Aristotle - Metaphysics.

I've been tackling with Aristotle's Metaphysics lately so I decided to make this thread for others interested to participate in exploring it. Quote him, post your own comments, analyses, etc.

Even though the books of metaphysics are ordered alphabetically, I'll begin with the IV. book, the Gamma Book because in it Aristotle elaborates on the basic principle of his entire philosophy and what has become the basic principle of logic and even human communication, at least here in the West -


Stating the law of non-contradiction

Aristotle wrote:

Evidently then such a principle is the most certain of all; which principle this is, let us proceed to say. It is, that the same attribute cannot at the same time belong and not belong to the same subject and in the same respect; we must presuppose, to guard against dialectical objections, any further qualifications which might be added. This, then, is the most certain of all principles, since it answers to the definition given above. For it is impossible for any one to believe the same thing to be and not to be, as some think Heraclitus says. For what a man says, he does not necessarily believe; and if it is impossible that contrary attributes should belong at the same time to the same subject (the usual qualifications must be presupposed in this premiss too), and if an opinion which contradicts another is contrary to it, obviously it is impossible for the same man at the same time to believe the same thing to be and not to be; for if a man were mistaken on this point he would have contrary opinions at the same time. It is for this reason that all who are carrying out a demonstration reduce it to this as an ultimate belief; for this is naturally the starting-point even for all the other axioms.

On demonstration/evidence for the law of non-contradiction

Aristotle wrote:

There are some who, as we said, both themselves assert that it is possible for the same thing to be and not to be, and say that people can judge this to be the case. And among others many writers about nature use this language. But we have now posited that it is impossible for anything at the same time to be and not to be, and by this means have shown that this is the most indisputable of all principles.-Some indeed demand that even this shall be demonstrated, but this they do through want of education, for not to know of what things one should demand demonstration, and of what one should not, argues want of education. For it is impossible that there should be demonstration of absolutely everything (there would be an infinite regress, so that there would still be no demonstration); but if there are things of which one should not demand demonstration, these persons could not say what principle they maintain to be more self-evident than the present one.

Aristotle wrote:

We can, however, demonstrate negatively even that this view is impossible, if our opponent will only say something; and if he says nothing, it is absurd to seek to give an account of our views to one who cannot give an account of anything, in so far as he cannot do so. For such a man, as such, is from the start no better than a vegetable. Now negative demonstration I distinguish from demonstration proper, because in a demonstration one might be thought to be begging the question, but if another person is responsible for the assumption we shall have negative proof, not demonstration. The starting-point for all such arguments is not the demand that our opponent shall say that something either is or is not (for this one might perhaps take to be a begging of the question), but that he shall say something which is significant both for himself and for another; for this is necessary, if he really is to say anything. For, if he means nothing, such a man will not be capable of reasoning, either with himself or with another. But if any one grants this, demonstration will be possible; for we shall already have something definite. The person responsible for the proof, however, is not he who demonstrates but he who listens; for while disowning reason he listens to reason. And again he who admits this has admitted that something is true apart from demonstration (so that not everything will be 'so and not so').

How it relates to substance and essence

Aristotle wrote:

And in general those who say this do away with substance and essence. For they must say that all attributes are accidents, and that there is no such thing as 'being essentially a man' or 'an animal'. For if there is to be any such thing as 'being essentially a man' this will not be 'being a not-man' or 'not being a man' (yet these are negations of it); for there was one thing which it meant, and this was the substance of something. And denoting the substance of a thing means that the essence of the thing is nothing else. But if its being essentially a man is to be the same as either being essentially a not-man or essentially not being a man, then its essence will be something else. Therefore our opponents must say that there cannot be such a definition of anything, but that all attributes are accidental; for this is the distinction between substance and accident-'white' is accidental to man, because though he is white, whiteness is not his essence. But if all statements are accidental, there will be nothing primary about which they are made, if the accidental always implies predication about a subject.

Illogical, non-sensible consequences/paradoxes that follow from rejecting the law of non-contradiction

Aristotle wrote:

Again, if all contradictory statements are true of the same subject at the same time, evidently all things will be one. For the same thing will be a trireme, a wall, and a man, if of everything it is possible either to affirm or to deny anything (and this premiss must be accepted by those who share the views of Protagoras). For if any one thinks that the man is not a trireme, evidently he is not a trireme; so that he also is a trireme, if, as they say, contradictory statements are both true. And we thus get the doctrine of Anaxagoras, that all things are mixed together; so that nothing really exists. They seem, then, to be speaking of the indeterminate, and, while fancying themselves to be speaking of being, they are speaking about non-being; for it is that which exists potentially and not in complete reality that is indeterminate.

....

all would then be right and all would be in error, and our opponent himself confesses himself to be in error.-And at the same time our discussion with him is evidently about nothing at all; for he says nothing. For he says neither 'yes' nor 'no', but 'yes and no'; and again he denies both of these and says 'neither yes nor no'; for otherwise there would already be something definite.

From what I understand, the law of contradiction is entirely self-referential. It is its own proof . Nonetheless, it makes higher and more precise forms of human communication possible, so its practical utility is undeniable.

More and less true

Aristotle wrote:

"Again, however much all things may be 'so and not so', still there is a more and a less in the nature of things; for we should not say that two and three are equally even, nor is he who thinks four things are five equally wrong with him who thinks they are a thousand. If then they are not equally wrong, obviously one is less wrong and therefore more right. If then that which has more of any quality is nearer the norm, there must be some truth to which the more true is nearer. And even if there is not, still there is already something better founded and liker the truth, and we shall have got rid of the unqualified doctrine which would prevent us from determining anything in our thought.

Additional comment:

The strongest objection to the law of contradiction IMO is this: Reality is fluid and constantly changing, so even during the process of speaking or thinking a proposition, the reality slightly changes and thus our referent in reality is lost if we understand it in an absolute sense, because it is slightly changed. Reality is different now than it was a moment before and than it will be a moment after and stopping time is, aside from in human imagination, impossible, so this loss of referents is inevitable.

Therefore Aristotle's law that the same attribute cannot belong to the same subject in the same respect and time is, if understood strictly technically, true, but useless because we can never stop time and observe anything static, for all is dynamic and interactive.

It can be useful if we understand it is an approximation which never absolutely encompasses the real but only approaches it to various degrees.

Law of non-contradiction deals with human abstractions.
One abstraction cannot contradict the other, when both refer to the same phenomenon.

The statement "Married bachelor" is a contradiction based no human constructs, of marriage and rules having to do with human mating restrictions, and the institution of marriage.

White/Blackness is a contradiction which is based no interpreting a phenomenon in a way that contradicts itself.
The mind cannot interpret the phenomenon as being both white, the aggregate of all perceptible hues, and black, the interpretation of non-colour, the interpretation of phenomenon where no pattern can be discerned.
The pattern vibrating, (inter)acting at a certain rate, cannot e interpreted at the same time as both red and black.

These laws of logic deal with how the human brain interprets phenomena.

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Law of non-contradiction deals with human abstractions.
One abstraction cannot contradict the other, when both refer to the same phenomenon.

I dunno what it 'deals' with but it means that something cannot be and not be at the same time. It is an intuitive principle of logic that underlies reason, not an abstraction.. an abstraction from what? Like it isn't real and is only a made up human concept or something? But even such a claim like that would depend on the principle being true, or else it might not be true by the excluded middle.

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The statement "Married bachelor" is a contradiction based no human constructs, of marriage and rules having to do with human mating restrictions, and the institution of marriage.

Human constructs have nothing to do with the contradiction of that phrase. The contradiction comes from the meanings of the terms, not the practices or rituals or customs or traditions or conventions of the institution of marriage. Those things could be anything and still you would have a solid contradiction there.

It is a contradiction based on another intuitive principle of logic (law of identity). If all bachelors are unmarried, you can't be a married bachelor. Sorry. If you are A then you equal A. No ifs ands or buts about it.

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White/Blackness is a contradiction which is based no interpreting a phenomenon in a way that contradicts itself.

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White/Blackness is a contradiction which is based no interpreting a phenomenon in a way that contradicts itself.
The mind cannot interpret the phenomenon as being both white, the aggregate of all perceptible hues, and black, the interpretation of non-colour, the interpretation of phenomenon where no pattern can be discerned.
The pattern vibrating, (inter)acting at a certain rate, cannot e interpreted at the same time as both red and black.

Some might argue that the specific wave lengths of the colors in the spectrum are as they are independently of if and how they are observed. Don't see any contradiction here. They are opposites, not contradictions. A contradiction is a statement that purports to be true when it can't be true, or vice-versa.

Zoot wrote:

Human constructs have nothing to do with the contradiction of that phrase. The contradiction comes from the meanings of the terms,...

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Anyway..
The meaning of marriage is a human construct, whatever it means in whichever society.
A thing, any thing, is an abstraction which may or may not refer to a phenomenon in reality.

What is a mountain? It's made into a thing, a distinct object, by the mind of the observer which thinks of it and identifies it as certain thing. To identify is to give an identity to some thing, more, it's to create, to make it into this thing. One doesn't have to think of it as a distinct thing. That being said, we don't identify arbitrarily, we identify as would an organism evolving how the various kinds of man have evolved.

Zoot Allures wrote:

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Law of non-contradiction deals with human abstractions.
One abstraction cannot contradict the other, when both refer to the same phenomenon.

I dunno what it 'deals' with but it means that something cannot be and not be at the same time. It is an intuitive principle of logic that underlies reason, not an abstraction.. an abstraction from what? Like it isn't real and is only a made up human concept or something? But even such a claim like that would depend on the principle being true, or else it might not be true by the excluded middle.

It deals with logic. Logic is completely abstract and only resides within a mind. "Not existing" and "existing" are both abstract concepts in the human mind. Existence, being a phenomenal experience of the thing being present, cannot apply to the thing and at the same time have the contradictory abstraction, non-existence, apply to it within logical systems.
Slightly reminiscent of Aristotle's idea that a thing has a form which allows it to be acted upon in a certain way, his idea of cause. A rock has a form which allows it to be rolled. If it were a square, it could not be rolled. That which can be heated has a form which allows it to be heated, else it would not heat. Etc. A thing cannot have two contradictory forms at the same time. This is why void, or nothing, is impossibly incoherent to Aristotle. It would be devoid of all properties. It cannot be existent nor nonexistent. Not lacking or full of things. No movement, no stillness.

I got a little off track there, but it is a thread about Aristotle and it's late here.

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The statement "Married bachelor" is a contradiction based no human constructs, of marriage and rules having to do with human mating restrictions, and the institution of marriage.

Human constructs have nothing to do with the contradiction of that phrase. The contradiction comes from the meanings of the terms, not the practices or rituals or customs or traditions or conventions of the institution of marriage. Those things could be anything and still you would have a solid contradiction there.

It is a contradiction based on another intuitive principle of logic (law of identity). If all bachelors are unmarried, you can't be a married bachelor. Sorry. If you are A then you equal A. No ifs ands or buts about it.

The meaning of the terms are separate from what the term is attempting to represent?
You believe this, then?: Hot, cold. Something cannot be both hot an cold. It is a contradiction in the meaning of the words. Something cannot be both taxed and tax free. It is a contradiction of the meaning of the words.

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White/Blackness is a contradiction which is based no interpreting a phenomenon in a way that contradicts itself.

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White/Blackness is a contradiction which is based no interpreting a phenomenon in a way that contradicts itself.
The mind cannot interpret the phenomenon as being both white, the aggregate of all perceptible hues, and black, the interpretation of non-colour, the interpretation of phenomenon where no pattern can be discerned.
The pattern vibrating, (inter)acting at a certain rate, cannot e interpreted at the same time as both red and black.

Some might argue that the specific wave lengths of the colors in the spectrum are as they are independently of if and how they are observed. Don't see any contradiction here. They are opposites, not contradictions. A contradiction is a statement that purports to be true when it can't be true, or vice-versa.

Color blindness is a thing, yeah. However, the point is it cannot vibrate at two rates at one time. It cannot be two places at once. "That car is only one completely uniform color of blue and green."

As obvious as 1+1=2.

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Material cause, having the capacity to be acted upon in a certain way, in this case by an efficient cause, guided by a formal cause.

Reading this, I thought about how women might be considered valuable by their material cause. I wondered if Aristotle said the same and he did. He attributed formal cause to males and material cause to females. Found here:

Spoiler:

I don't intend to hijack the thread for discussion of this specific example or factoid though. Just a musing.

--
Edit:
I was mistaken about material cause, it is "substantial form".

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Anyway..
The meaning of marriage is a human construct, whatever it means in whichever society.
A thing, any thing, is an abstraction which may or may not refer to a phenomenon in reality.

What is a mountain? It's made into a thing, a distinct object, by the mind of the observer which thinks of it and identifies it as certain thing. To identify is to give an identity to some thing, more, it's to create, to make it into this thing. One doesn't have to think of it as a distinct thing. That being said, we don't identify arbitrarily, we identify as would an organism evolving how the various kinds of man have evolved.

That's all really neat, but my point is that the contradiction in the phrase 'married bachelor' is made evident by a rule of logic that exists independently of the terms and conditions of what A and B ever are. Read again:

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The statement "Married bachelor" is a contradiction based no human constructs, of marriage and rules having to do with human mating restrictions, and the institution of marriage.

If you take any individual instance of when there is difference in practice for both a bachelor and married man..say, the married man has a marriage license and the bachelor does not.. the confirmation of this fact would involve, again, the use of the law of non-contradiction; one either has a marriage license or not.

The series would be never ending and you could never therefore claim that the principle of non-contradiction is a rule abstracted from arbitrary, human constructs.

It was a very minor point, really.

...

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It deals with logic. Logic is completely abstract and only resides within a mind.

I'm not sure about the meaning of this metaphor "resides in the mind". Don't mean to mince words, but I need to know what you mean. Are we talking a Cartesian second substance or an epiphenomena or something anomalous? What do you mean by "in" the mind?

I would think rather that logic transcends the individual contexts in which it is operating in human reasoning.. it's not something that is conjured up by the mind when needed at any given moment, rather it becomes employed, as it were, when reasoning happens. It is foundational to reasoning.. Aristo's three formal rules of logic are not for nothing, man.

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"Not existing" and "existing" are both abstract concepts in the human mind. Existence, being a phenomenal experience of the thing being present, cannot apply to the thing and at the same time have the contradictory abstraction, non-existence, apply to it within logical systems.

So things in the world don't have the quality 'existing' or 'not existing'? There are things that neither are or are not? Things that will be, but be not?

Not sure about the last bit there. Feel free to comment.

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Slightly reminiscent of Aristotle's idea that a thing has a form which allows it to be acted upon in a certain way, his idea of cause. A rock has a form which allows it to be rolled. If it were a square, it could not be rolled. That which can be heated has a form which allows it to be heated, else it would not heat.

Aristotle inadvertently means 'reason' when he says 'cause'. These are not the same things. The shape of the rock is not the reason for why it rolls... there is no 'reason' for why it rolls because there is no reason for anything. This was Aristotle's teleological mistake. Now you could say part of the cause of the rock being able to roll is its shape, but again the shape has no investment in the movement of the rock and is a completely unrelated phenomena which happens to be the proper contingent characteristic for a rollable rock. There is a difference here.

A reason is a reason put before an event; the reason for driving fast was to get there faster.. this is a teleologically designed action, an intended action. If I get there faster, the reason was not my driving faster..my driving faster was a cause. My reason has no real causal interface with anything that actually happens.. it is strictly phenomenological. My reason was to get at the front of the line. This mental thought/event is in no way connected to physical events. It runs in parallel, sorta.

Aristotle is putting anthropomorphic purpose into nature with his four formal causes model.

I never thought of it that way.
Thanks Zoot.

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"I would think rather that logic transcends the individual contexts in which it is operating in human reasoning.."

No, it doesn't transcend where it fundamentally must reside. A human being is an organism, it calculates analyzes and reasons. A fundamental aspect of its thought is the 1/0 dichotomy of synapses. Logic is a way the human organism attempts to prune what it accepts as probable within that structure. That's why logic deals with true/false, 1/0. It's a part of a sort of mental "natural selection".

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So things in the world don't have the quality 'existing' or 'not existing'? There are things that neither are or are not? Things that will be, but be not? "

Correct, in the logical sense. Existence in the logical (dualistic 1/0, it exist or it doesn't) sense is a human concept. It's a hypostatization or reification. Reality is in flux. (Note the origins of a belief in flux would likely come from a distrust of our own faculties, spurred by the encountering of paradoxes.) The noumena the human mind interacts with is like making a map, like Baudrillard's map in the first 5 or 10 pages of his book Simulacra and Simulation, where you replicate some area or process of reality so accurately that whatever you do to the map is what would happen if you did it in the phenomenal world. Humans do this in their heads, to subject it to reason or experimentation. Except humans don't make perfect representations - they do try, though.

As for Aristotle, I'm not trying to defend his causality so much. I can't be bothered to interpret what you said of it and engage in an argument about his causality right now. Whatever you said of it may be right.

As for what "mind" I am talking about the physical human brain. Logic is the "software", memory the "hard drive", grey matter the "cpu" and it performs the softwares calculations upon the memory (white matter). As to the metaphysical explanation of how this process is performed precisely, I'd like to know, but I don't. These are my estimations.

Zoot wrote:

That's all really neat, but my point is that the contradiction in the phrase 'married bachelor' is made evident by a rule of logic that exists independently of the terms and conditions of what A and B ever are.

It doesn't matter what 'married' and 'bachelor' means but it's a contradiction because of logic?
I don't even see why 'Married bachelor.' needs to be a contradiction. If I call someone a married bachelor it could mean that I am saying he is married on paper but lives the life of a bachelor.

It's like with math - In the real world a phenomenon needs to be abstracted and if the abstraction is done poorly or the mathematician doesn't get what it's about the result won't be helpful in reality even if the logical operations were flawless.

Slaughtz that pic explaining Aristotle's tetracausality is great - that was what I intended to post after I post the law of excluded middle.

But feminist interpretations of Aristotle? Get out of here with that shit

This may be the quote you were looking for:

Aristotle wrote:

But he agreed with the Pythagoreans in saying that the One is substance and not a predicate of something else; and in saying that the Numbers are the causes of the reality of other things he agreed with them; but positing a dyad and constructing the infinite out of great and small, instead of treating the infinite as one, is peculiar to him; and so is his view that the Numbers exist apart from sensible things, while they say that the things themselves are Numbers, and do not place the objects of mathematics between Forms and sensible things. His divergence from the Pythagoreans in making the One and the Numbers separate from things, and his introduction of the Forms, were due to his inquiries in the region of definitions (for the earlier thinkers had no tincture of dialectic), and his making the other entity besides the One a dyad was due to the belief that the numbers, except those which were prime, could be neatly produced out of the dyad as out of some plastic material. Yet what happens is the contrary; the theory is not a reasonable one. For they make many things out of the matter, and the form generates only once, but what we observe is that one table is made from one matter, while the man who applies the form, though he is one, makes many tables. And the relation of the male to the female is similar; for the latter is impregnated by one copulation, but the male impregnates many females; yet these are analogues of those first principles. (Aristotle's Metaphysics, Alpha book)

I was mistaken earlier about material cause. Instead I meant the substantial form.

Thomas Pyne wrote:

For substances, their substantial form is the cause of their powers to act, be acted upon, everything that can happen to it.

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Also, thanks Arbiter. Source material is superior and I can see why it is called an interpretation book that I referenced. Instead of applying the scholastic rule of generous interpretation, it was probably dedicated to performing the opposite. Regardless, it is simply what I managed fo find. It wasn't ideal for me, either.

"Ought implies Can" is encompassed in Aristotle's metaphysics of substance. That is, that a thing's form will determine what can or cannot influence it.