6. Aristotle's Understanding of Reality

so this is the first video on our stott l and it is all about his understanding of reality our stott all argued for empiricism which if you remember is the belief that knowledge is gained via sense experience of the physical or the material world our subtle is often interpreted as having a correspondence theory of truth this means that when our understanding corresponds identically to an object we have knowledge of it when it corresponds poorly we only have opinion so if the idea I have in my head of the horse I'm looking at is exactly identical

to the horse I'm looking at then I have knowledge unlike Plato Aristotle rejected rationalism as the basis for knowledge he argued that the changeable physical world could be the object of knowledge and he rejected along with that rationalism Plato's particular idea of rationalism which was innate rationalism the idea that we have within us some truths that we learned in some prior existence he rejected therefore also the realm of forms as superfluous because we don't need it as an explanation we don't need to rely on reason to acquire knowledge instead he argued that we have an

innate capacity to perceive and that everything you know comes from perception of the physical world knowledge gained empirically in this way via sense experience is called a posteriori knowledge Aristotle argued that even our most basic first principles come from experience things like mathematical and logical truths and that includes as well our understanding of universals and abstract ideas like a perfect triangle the general idea of what it is for a horse to be a horse those things that Plato tried to explain using the forms Aristotle argued that knowledge is best achieved through careful observation and then

through collaborating our observations with those of others he said an individual contributes little or nothing to the inquiry but a combination of all conjectures results in something considerable one of Aristotle's most important observations about the physical world was that everything has a purpose and the word for this is Tilos the exam board the OCR exam board point II to understand Aristotle's theory in terms of teleology teleology means the study of purpose and Aristotle used healy ology as a way of understanding the world so he believed that everything has a purpose an end or goal referring

to this as the Telos or the why other thing he said it is that for the sake of which a thing is done and he gives some examples including health which he said is the cause of walking about or in other words the purpose of walking about he gave other examples including actions Arts and Sciences he said there ends also are many the end of medical art for example is health that of shipbuilding a vessel that of strategy victory and that of economics wealth Aristotle argued that everything has it he loss from actions to people

as well as objects he believed that to know something fully we need to understand its purpose and the purpose of a thing determines what that thing is like its nature or its essence in other words the Y is reducible finally to the definition Aristotle argued that how effectively something fulfills its Telos determines its goodness so the more effectively it fulfills its purpose the better it is so we can look at lots of examples of this in the natural world we've seen Aristotle's example of walking for the sake of health one example from the natural world

is a Viper a Vipers tail looks very much like a spider and it runs the tail along the rocks where it's camouflaged to attract birds that it learns in as prey and when the bird comes close enough to try and eat to what looks like a spider the snake pounces on the bird and eats it so we could say that the Vipers tail has the T loss of luring prey it has the purpose of attracting things for the snake to eat from his observations of things having a purpose or a T loss Aristotle concluded that

everything has a purpose or a t loss so he moves from looking at several examples to generalizing to all examples and this process is what we call the process of in duck where you move from one observation or a few observations to generalizing that all similar things will be like that as well the method of induction can be explained in this way all observed a are B therefore all a are B for example we might observe some swans and say all observed swans are white therefore we conclude that all swans are white Aristotle argued that

having a Tilos doesn't imply a mind or an intention so he's not saying that someone created all these natural things so that they had these purposes or ends he's just observing that that is the way that things are everything does have an end and that the end is what makes it truly itself this video has been brought to you by jest education thank you for watching and please subscribe to find out more