Aristotle: the first empirical thinker?

Aristotle was born in Athens and lived from approximately 384 B.C.E. to 322 B.C.E. He was both student and teacher at the Academy, the school founded by his teacher, Plato. His own school, the Lyceum, was said to have contained one of the world's first great libraries.

Aristotle’s influence on global knowledge has been great, spanning the arts, sciences, logic, aesthetics, politics, metaphysics, and philosophy. He is considered a key mind of Western civilization and was an influential figure for medieval Islamic and Christian scholars.

In philosophy, Aristotle is considered a key progenitor of the empiricist tradition. Empiricism is the theory within philosophy that we can only gain true knowledge from the experience of the physical world which we gain through our senses.

Empiricism is one of three main branches of epistemology or the theory of knowledge.  

The other two are rationalism, or the idea that true knowledge can be gained via reason alone, and skepticism, which questions the possibility of knowledge itself.

For Aristotle, the acquisition of knowledge passes through four stages 1. We are born as a 'blank tablet', devoid of knowledge. 2 By perceiving objects in the world via our senses, we 3. build ideas based upon our observation/experience, and finally, 4. assign names.

Aristotle considered the form of a physical thing to be a combination of its observable properties as perceived via the senses. Here he differs from Plato, who believed in the existence of 'ideal forms' separate from the physical world.

Aristotle felt that universal 'ideal' forms, such as the perfect geometrical shape, were generalizations from a process of reasoning/rationalization based upon past sensory experience - derived from our experience of things on earth, not pre-existent in the Platonic sense.

Aristotle distinguished between ‘essential’ and ‘accidental’ properties of things. The essential properties of a thing are unchanging qualities that make a thing what it is - its defining characteristics - while the accidental properties are subject to variation.

The substance of each thing for Aristotle is a combination of its matter - the material from which it is made - and its form, or shape/design. It is this substantive nature that identifies a thing as being a thing - a theory known as hylomorphism.

According to Aristotle, each thing in the world has ‘four causes’: 1. A material cause, the matter from which it consists, 2. A formal cause, i.e. its design, 3. An efficient cause - the physical process by which it came into being, and 4. A final cause: its purpose for existing.