Atoms and Empty Space: Aristotle's Critique of Plato and the Form-Matter Theory

-Atoms are eternal and invaluable, uncreated and indestructible.

-Empty space is unlimited non-being, in which atoms move on their own due to their own weight, collide, rebound or intertwine, thereby causing the changes in appearance of things.

-The soul consists of finer atoms and belongs together with the body.

-Atoms are limited, corporeal and imperceptible.

-They differ from one another in countless shapes, size and weight, hardness and motion, and things differ by the properties of their atoms, their position and their order.

-Raised in a family of physicians, Aristotle was educated in a natural-scientific and realistic spirit.

-For him there is no other world beyond this world of individual things, and no other reality besides this one, which is a unity (of the general and the individual, of being and appearance), inseparable: it is not outside but in things.

-There is no general outside the individual.

-The first substance is the individual, corporeal and sensory substance (for Plato, the first world of ideas).

-"Dear to me is Plato..." Yet Aristotle criticizes the doctrine of ideas; the dualism of two worlds is unacceptable to him, since reality is one.

-The essence of his critique of Plato's idealism comes down to the untenability of separating ideas from real things.

-Separation creates difficulties: how to explain the connection of ideas and appearances, how to explain the influence of ideas on appearances, and how motion arises from eternal and unchangeable ideas.

-In every individual thing Aristotle distinguishes matter and form.

-Matter (material, substance) is passive possibility, potency for a perfection that becomes actual or real when it is shaped, when it takes on form, figure or mold.

-Form is that which is essential, the essence by which something is what it is.

-Thing is formed matter.

-The transition from matter to form, from possibility to act, from potentiality to reality, is motion, becoming and occurrence.

What each state holds to be just and fair, that is so for it, and for as long as it pleases it.

-In seeking knowledge, he found it in concepts, in the cognition of the general.

-He determined the essence of thought as the knowledge of the general, conceptual knowledge.

-An ethical endeavor: calm, dignified, superior.

-Works: The Republic (justice), Symposium (on love), Phaedo (on the soul), Phaedrus (writings of his mature period), Protagoras (on virtue), Parmenides (dialogue on the ideas).

-Rational and sensory cognition.

-Subsistence; he hypostatized (made independent) the ideas.

-Native of Stagira.

-Works: Organon, Metaphysics, Politics, Rhetoric, Physics.