Aristotle Philosophy Aristotle, born in the year 384 B.C.E in Stagirus Greece, is known as one of the greatest thinker of ancient times. At the age of 18 he joined Plato’s academy and stayed there until he was 37.However following Plato’s death, Aristotle began to read more empirical books and shifted from Platonism to empiricism. His main belief was that all of people’s concepts and all of their knowledge were ultimately based on perception. Aristotle’s views on natural sciences, including philosophy of the mind, body, sensory experience, memory, physics, and biology represent the groundwork underlying many of his works. When it came to physics, Aristotle believed that there were 5 elements in the universe. They are earth, water, fire, air, and aether. He says aether is the divine substance that makes up the heavenly spheres and heavenly bodies (stars and planets). He says that all of these elements have a certain spot in nature and all that is earthly moves toward the center of the universe. If any of the elements move out of place, they will naturally move back to where they were. He also suggested that the reason anything can happen is because of four different types of simultaneously active causal factors. Those four factors are material cause, formal cause, efficient cause, and final cause. Using these he says things can be caused by other things. One of them is the beginning of the change and the other is the goal. When it comes to metaphysics, Aristotle defines metaphysics as "the knowledge of immaterial being.” He refers to metaphysics as "first philosophy". When thinking about metaphysics, Aristotle comes to the conclusion particular substance is a combination of both matter and form. He distinguishes the matter of the substance as the substratum (stuff it’s composed of). This means the matter that makes up an object has the potential to be that object and the making of the object and the form of the final object are actualities. He says matter and form are the same. He thought that everything had a universal form either in particular or universal form. Aristotle also believed, unlike his teacher Plato, that if a universal exists, either as a particular or a relation, then there must have been, must be currently, or must be in the future, something on which the universal can be predicated. He also thought that the location of the universal was different from his teachers. Aristotle thought that the universal was located within the form itself.
Aristotle believed that memory was the ability to hold a perceived experience in your mind and to have the ability to distinguish between the internal “appearance” and an occurrence in the past. Which means a memory is a basically a mental picture.
