Great Philosopher Aristotle Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Great Philosopher Aristotle - Essay Example Aristotle had been very influenced by Plato although he did not agree with all his thinking, such as his theory of forms. As Michael V. Wedin claims in The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy â€Å"Aristotle early on developed a keenly independent voice that expressed puzzlement over such Platonic doctrines as the separate existence of Ideas and the construction of physical reality from two-dimensional triangles.† Aristotle replaced this with his own theory of substance and further elaborated this into his theory of knowledge via his thinking on sensation and reason and the way in which he linked these properties of â€Å"man†. He also formalized abstract thought when he developed his universal method of reasoning. Not only does Aristotle’s philosophy underpin much of today’s Western thought and politics, but it also lays the foundations to modern Scientific Method. His system of inferential logic, or syllogistic reasoning, or categorical logic, has remaine d the major logical system of the Western world for many centuries. As the online Stanford Encyclopaedia says, â€Å"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.†In his Prior Analytics Aristotle says that a syllogism is â€Å"a discourse in which, a certain thing being stated, something other than what is stated follows of necessity from being so†.... Not only does Aristotle's philosophy underpin much of today's Western thought and politics, but it also lays the foundations to modern Scientific Method. His system of inferential logic, or syllogistic reasoning, or categorical logic, has remained the major logical system of the Western world for many centuries. As the online Stanford Encyclopaedia says, "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." (2) Aristotle's other achievements include the fact that he taught and influenced Alexander the Great. Although Aristotle is given credit for developing, again according to the online Stanford Encyclopaedia, "a systematic treatment of the principles governing correct inference" (2) the idea of sound argumentation existed before him. What he did that was so unusual was to "codify the formal and syntactic principles at play in ... inference". (online Stanford Encyclopaedia 2) In his Prior Analytics Aristotle says that a syllogism is "a discourse in which, a certain thing being stated, something other than what is stated follows of necessity from being so" (Aristotle 24b 18). Three kinds of syllogism have emerged: the categorical syllogism, the hypothetical, and the disjunctive syllogism. The study of Prior Analytics and of what constitutes a syllogism is necessary for an understanding of Aristotle's foundations to scientific knowledge. As David Ross points out in the online excerpt from his book Aristotle, "Whatever other conditions it must satisfy besides, science