When Aristotle was forced to flee Athens in 323 B.C., he left the Lyceum in charge of Theophrastus. According to one source, Theophrastus had fallen in love with Aristotle’s son, who had been his pupil, but Aristotle evidently didn’t consider that this time-honored occupational hazard disqualified his successor. Theophrastus ensured the continuity of the Lyceum after the departure of its founder, and its Peripatetic School of philosophers soon began living up to their name by wandering throughout the classical world, spreading Aristotelian philosophy wherever they went.
Yet it was some three centuries after the death of Aristotle before his works were gathered in the form we know them today. Aristotle’s works can be divided into two groups—those he wrote for publication, and his lecture notes at the Lyceum (which were not intended for publication). Inevitably all the former have been lost, and the only works of Aristotle that have come down to us are the latter. These were originally in fragmented form and covered hundreds of scrolls. They were organized into various distinct works by Andronicus of Rhodes, who was the last head of the Lyceum. It is to Andronicus that we owe the word metaphysics—the title he gave to a group of Aristotle’s works. These originally had no title and merely followed those on physics, thus Andronicus simply labeled them “after physics,” which in ancient Greek is “metaphysics.” The works in this section consisted of Aristotle’s treatises on ontology (the nature and relations of being) and the ultimate nature of things. This subject quickly became identified with the label that had been attached to these works: metaphysics. So this word, which through the centuries has become synonymous with philosophy itself, originally had nothing to do with the philosophy it described. Just like philosophy itself, it began with a mistake and has continued to flourish as such ever since.
During the classical era Aristotle was not regarded as one of the great Greek philosophers (on a par with the likes of Socrates or Plato). In Roman times Aristotle was acknowledged as the great logician, but his other philosophy was largely eclipsed by (or absorbed into) the evolving Neoplatonism. And over the centuries this was in turn largely absorbed into Christianity.
Christian thinkers quickly recognized the usefulness of Aristotle’s logic; thus Aristotle now came into his own as the supreme authority for philosophical method. Aristotelian logic was to remain the basis of sound theological debate throughout the Middle Ages. Ambitious monastic intellectuals indulged in nit-picking logical argument, the finest minds using this expertise to hunt out heresies. Aristotle’s theologically unobjectionable logic thus became an integral part of the Christian canon.
Yet parallel to this European Christian development of Aristotle’s thought was another, equally important, Eastern development, which was eventually to have a profound effect on medieval Europe.
During the early centuries of the first millennium A.D., the body of Aristotle’s work remained lost to the Western world. Only in the Middle East did scholars continue to study the full range of his philosophy. The seventh century saw the rise of Islam followed by widespread Arabic conquest throughout the Middle East. Islamic intellectuals quickly recognized the merits of Aristotle’s works, discerning in them no conflict with their religious faith, and began interpreting them for their own purposes. Aristotle’s teachings were soon absorbed to the point where almost all Islamic philosophy was derived from interpretations of his thought. It was the Arabs who first understood that Aristotle was one of the great philosophers. While the Western world sank into the Dark Ages, the Islamic world continued to develop intellectually. Indicative of this rich heritage are the words we have absorbed from Arabic, such as algebra, alcohol, and alchemy. But greatest of all was their use of Arabic numerals, while in the Western world mathematics remained hamstrung by the use of Roman numerals. Divide LXXXVII by XLIV, using only Roman numerals, and the difficulties of more refined calculation immediately become apparent. Not for nothing is it said that the only Roman who appears in the history of mathematics is the soldier who slew Archimedes.
In the East, Aristotelian philosophy was developed by two great Islamic scholars. Abu Aki Al-Husayn Ibn Abd Allah Ibn Sana (fortunately known to us as Avicenna) was born in Persia at the end of tenth century and emerged as one of the greatest philosopher-scientists of the Islamic world. His voluminous works on medicine were among the finest ever written, noble attempts to lift this subject from the quackery that it has never quite been able to forswear. Avicenna even attempted to remedy what he saw as elements of quackery in the works of Aristotle. He discerned various problems that Aristotle had overlooked, and even gave answers to these problems such as Aristotle might have given had he seen them in the first place. His attempts to render Aristotle’s thought more systematic are masterly and tie up many loose ends. Unfortunately much of Avicenna’s work only closed off options that Aristotle had always wished to be left open. Aristotle knew he couldn’t know everything—Avicenna felt otherwise.
The other great Islamic commentator on Aristotle was Averroës, who lived in twelfth-century Moorish Spain and became personal physician cum philosopher to the caliphs of Cordoba. Averroës was convinced that philosophy, and in particular the philosophy of Aristotle, was the real way to the truth, that revelations of belief were merely a lower form of arriving at God. Reason was far superior to faith. (It would be more than five hundred years before such heretical thoughts began to surface in Christian Europe.)
One day the caliph disturbed Averroës by asking him how the heavens had come into existence. The philosopher was forced to confess that he had no answer to this question (not always a healthy intellectual position to adopt with a caliph who employs you to answer his questions). Fortunately the caliph respected Averroës’s honesty and sent him away to find the answer in Aristotle.
For the next thirty years Averroës wrote an endless stream of commentaries and interpretations on Aristotle’s work. Wisely he never came up with an answer to the caliph’s original question: the caliph himself had already pronounced on this matter. But Averroës did advance several of his own answers to Aristotle, even providing arguments from Aristotle to support his point of view (which often contradicted Aristotle’s).
This was just the kind of approach that appealed to medieval Christian scholars, who quickly perceived its uses in the persecution of heretics. Translations of Averroës’s commentaries on Aristotle began circulating in Paris, the great center of learning at the time. But the Averroists, as they became known, soon found themselves in trouble. Aristotle may have been accepted by the church, but these new teachings of his looked suspiciously unorthodox. In the conflict between reason and faith, there could be no doubting the supremacy of faith. The Averroists found themselves facing the prospect of a heresy charge, and the only way they could defend themselves was to use arguments from the same source as their heresy—namely, the writings of Averroës.
Fortunately the situation was remedied by Thomas Aquinas, the greatest of the medieval scholars, who managed to patch up a compromise. Reason must indeed be free to operate according to its own inexorable laws, suggested Aquinas, but only from within the confines of faith. Reason without faith was nothing.
Aquinas was deeply attracted to Aristotle and quickly recognized his supreme worth. He devoted much of his life to reconciling Aristotle’s philosophy with that of the church. In the end he succeeded in establishing Aristotelianism as the philosophical basis for Christian theology. This was to be the making, and eventual breaking, of Aristotelianism. The Catholic church pronounced that the teachings of Aristotle—as interpreted by Aquinas—were The Truth and could be denied only on pain of heresy (a situation which remains in force to this day). Much of Aristotle’s philosophy concerned the natural world and was thus scientific. Science, like philosophy, makes pronouncements that appear to be the truth but later turn out to be wrong. They must be modified as our understanding of the world increases. By declaring the works of Aristotle to be the holy writ, the church painted itself into a corner (and the corner of a flat earth, at that). Conflict between the church and scientific discovery was thus inevitable. Aristotle is not responsible for this conflict between reason and faith, which was not satisfactorily resolved in Western thought until this century. Indeed, like Count Dracula it still makes the odd sensational resurrection when night returns to the world of learning. The argument raging in some of the United States between Darwinism (evolution) and creationism (the literal truth of the Bible) is but a recent example.
Despite the demise of Aristotelian thought, Aristotle himself has continued to play a part in modern philosophy. The contemporary American philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn, a profound admirer of Aristotle, found himself puzzled that such a supreme genius could also be guilty of making a number of simple errors. For instance, despite some earlier philosophers realizing that the earth orbited the sun, Aristotle remained convinced that the earth was the center of the universe—an error which severely restricted astronomical knowledge for more than fifteen hundred years. Scientific thought was likewise hindered by Aristotle’s belief that the world was made up of four primary elements: earth, air, fire, and water. Kuhn’s study of Aristotle’s errors led him to formulate his notion of paradigms, which revolutionized our thinking about the philosophy of science and had applications far beyond this field.
According to Kuhn, Aristotle was led into error because of the way he and his contemporaries viewed the world: the paradigm of their thought. The ancient Greeks saw the world as consisting essentially of qualities—shape, purpose, and so forth. Viewing the world in this way, they were bound to arrive at a number of wrongheaded conclusions, such as those which marred even Aristotle’s thought.
The inevitable conclusion to be drawn from Kuhn’s notion of paradigms is that there can be no such thing as a “true” way of viewing the world, either scientifically or philosophically. The conclusions we reach simply depend upon the paradigms we adopt: the way we decide to think about the world. In other words, there is no such thing as ultimate truth.