The Life Of Aristotle

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also wrote some short technical notes,
such as a dictionary of philosophic terms and a summary of the doctrines of
Pythagoras. Of these, only a few brief excerpts have survived. Still extant,
however, are Aristotle's lecture notes for carefully outlined courses treating
almost every branch of knowledge and art. The texts on which Aristotle's
reputation rests are largely based on these lecture notes, which were collected
and arranged by later editors.

Among the texts are treatises on logic, called Organon ("instrument"), because
they provide the means by which positive knowledge is to be attained. His works
on natural science include Physics, which gives a vast amount of information on
astronomy, meteorology, plants, and animals. His writings on the nature, scope,
and properties of being, which Aristotle called First Philosophy (Protè
philosophia), were given the title Metaphysics in the first published edition of
his works (circa 60 bc), because in that edition they followed ...

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thought, has more than one "reason"
that helps to explain what, why, and where it is. Earlier Greek thinkers had
tended to assume that only one sort of cause can be really explanatory;
Aristotle proposed four. (The word Aristotle uses, aition, "a responsible,
explanatory factor" is not synonymous with the word cause in its modern sense.)

These four causes are the material cause, the matter out of which a thing is
made; the efficient cause, the source of motion, generation, or change; the
formal cause, which is the species, kind, or type; and the final cause, the goal,
or full development, of an individual, or the intended function of a
construction or invention. Thus, a young lion is ...

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