Why is it Aristotle is so fetishized by classical theology but considered irrelevant by everyone else?
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Why is it Aristotle is so fetishized by classical theology but considered irrelevant by everyone else?
wut? Aristotle is arguably the most influential philosopher of all time. Hegel and all subsequent Hegelians (including Marx) were just ripping off Aristotle's ontology and metaphysics. His Politics is still inspirational to contemporary "republican" political theorists, and in contemporary ethics he is the most influential of any thinker except perhaps Kant. 20th century philosophers inspired by Aristotle would include John McDowell, Bernard Williams, Hannah Arendt, Alasdair MacIntyre, Martha Nussbaum, David Armstrong, Heidegger, Strauss, Anscombe etc. etc.
Virtue ethics is a meme. Cope and seethe. His metaethics sucks Black person dick.
sucked at counting women's teeth too
>Hegel and all subsequent Hegelians (including Marx) were just ripping off Aristotle's ontology and metaphysics.
Elaborate on this.
Hegel's solution to Humean scepticism and Kantian antinomies was to revive Aristotelian teleology under a different guise and return to Aristotelian realism re: universals. Whenever Hegel speaks of "Geist" doing XYZ, that's in the tradition of Aristotle that universal concepts are instantiated in the particular, and same for whenever Marxists claim "Capital" is doing ABC. Hegel himself said somewhere that De Anima was the prototype for his own Phenomenology of Spirit, I think.
>T. has never read a single page of the PoS
I think you are overrating Aristotle’s influence on Hegel. Yes, the teleological analysis of the world as the coming to be of rational spirit can be derived from Aristotle’s notion of telos, but this can be applied to any philosopher who attempts it, and also it does not encompass Hegel’s system nor accounts for the modifications he makes to telos itself.
>that's in the tradition of Aristotle that universal concepts are instantiated in the particular
The problem of universals and a solution to it predates Aristotle and is not really his own creation.
But, to the point of the larger discussion, yes, Aristotle’s influence is humongous and people who don’t realize this are ignorant. His influence on Hegel though? Not that great to be saying Hegel ripped him off. That is just stupid.
>but this can be applied to any philosopher who attempts it
yes but who "attempted" that first and who followed?
>Yes, the teleological analysis of the world as the coming to be of rational spirit can be derived from Aristotle’s notion of telos, but this can be applied to any philosopher who attempts it, and also it does not encompass Hegel’s system nor accounts for the modifications he makes to telos itself.
I'm not sure what this means. My simple point is that Aristotle developed teleology and Hegel returned to him in order to overcome Kantian antinomies. The ground of Hegel's metaphysics is entirely explicable in terms of Aristotelian final cause.
>The problem of universals and a solution to it predates Aristotle and is not really his own creation.
The point is that Hegel is an Aristotelian realist re: universals. This is fundamental to his entire philosophical project. The relation of the Absolute to its instantiation in the world through things, for example, is in a conceptualisation in Aristotelian terms. That is absolutely central to Hegel's metaphysics.
And I didn't even mention Hegel's adaption of Aristotle's hylomorphism in his biology.
What is the point of this type of garbage thread? If you're going to shitpost, at least be funny.
I think more and more people are coming to realize what a dead end natural philosophy is without him. People have tried so hard to coherently excise teleology but they still can't explain what the most basic things are without alluding to purpose in some way. Think about the way so many people can't tell you what a woman is. troonyism or gender ideology is just one of the consequences of philosophy without Aristotle.
>we need to go back to a dead and buried philosophy cause of trannies
When I said you couldn't explain what anything was without teleology, I meant it. Scientists can't tell you what DNA is without reference to what it does and what it's for. This is a problem of knowledge and truth. You can reject Aristotle but the results will be ridiculous and clownish, and I only give troonyism as an example of that.
It’s not dead at all, the thomists are alive and well and the Catholic Church more or less ascribes to it officially and funds schools to study it and push it forward. They even publish papers on ai etc etc.
It will outlast post modernism
Because despite writting some valid and influential ideas, his work still suffers from the cardinal sins of philosophy: its not very well written or readable, it often lacks common sense and because of the other two it's not concise
Aquinas being taken to near scriptural levels of authority is not a good thing either
Also Renaissance Platonism is superior to Medieval Scholasticism (which was mostly intelectual dick measuring)
>Aquinas being taken to near scriptural levels of authority is not a good thing either
this is ironic as Aquinas accepted all answers by ones who came before him (or at any rate, a charitable reading of them) and apparently went out of his way to leave everything very open ended. he was basically the exact opposite of the modern thomists, he acknowledged that there were endless ways of approximating truth. it is very telling that he ended up quitting writing after a mystical experience. even in his writings, he reiterates several times that creation (not creation as an "event" but the createdness and intellegibility of things) is ultimately a mystery, as is the nature of God (of this, modern thomists seem generally aware). All in all, he was never obnoxiously assertive and never purports to give the final word (or even his own, really) on anything. He was fully aware that his philosophical acumen and aristotelianism, and ultimately language, were really just tools to "induce" partial knowledge of certain truths that could never, not even in principle, be really spelled out.
this is not to say that he was anything other than a realist, that he was timid somehow, or that tiptoeing around is a virtue, obviously. but the "manualism" of later thomism is ironic in that Thomas really never considered he was saying anything new.
One interesting "thomist" who avoids these pitfalls imo is Josef Pieper. He wrote two interesting papers on this matter which appear in "The silence of St Thomas".
It’s not dead at all, the thomists are alive and well and the Catholic Church more or less ascribes to it officially and funds schools to study it and push it forward. They even publish papers on ai etc etc.
It will outlast post modernism
It’s not dead at all, the thomists are alive and well and the Catholic Church more or less ascribes to it officially and funds schools to study it and push it forward. They even publish papers on ai etc etc.
It will outlast post modernism
>the thomists are alive and well and the Catholic Church
Hilarious.
Dingding. He's important for genealogical reasons but no one actually reads Aristotle. At most he's just a kind of idol that Thomists vaguely gesture to in order to give their theologies more credibility. "See, there's a Pagan involved, so it's not silly christcuck nonsense".
>DNA
You picked a really shitty example to defend teleology with. Anti-teleologists use DNA as the principle example of how something can be incredibly complex and do a lot without a teleology.
>Anti-teleologists use DNA as the principle example of how something can be incredibly complex and do a lot without a teleology.
What the hell are you even talking about?
Exactly what I said. DNA is one of the best examples of how something can be incredibly complex and do an incredibly large number of things without a teleology. The fact that you can't even tell what a protein will look like based on its code alone is a demonstration of that.
Why would complexity matter? You really don't know what you're talking about.
How can something with a telos do anything other than that telos? If something with a telos can do things other than that telos, why does having a telos matter?
There's no reason an object can't have multiple functions and Aristotle would never have said otherwise so I don't know where you're getting this from. You are the perfect example of how modern philosophy deals with Aristotle. Utter ignorance.
>There's no reason an object can't have multiple functions
Aristotle and Aquinas say otherwise.
>Aristotle would never have said
Aristotle says so in Physics, Metaphysics, and Generation of Animals.
>I don't know where you're getting this from.
Aristotle and Aquinas.
You didn't answer the second question btw, so I'll ask it again: If something with a telos can do things other than that telos, why does having a telos matter? If you want to concede to Aristotle being a polytheist who believed that there were multiple Unmoved Movers and that a thing has 47-55 teloses (one from each of the Gods), then I'd accept that as an acceptable answer to the first question.
why would aristotle being a polytheist matter in regards to a think having multiple teloses?
In Aristotle's theory of entelechy a thing can only have one of each Cause. Natural phenomena occur because the Gods make them occur in that manner. Because all natural phenomena occur due to divine will, they must have some input from each of the Gods, as each God is extending its will out upon the world at all times (that's a GROSS simplification but there's no point in talking about celestial Spheres and Love here). Thus, a thing HAS to have an input from each of the 47-55 Gods.
Aquinas meanwhile believed that there was only one deity, the israeli one, and that the israeli deity gave every thing a telos, and only one. His argument is directly one from monotheism, if there were multiple deities there would have to be multiple teloses because then there would be multiple divine wills acting upon natural phenomena at a time.
They didn't say it because it contradicts common sense. Let's define what a tongue is. It's an organ of the body that tastes the food you consume. This can work as a definition but it's incomplete. Let's say it's an organ of the body that tastes food and manipulates food within the mouth to facilitate chewing. We can also say it facilitates speaking. The more functions we add to the definition of a tongue the complete a definition it becomes. Do you think Aristotle would be so stupid he wouldn't recognize that a tongue has multiple functions? I'm insulted on his behalf.
If I really had to I could find the text where he talks about the multiple functions of a leg but this conversation is stupid.
>Do you think Aristotle would be so stupid he wouldn't recognize that a tongue has multiple functions?
I don't know, why don't you read him and find out?
It’s not dead at all, the thomists are alive and well and the Catholic Church more or less ascribes to it officially and funds schools to study it and push it forward. They even publish papers on ai etc etc.
It will outlast post modernism
I don't even think trannies think about trannies as much as you people do tbqh
This is just a rhetorical thought stopping cliche used by trannies to keep people from outwardly opposing their deviancy. Har har you're so obsessed just stop talking.
It's the 'tism
Aristotle is one of the few ancient philosophers who is fetishized by more than just theologians. There are plenty of secular Aristotelians who espouse Aristotelian naturalism.
Aristotle is a bad example but there are others that start to influence christian theologians and that in turn spreads to muslim ones. israelites don’t really suffer from this.
The basic problem is that the material in the bible makes no sense. It’s not good history or philosophy. Early christians are influenced by greek thinking but it is also rejected as pagan. Later they invent a cope so they can start cribbing from pagan authors because it turns out they had more relevance to the big questions from how the world was made to how to live, than the bible did.
By this point the cope is so strong Christians think they invented the ideas they stole.
Muslim theologians based all their thought on Aristotle and Plato. They didn't receive it from christisn theology.
Libtard detected
>The smartest Christian is a pagan
>so is the smartest muslim
kek
he's like the prophet of the Greeks that prepared the way for Christ
>prepared the way
this is one of the strangest christer copes... why should an omniscient God behave like the ringleader of a conspiracy? One nation gets revelation directly, the others have to be prepared for it by secret agents? Was God taking a vacation? The Greek philosophers you borrow from knew better than to make the highest God into an anthropomorphic moron; they awarded all of those more grubby functions to lesser gods or daemons.
He came up with the original mover theory of God that people love to site
Because all philosophers were religious in the middle ages and Aristotle was the foundation of all the philosophy of that time period. He is still relevant, we just don't notice his influence because of the progression of the field. Also contemporary philosophy is just useless bullshit, so it shouldn't be counted.
What is IQfy's consensus on virtue ethics? Would it be a good thing if it became a part of modern mass culture the way the stoicism, at least in its practical variant, did?
It already sort of is. "Just be nice", "all you need is love", or "don't be an butthole" are pop-virtue ethics. Virtue ethics are part of Thomism, and Wokism is a Christian heresy, and Christian virtue ethics is one of the things that got inherited.
>"Just be nice", "all you need is love", or "don't be an butthole"
These ideas may derive from virtue ethics, but they're a very bastardized and simplified version of it.
Actual Aristotelean virtue ethics may have some implications which are not quite in line with what an average person thinks. Such as: it's possible to be too nice, because excess of kindness is a vice as much a deficiency of it. Or: being a virtuous person is not an end in itself; it is only a goal because being virtuous makes you happy, or, at least, maximizes your chances of being happy. Therefore, you can't be a "cool baddie" because being non-virtuous (unreasonable, cowardly, lacking self-control, unjust) will make you suffer. Or: reason is the ultimate virtue, so "listening to your heart" as a cultural maxim is moronic. However, being reasonable is not the same as being an unemotional autist, as the virtue of reason is, again, just a way of achieving happiness.
>These ideas may derive from virtue ethics, but they're a very bastardized and simplified version of it.
Well then you're really just arguing over what the virtues should be. Also, I imagine that the required virtue-balancing calculations get too cumbersome if you have too many virtues, so virtue ethics must always be "simple" in as much as you can only have a single-digit number of virtues.
>virtue-balancing
Wokies do this, this is what intersectionality is about. You can even see more abstract demonstrations of this regarding weird edge case discussions that Wokies have like the "was Yukio Mishima (a homosexual non-White anti-Colonial agitator) Progressive?" discourse.
>weird edge case discussions that Wokies have
That's just scholastic/doxographical debate, something their Christian ancestors engaged in with as much seriousness and sincerity as someone else might follow sportsball or Star Trek or Evangelion. The consequences are real to them because to err on such questions is to be in a state of sin and separation from the academy, and the speed at which various authors and positions become unacceptable has become so quick that what used to take decades or longer now takes mere years. The pressure within such circles might even be greater than that within medieval intellectual circles. Instead of the church prosecuting you for heresy, it is a "democratized" church of other doctors in gender studies or whatever else, amplified by social media and the ability to call in cavalry, a power once limited to far fewer and less innovative persons of authority. The government's portfolio of student loans, among other things, ensures the institutions producing such priests at large will continue to do so, for we have committed our productive surplus to religious consumption, just not the beautiful and ornamental kind but rather the upkeep of monks and eunuchs and theologians
>That's just scholastic/doxographical debate
So again, they are doing virtue ethics, you just disagree with them on the virtues.
>Then why not take the four cardinal virtues as a rule-of-thumb framework?
I don't see why you couldn't.
>In this sense, wokism resembles Kantian deontology much more than it does virtue ethics - at least that's the way it seems to me.
That's a fair point, but then we get into the question of how they really differ in practical terms. When you get down to it you can make any ethical theory into another with enough word play. You could say that Wokies believe that people "have a duty to value universal justice" or equality or whatever, but you could also say that "valuing universal justice" is a virtue and that people should be virtuous. But you can only explain why you should be virtuous using some other theory, such as utilitarianism, where you're really saying that "universal justice gives you the most utility", but then something can give you utility while being bad, so you actually have to argue that "universal justice produces the best results", and so one.
Personally, I think that most people determine something as being "good" or "bad" based on weighing it according to several of these systems at once rather than choosing just one. This is why I said that Wokies "sort of" have a virtue ethics thing going on: they do have "virtues", but most people aren't following one ethical theory all that strictly anyways.
>Personally, I think that most people determine something as being "good" or "bad" based on weighing it according to several of these systems at once rather than choosing just one.
That really makes a lot of sense. On a second thought, I believe that I have somewhat confused two things: defeding Aristotelian virtue ethics as an "objectively" useful ethical theory that many people would benefit from accepting, and my personal search for a system to structure my life around. Looks like I have some grass to touch haha
Anyways, thanks for the thoughtful response. Posters like you are the reason IQfy is one of the few places on the internet really worth visiting.
>virtue ethics must always be "simple" in as much as you can only have a single-digit number of virtues
Then why not take the four cardinal virtues as a rule-of-thumb framework? I know that the specific list actually comes from Plato or even predates him, and much later it was Aquinas who solidified the concept, but the four virtues seem like the most reasonable set. And it, along with the concept of the mean and a few other ideas, would distinguish Aristotelian virtue ethics proper from virtue ethics in general.
>Wokies do this, this is what intersectionality is about.
Maybe, but I think there's a major distinction between wokism and the practical or, if you like, simplified Aristotelian ethics. Aristotelianism focuses on individual happiness/eudaimonia, which is something the value of which is almost axiomatic. Wokism strives for universal "justice" and "equality," the value of which for an individual person is far from obvious. You almost have to accept it as a dogma that universal "justice" is the ultimate goal ethics must be focused on. In this sense, wokism resembles Kantian deontology much more than it does virtue ethics - at least that's the way it seems to me.
Incorrect. There cannot be a surplus of virtue, Goodness, or truth (all one in the same), as they are what the Doctrine of the Mean arrives at.
I think simply put it's the other way around, that people who find Aristotle relevant are bound to believe in the God of classical theism ?
I know that there are "aristotelian" atheists but they are moronic boomers mostly.
Goes for all "classical" thinkers too. It's not too different from asking why the only people interested in Aquinas have a focus on theology or at least regard it as fundamental. Really you cannot take a top down view of reality (that is, a premodern one) without arriving very quickly at God.
>irrelevant by everyone else
lol ok and how so?
maybe you should respect where aristotle got you to