory of the four elements. His physical theory was based on the existence of four elemental substances: water, earth, air, fire and ether. To each one he assigned a natural movement, namely: the first two moved towards the center of the universe, the next two moved away from it, and the ether revolved around said center. This theory remained in force until the Scientific revolution 16th and 17th century.

1. Postulated the theory of spontaneous generation. Perfected by Jan Van Helmont in the 17th century and finally refuted by the studies of Louis Pasteur, this theory of the spontaneous appearance of the life proposed the creation of it from humidity, dew or sweat, thanks to a force that generates life from matter, which he baptized as entelechy.

1. Laid the foundations for literary theory. Between your Rhetoric of him and his Poetics, Aristotle studied the forms of language and poetry imitative, overcoming Plato's suspicion of poets (whom he had expelled from his Republic cataloging them as liars), and thus laying the foundations for a philosophical study of aesthetics and the literary arts, which he divided into three main forms:

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