Online History About Many Years AGO

Anaxagoras, Science and Philosophy

Anaxagoras has been described as the first scientist. He was born a Persian subject in Asia Minor, around 500 BC -- the first of a wave of Greek intellectuals who migrated to Athens. There he pursued his interest in philosophy, lectured students and gave laboratory demonstrations. He is reported to have conducted experiments and to have tested hypotheses -- an advance over merely applying one's imagination to the struggle to understand. He wrote theories on physics. Having learned about meteorites he described the sun and moon as fiery stones. He saw the moon as having mountains, and he attempted describe scientifically the solar and lunar eclipses that for millennia had frightened people.

In pondering connections in nature, Anaxagoras drew on the belief of philosophers before him that change is the result of an interaction among opposites. Anaxagoras discovered that air tends to rise above solids, and he described air as a gas, which he saw as consisting of material particles too small to be visible. He believed in infinity, and he speculated that matter too small to see is infinitely numerous and distributed in all things, that all objects, including the human body, consist of invisible minutiae with differences in appearance being the result of differences in preponderance.

Anaxagoras believed that mind was mixed with materiality but that it was the finest substance, and he believed that unlike everything else the substance that was mind remained disconnected from other substances. His word for the substance of mind was nous, and he theorized that mind was the first cause of all motion, change and order. Nous was for Anaxagoras, God.

Athens had conservatives who disliked Anaxagoras' view of the cosmos and his impiety toward traditional gods. Among city officials were those who managed the city's religious festivals and made sacrifices to the gods before each official action. They had a tradition of punishing those they thought guilty of impiety. They accused Anaxagoras of atheism, and they associated his impiety with disloyalty toward the city. And they disliked Anaxagoras for having sympathized with Persia years earlier. Anaxagoras was a friend of Pericles, who had been one of his students. But being a friend of Pericles was no protection from the courts of Athens. Before the beginning of the Great Peloponnesian war, the city fathers sought to protect their city from disloyalty, and they forbid the teaching of Anaxagoras' opinions and outlawed the teachings of others on astronomy and meteorology. They drove both Anaxagoras and the musician Damonides into exile, and Anaxagoras returned to Asia Minor, where he taught until he died in 428.
Protagoras and other Sophists

Among the Greeks the worship of Homer's gods dominated, but secularism had developed in education -- while among most other civilized people education remained the function of priests. Among the Greeks, teachers called Sophists had appeared who were willing to fill the demand among youths for instruction on becoming a lawyer or success in politics. These youths wanted training in rhetoric -- in the forceful presentation of a point of view. The Sophists also taught grammar, mathematics, physics, political philosophy and literary analysis. They tended to see humanity as a part of nature. Many of them questioned myths about the gods, and many of them believed that morality was learning how to get along with others rather than a matter of pleasing the gods. Some among them spread Heraclitus' ideas about conflict and the inevitability of wars, and some claimed that right lay with whichever people were stronger militarily, while other Sophists advocated peace, tolerance and understanding.

Outstanding among the Sophists was Protagoras from Thrace, who moved to Athens in 445. Like Anaxagoras he became a friend of Pericles. Drawing from his travels, Protagoras' position on foreign people was advanced for his time: he spoke of peoples from different areas of the world as sharing a common humanity. He claimed that by criticizing tradition and eliminating customs derived from “barbarian times” people could create better societies. Like many other Sophists, Protagoras believed in democracy. In the place of the rule of gods and their representatives, he advocated laws made by and for people. He lectured that people became good citizens not by obedience to authority but by learning what is just and right. Believing that people were dependent on what they learned and on their own will, he claimed that "man is the measure of all things."

Like Anaxagoras, Protagoras believed in acquiring truth through sense perception. But, limited by the age in which he lived he was not much of a psychologist or epistemologist: he failed to distinguish between perception and knowledge, as if knowledge does not require organizing the impressions one gathers through one's senses.

During the Great Peloponnesian War city officials in Athens restricted what could be taught, and Protagoras defied the repression. At the home of the famous poet and playwright Euripides he read aloud from his book and claimed that gods were the figments of people's imaginations. City officials put him on trial. In their drive against atheism and other thoughts they considered dangerous they had books burned -- the first known official book burning. Then Protagoras was sent into exile, and he was lost at sea.
Thucydides, Journalism and History

During the Peloponnesian war a new contribution was made to writing by a man named Thucydides, who surpassed Herodotus in recording events with precision and impartiality. He was an Athenian from a wealthy family and had been educated in rhetoric and philosophy. He was twenty-nine when the Great Peloponnesian War erupted in 431 BCE. He was made a general. And, in 424, he was ordered to relieve the city of Amphipolis, which was under siege by the Spartans. He blundered, was recalled, was put on trial, and was exiled until the end of the war. Meanwhile, he made a record of the course of the war, creating his masterpiece, The History of the Peloponnesian War. His purpose, he claimed, was not to win applause but to benefit posterity. He hoped that an accurate portrayal of events would help people avoid mistakes of the past.

Thucydides saw both strengths and weaknesses in Athenian democracy and in Sparta's society, but he favored the democracy of Athens -- and he favored unity among the classes. He was a moderate democrat who complained that people too often put revenge above agreements that would benefit all. He pleaded for cooperation among Greeks and favored an increase in interstate obligations.

Some would call Thucydides the first real journalist and historian. More than Herodotus he described events without interventions by the gods. He believed that people acted according to self-interest and social circumstances rather than divine guidance. He practiced journalism with a skeptical mind, giving importance to conflict between people. He was obsessed with methodology and more concentrated in his writing than was Herodotus. By sticking to observation and the speeches of participants in the war he described the war with both drama and a great degree of objectivity. He discarded poetry in favor of the precision of prose, acknowledging that his prose would have less appeal. He tried to clarify issues with lengthy descriptions, and in expressing complexity he molded the Greek language into more mature forms.
Hippocrates, the Father of Medicine

During the Great Peloponnesian War some people continued to advance human awareness. Among them was Hippocrates, who lived from 460 to 377. Hippocrates was the son of a priest-physician from the Greek island of Cos. Believing in investigation as had Anaxagoras, Hippocrates revolted against medicine tied to religious dogma -- medicine that attempted to cure by use of charms, amulets and incantations. He ridiculed, saying that people thought epilepsy divine because they did not understand it. He believed that diseases are subject to nature's laws. He wanted health care to be built upon observation. He sought to improve diagnoses by examining symptoms. Seeing the human body as influenced by materiality as opposed to spirit, he advocated principles of public health, including building a patient's strength by a good diet and by hygiene. And, recognizing the damage that could be done through acting on ignorance, his first rule was do no harm.
Democritus and Atom Theory

One of Hippocrates' contemporaries was Democritus, a Greek from Thrace. Democritus added to Anaxagoras' view of gas as matter too small to be visible. He constructed a rival theory of division between things in materiality while pondering the problem of density. An apple, he reasoned, can be divided with a knife because it has air in it. He labeled as an atom that which had no air, that which is too dense to be cut, that which is the smallest and most dense of matter. Democritus theorized that atoms collide and combine with each other and that in combining they create visible substance. Like Heraclitus, he believed that some things are developing and other things decaying. He believed that heavenly bodies sometimes collide with each other and that the Milky Way consists of unresolved stars.

Unlike those influenced by Pythagoras, Democritus believed that a word is a conventional label rather than a perfect embodiment of a god-created idea or substance. Unlike Pythagoras, Democritus believed that sense perception is not just illusion. He believed that humans were capable of an awareness of matters outside themselves. And looking at the relationship between the human body and the human mind, he decided that human flesh, bones and bodily fluids are elements found elsewhere in nature, that the human brain is functioning matter, that people are matter organized in a way that allows them awareness and self-directed movement.
Socrates

What we know about Socrates is what his contemporaries -- mainly his student Plato -- wrote about him. Early in the Peloponnesian War, when Socrates was in his late thirties, he was an Athenian infantryman, and he fought in a few of the minor battles that Athens fought on land. He was recognized for his courage in battle and for his ability to endure the hardships of heat and cold, hunger and thirst. After his service in the military, Socrates devoted his life to truth, beauty and justice -- in a world he found filled with wrongdoing, confusion and ugliness. He did what philosophers: he examined how people think. Applying this to himself he might have said "know thyself. How much he questioned himself is open to question. He is more known for questioning others. He studied the art of debate and became a master at cross-examination and irony. He became a teacher, mainly of the sons of aristocrats, and without asking for money. Like the Sophists he questioned assumptions about religion and ethics.

Socrates took oracles seriously, but he did not worship the traditional gods of the Greeks -- the gods of Homer. Like Xenophanes, he believed that these gods were no guides for morality. Instead of the chaos created by the conflicting passions of these gods, Socrates believed that the universe was guided by a god with a sense of purpose, a God that was mind, as described by Anaxagoras - a god that was the source of human consciousness and morality. And Socrates is described as hearing an inner voice that he believed was God's.

Socrates' main interest was ethics. Believing in goodness created by God he believed that people needed merely to match that goodness. Socrates believed that knowledge and obedience to truth improved one's soul and diminished the ungodliness of wrongdoing, confusion and ugliness. To help people gain knowledge and improve their soul he tried to expose their ignorance and mistaken reasoning, and he often started with the question whether they understood what they were talking about.

This did not prevent Socrates from forming opinions of his own that can be considered dubious. According to Xenophon, Socrates called people fools for studying the mechanics of nature -- the wind, rain, physics. Nature, Socrates believed, was part of the divine and one could approach the divine only through a sufficient knowledge of the human mind. The study of natural phenomena, Socrates believed, produced nothing practical.

In the market place, where Socrates often argued, he must have annoyed many people with his persistent and seemingly pointless questioning. To many of those in his city of Athens he was a foolish babbler. The Athenian playwright Aristophanes made Socrates a subject in his play, The Clouds. In this play, a philosopher's meeting place burned, which the audience was supposed to enjoy and to care little if Socrates burned with it.

Socrates' view that no one knowingly did wrong was part of the naïveté of his time. Human psychology had not yet become a disciplined study. Similar to others of his time, Socrates believed that truth was absolute rather than gained through approximation. But it is said that Socrates contributed to philosophy by his searching for truth through questioning and uncovering contradictions and by his championing moral responsibility.

Socrates is not known to have been politically active. He is not known to have spoken in favor or against the murderous Spartan supported oligarchy that took power at the end of the Peloponnesian War, and he is not known to have spoken in favor of or against the pro-democracy regime of moderate conservatives and democrats that replaced that oligarchy. But perhaps because Socrates had associated with many of the aristocrats who had supported the oligarchy, or because many of his students had been against democracy, some members of the pro-democracy regime held him suspect. Some members of the pro-democracy regime believed that Socrates was hostile to them and that he believed they were immoral. These were times when people had been made nervous by civil strife and bloodshed and by attacks on traditional beliefs. Believing that Socrates was a danger to their democratic regime, leaders of the new democrat regime had him arrested. They believed in the traditional gods of Athens, and they charged him with not believing the gods of the state, with introducing new gods and with corrupting young people with his talk.

In court, Socrates admitted that he did not believe in the gods of the state. He said that he had not intentionally corrupted Athenians, and he told the court that rather than prosecute him the honorable jurors should tell him what course of thought was correct. The court was not amused. The court was telling Socrates clearly enough that he should desist from maligning the city's gods. This was the charge against him, and the court found Socrates guilty and suggested a sentence of death. If Socrates had requested a reasonable lesser sentence, as was the custom in Athens, he would have given the court an opportunity to reduce his sentence. Instead, he shocked the court with his defiant announcement that instead of being sentenced he should be praised as a public benefactor. So the death sentence stood.

According to Plato, Socrates announced that he honored and loved the men of Athens and that he would never abandon philosophy. As ordered by the court, Socrates drank the poison hemlock and died. Then, because of the public hostility against those perceived as supporters of oligarchy and the as enemies of the pro-democratic regime, friends of Socrates and others who felt endangered fled into exile.
Plato

Plato was among those who fled Athens following Socrates' death. He was twenty-seven then and perhaps among those Athenians who blamed democracy for having created the Peloponnesian War. At least he saw democracy as having contributed to Athens' defeat, and he was among those who wished for a government wiser than that which had arisen from the Athenian multitude.

Like Socrates, Plato was dissatisfied with the world that had unfolded around him, but rather than see remedy only in individuals improving themselves, as Socrates seemingly did, Plato saw remedy in new institutions. He searched his imagination for an ideal society, one strong enough to win wars, a society able to provide a livelihood for its people, a society free of what he saw as the self-serving individualism and commercialism of Athens, and a society unified by a harmony of interests.
Plato's Republic

Plato perceived the ideal society as a city-state of no more than 20,000 people, ruled by an elite. He wanted something better than the kind of rule that had existed among the Spartans and societies with aristocracies, and looking into the past he saw that societies led by aristocrats could degenerate and that some aristocrats were unfit for leadership. He wrote a work entitled The Republic, imagining a society with a ruling elite made up of men of learning, men who could pass their status to their sons but who would lose that status if their peers decided that they were unfit, and men who would admit to their ranks only those who had developed into sound philosophers. Plato imagined a society without the weaknesses of rule by inheritance and the weakness of leadership chosen by the multitude. Like Solon and others, Plato thought of justice as harmony emanating from godliness. He believed that philosophers who understood the harmony of all parts of the universe were closest to God and that only they were capable of creating a harmonious and just society. These philosophers, he believed, would agree and get along with each other with equal harmony rather than break into hostile factions.

Plato believed that his ruling elite had to be free from labor so they could specialize in philosophy. Under his ruling elite Plato invented a second class of citizens and a third class. The second class were the warriors, who were to be free from ordinary labors so they could train to become as highly skilled in combat as possible -- as with Sparta's warriors before Sparta's fall. And the third class was to those who labored.

Plato wished his ruler-philosophers to be unconcerned with possessions. He wished that they be interested in harmony and justice only. The best men, he believed, serve society out of devotion rather than for pay. Therefore, he believed, the ruling elite should share rather than compete for possessions.

As for women, Plato believed they were equal to men in many ways, that they had philosophic capacities and were capable of virtue, that a mentally accomplished female was superior to a mentally incompetent male. He approved of the greater respect and freedom for women that he had seen among the Spartans. He thought it best that men rule, but he believed that women should be free rather than possessed by men. He believed that the harmony that was essential to his utopia would be best served by his ruler-philosophers and their women associates and children living as one large family, the men and women coupling freely with whomever they pleased.
Idea, God and Love

Plato followed his teacher Socrates in devotion to philosophy, and like Socrates he was concerned with godly perfection, but unlike Socrates he attempted to express a coherent view of reality. Plato rejected the views of Heraclitus that reality was a process, and he rejected Heraclitus' belief in evolution. Plato rejected the atomism of Democritus. He believed in the same absolute truth that Socrates believed in. Like Pythagoras, he believed in perfection and saw perfection in mathematics. He believed in perfect reason and that the mind was located in the head because the head was round and roundness was the perfect shape and therefore the appropriate place for reason. As had Pythagoras, Plato looked to the heavens and speculated in astronomy. Unaware of asteroids, other chaos and the imperfect shapes of solar bodies that modern astronomers would know of, he believed that the perfection he and Pythagoras saw in mathematics existed in the heavens. He believed that the heavens consisted of perfect spheres and circles. Like Pythagoras, he made harmony fundamental to his philosophy. He sought what Pythagoras had described as the permanence that lay behind the flux and chaos of appearances, and he saw abstractions as real and permanent and the changing world known through the senses as illusion -- a view of the senses that could be found in Hinduism. In his Vision of Er the Pamphylian, Plato displayed familiarity with Hindu doctrines.

Rather than being concerned with the mechanics of work and manipulation that would help give rise to science, Plato remained concerned with the world of spirit and the perfection of the heavens. According to Plato, a person as a material being develops and dies while his soul remains eternal. He believed that a person's soul has its rational side and its irrational side, that on one side was mind and the ability to reason and on the other side was desire - what some would call impulse. Plato believed that a person served his or her soul by denying oneself the bodily desires of the material world. He believed that the part of the soul that was mind survived death while desire did not.

Plato believed that the wise loved beauty in the abstract more than they loved specific, material things. He believed in love that begins as a lowly specific and perhaps as a carnal and amorous experience, a love that a good person turns into spirituality by comprehending it as an abstraction. As an abstraction, he believed, a lowly experience could be elevated to a pure form of beauty, to perfection -- to an ideal. At this level, he believed, love and beauty motivated one to beneficent deeds.

Believing in harmony, Plato, like Socrates, disliked Homer's description of gods engaging in deceptions, quarrels, adultery and violence. According to Plato, Zeus was absolute, eternal, infinite and harmonious. He believed that Zeus was the ultimate source of all idea, that Zeus embodied universal mind, in other words that Zeus was ultimate soul. Seeing philosophy as the highest of pursuits, he believed that one should approach Zeus through reason and by grasping harmony and the perfection of abstractions. Melding philosophy and religion -- as had Pythagoras -- Plato believed that the highest activity of an individual was to contemplate the beauty of Zeus and the immortality of his own soul.
Plato's Republic Lost

Plato recognized that philosophers were unpopular and that his utopia would never be achieved through popular will. He foresaw too that philosophers would not and could not band together and overpower established authority. So, like Confucius, the best he could hope for was finding someone to create his utopia who already had power. Not until late in his life did he come close to finding such a ruler. A close friend, Dion, had become advisor to the young king, Dionysius II, of Syracuse. Dion invited Plato to tutor Dionysius, but a few months after Plato's arrival the king sent Dion into exile. Plato lost what influence he had over Dionysius, and he returned to Athens. Dion then gathered mercenaries and overthrew Dionysius. But Dion's rule was unpopular, and soon Dion was assassinated, ending Plato's hope that Dion would make Plato's utopia a reality.

Late in his life, Plato decided that in his Utopia it should be official doctrine that its class divisions had been created by Zeus, and he thought that citizens should be obliged to believe in Zeus. He decided that the reading of certain kinds of literature should be forbidden, among them the works of Homer and stories that depicted virtuous people as unhappy or villains as happy. Plato declared that religious cults that attempted salvation of the soul should be outlawed because their attempts at salvation implied that wrongdoing could be absolved through ritual. He thought his utopia should control the kind of music people listened to in order to prevent corruption. He believed that to help prevent the spread of corruption, dissidents, including atheists, should be imprisoned. These dissidents, he believed, should be reformed by persuasion, and if they proved incorrigible they should be executed.
Aristotle

Aristotle was the son of a Greek doctor who served the king of Macedonia -- a land just north of Greece. Supported by his father, Aristotle at eighteen went to Athens to study under Plato, and he remained at Plato's academy for twenty years -- until Plato's death in 347.

Aristotle began as an ardent supporter of Plato's philosophy, but he modified his beliefs. He attempted to systematize what he saw as best among the philosophers who preceded him and to bridge their contradictory positions. Like other philosophers Aristotle believed in intellectual progress through effort rather than revelation from the gods. He believed in reason and the spirituality of the heavens as did Plato, but he also believed in observation of the material world rather than relying on commonplace opinion. Many, for example, still assumed that rivers flowed from some great pool of water hidden from humanity's view, and he advised such people to climb mountains and observe that rivers began as small streams in high places.

Aristotle became a collector of facts. He had little interest in testing theories in a laboratory, or theories of anatomy by dissecting dead people. The Greeks disliked the idea of dissecting people. But he believed in exact classifications - when classification was still largely ignored. He made his classifications according to common sense, finding consistent attributes that ignore insignificant differences (humans, for example, having common attributes that allow them to be classified as humans while differing in minor attributes such as height). Aristotle divided things into classes and sub-classes, made contributions in biology, botany, and embryology, and Aristotle wrote numerous works.

Like other Greeks, Aristotle assumed that emotions arose in the heart and that the heart was where reasoning took place. The brain, he believed, merely tempered the heart's seething. Aristotle's theory of motion was also limited by the time in which he lived. With others he believed that the earth was the center of the universe, and he saw what we now know as gravity as objects having a will to rush to this center. He believed that the natural state of all bodies was rest, that all bodies tended to return to rest and needed a mover to keep them in motion. For Aristotle this mover was Zeus. Not until the late 1600s CE would anyone advocate inertia as a law of motion. Unaware of gravity, Aristotle held that everything moved in a straight line until something intervened to deflect it or to stop it and that the object then fell to earth. Speed, he believed, was governed by the resistance through which an object had to travel, water slowing a body down more than air. He believed that if there were no resistance, a body would move from place to place in an instant, but he also believed that there was no such thing as a complete void, or vacuum. God Himself, he stated, could not make one.

Aristotle combined his study of the world, his classifications, with his work in logic and theology. He was burdensome in his discourse and would be among the hardest philosophers to read, but in the breadth of his interests and the great amount of work he did in classification he would become the most influential philosopher until modern times.
Aristotle's Logic

In ancient times Aristotle became recognized as the foremost authority on logic, and he would be recognized as such during the Middle Ages. He began his study of logic as lessons on how to succeed in the kind of debates found in Plato's writings. He built his logic on the rejection of contradiction, and he drew from the law in geometry with which Pythagoras had worked: the simple, common sense theorem which holds that if two items are alike and a third is similar to one, it is similar to the other. In other words, if all humans are mortal and all Greeks are human, then all Greeks are mortal.

Some discoveries are stimulated by falsehoods, and from a falsehood one might accidentally stumble to some truth, with intermittent logic, but this has nothing to do with the consistency that is the basis of Aristotelian logic.

Aristotle recognized that the consistency on which his logic rested depended upon properly distinguishing between classes and subclasses. And Aristotle recognized that logic cannot take one from a false premise to a valid conclusion. [note] But Aristotle did not fully appreciate the extent to which premises might consist of hidden, often unexamined complexities. Using Aristotle's logic, people would build with confidence from premises to a great variety of conflicting conclusions. Aristotle himself used his logic to arrive at conclusions about which he had no knowledge, such as: because the eye disconnected from the body does not see it is not the eye itself that sees but the soul. Aristotle's logic was deductive. It conflicted with science, which made generalities from observed particulars (facts) -- in other words, induction. But Aristotle made a contribution to humanity's effort to think more clearly and to examine presumptions and contradictions.
Classification and Theology

In working with classifications, Aristotle rejected Plato's view of abstractions. Plato viewed abstractions as real, or, as Aristotle put it, as having substance. Contrary to Plato, Aristotle associated substance with specific forms and saw abstractions as the creation of imagination dependent upon specifics.

Aristotle classified reality into three types of substance. SUBSTANCE-TYPE ONE was earthly matter -- that which could be both seen and felt. Similar to Plato, he thought of earthly reality as a lower order, a world of imperfection, a world of decay and impermanence. Concerned with classifying the difference between what is basic and what was not, Aristotle reduced this earthly substance to four basic ingredients: air, earth, fire and water. Believing that these elements were things-in-themselves and irreducible, he rejected the atomic theory of Democritus.

SUBSTANCE-TYPE TWO consisted of the visible heavenly bodies -- the moon, planets, sun and stars. As did Plato, Aristotle saw these as both moving and eternal, as orderly, unchanging and perfect in form. And he judged these heavenly bodies as an order superior to earthly substance.

SUBSTANCE-TYPE THREE Aristotle deduced from his view of the heavens. This substance was the invisible world of spirit, or nous, which can be translated as soul. In not understanding inertia Aristotle assumed that the moon, planets, sun and stars needed a force to move them. Everything, he reasoned, must have a cause. Soul, on the other hand, according to Aristotle, was that which was not moved by some external force. Soul was the mover. Like Plato, Aristotle saw soul as embodying reason. Soul, he believed, moved itself with a sense of purpose. The cause of motion of all things, he concluded, is Divine Will.

Aristotle believed that soul descended from the perfection of heaven to earth in the form of life. Classifying life into different levels, he saw plants as having the lowest level of soul, animals other than humans as having a higher level of soul, and humans, because of their capacity for reason, possessing a greater soul. More than Plato, Aristotle saw soul (or mind and reason) as having a connection with the human body. In his work De Anima, Aristotle connected body and mind -- the first work in psychology grounded in biology. He believed that one's body developed earlier than one's soul and that one's appetites developed earlier than one's ability to reason. He held that one's body should be trained for the sake of one's soul and one's appetites harnessed for the sake of reason. He saw imagination as a by-product of sensation. He saw memory as a combination of imagination and accumulated sense experience.

Aristotle believed that one's soul moved one's body, but unlike Plato he believed that a person's soul did not survive death in individualistic form. Believing that soul was a collective force he believed that with the death of an individual the soul returned to this collective -- or to use another word, Zeus. He did not say whether after one crossed the Golden Shore to the other side and connected up with the Great Collective Soul and infinite knowledge one learned what a fool one had been during life on earth.

Like Deists of the 17th and 18th centuries, Aristotle's god was not an interventionist. His god was the source of all. His god was the unmoved mover of the universe - the eternal inaugurator of motion. He did not see Zeus as the creator of the universe. Instead, he clung to his belief in eternity. He could not bring himself to believe in something created out of nothing. For Aristotle Zeus remained the unmoved mover.
Happiness and the Golden Mean

Aristotle concerned himself with what was right and wrong in everyday life. He believed that people pursued self-fulfillment, or happiness, and he believed that people should search for happiness both in the divine and in the material world. And not surprising for a philosopher, he believed that the greatest happiness, the greatest self-benefit and the greatest virtue came with the pursuit of theoretical wisdom. Similar to the Hindus, Socrates and Plato, Aristotle believed that the pursuit of knowledge moved one closer to the harmony of God.

Happiness, Aristotle believed, could be achieved by choosing a golden mean between extremes. This was a recognition that humanity functions within a range of possibilities and limited conditions and that it functions best at a point of balance within these ranges. For example, humanity needs sunshine, but people can have too much sunshine and too little rain, which would ruin their crops. Aristotle believed in the kind of moderation advocated in The Analects purportedly written by Confucius. For example, Aristotle advocated moderation over the extremes of gluttony and self-deprivation, and he chose courage over the extremes of rashness and cowardice. Aristotle believed in moderating one's passions. He compared a man in a state of passion to a man asleep, drunk or insane.

Aristotle applied his Golden Mean to economic and social order and to the relationship between the state and the individual, but he could not, of course, apply it to those matters that had no median, such as choosing between honoring and ignoring one's contracts, between commitment and being uncommitted, or between loyalty and disloyalty.
Aristotle's Politics

Harmony was central to Aristotle's theory of politics, as it had been with Plato. Aristotle saw that humans were social creatures, that social participation was inescapable, that no one was immune from the rules of a community, in other words that no citizen belonged just to himself, that every civilized person was a member of the state.

Aristotle saw politics as the manner in which people govern their relations with each other and that people were, therefore, not just social creatures but also political creatures. He believed that the welfare of a community contributed to the well-being of its individual members, and, drawing again from classification, he put the city-state above the family and individuals, claiming that the whole must necessarily be prior to the part. He saw the state as necessary in creating harmony -- by promoting balance, moderation and protecting the individual from abuse. But he was for a balance between the powers of the state and the rights of individuals, between regimentation and anarchy, claiming that the state should not be so powerful or all encompassing that it fails to offer a good amount of liberty to its individual citizens -- which put him at odds with Plato's totalitarianism.

Much of Aristotle's political writing was a retort to Plato's republic. He believed that Plato's communism -- the elite holding everything in common -- was impossible. He wrote that property owned in common received less attention than property owned by an individual. Men, he wrote, care most for their private possessions.

In addition to opposing communism, Aristotle opposed excessive wealth. Responding to the strife between Greece's rich and poor, Aristotle applied his golden mean and advocated a balance between great wealth and poverty. To this end he favored the creation of a strong middle class and government assistance to the poor, with everyone having the right to property but no one accumulating more than was needed for what he called "intelligent living."

It was Aristotle who made the first effort at political science. His interest in data led him to gather information on 158 Greek and other cities. But his conclusions were too big for the amount of information he was able to collect. From his data he concluded that the best form of government was rule by an elite. Like Plato he believed that rule should go to the wise, that rule to the wise is the best way of creating harmony. He was opposed to democracy. He did not think of democracy as giving power to an intelligence drawn from the broadest spectrum of experiences. Nor did he believe that democracy and a middle class would create the moderation that he preferred. He believed that democracy was unsuitable because of the lack of wisdom among common people and that common people were swayed by demagogues.

Aristotle disapproved of the permanent aristocracy that was common in most civilized societies, and he rejected Plato's anecdote to this aristocracy -- the philosophical elite of Plato's Republic. The best rulers, Aristotle believed, were people who had first learned to be good subjects. There was, he wrote, nothing degrading about obedience when obedience is directed toward good ends. When men are young, he suggested, they should be warriors. They should not rule until they are older. And they should be priests when they are older still -- past an active life.

Aristotle linked social harmony with ethics. He saw virtue in honesty, in keeping one's promises, in abiding by one's contracts and in paying one's debts. He believed that refinement and education made one a better person, a better citizen, and made people more suited for rule.

Aristotle saw weakness in Sparta having trained only for military prowess. This narrow focus, he believed, made Sparta an unsuitable leader in the years following its victory in the Great Peloponnesian war and contributed to its failure.

According to Aristotle the state should follow the same morality that applies to individuals. He believed that the state should be a moral agent. But he believed that a superior people should rule over an inferior people, just as it was better that tame animals be ruled by humans rather than allowed to run wild. The superior people, according to Aristotle, were the Greeks. Greeks, he believed had the high spirit of "the northern races" and the intelligence of "the eastern races," and as a result they had a higher civilization than others. Here was Aristotle's rationale for slavery. In his ideal society the tillers of soil would be barbarian serfs or slaves rather than citizens. He wrote that Greeks should not be slaves but that they should be slave owners. Here he got his classes and sub-classes mixed, believing that justice was served by any dull-minded individual Greek being master to the brightest of foreigners.

Thucydides writes of the fear of torture being used by the Spartans during the Peloponnesian War. And in Athens, the torture of slaves was commonly used as a source of truth for litigation. Generally, it was against the law in Athens to torture citizens.

Aristotle believed in torture for eliciting truth from slaves. "Torture is a kind of evidence," he writes, "which appears trustworthy, because a sort of compulsion is attached to it." Torturing slaves for testimony was common among the Greeks. [note] Aristotle recognized that a person being tortured might say whatever the torturer wants to hear in order to stop the torture, but he accepted it for use against foreigners and slaves -- in other words, barbarians. The slave master, according to Aristotle, had reason and therefore could choose to go around the truth. A barbarian, like a simple child, would merely tell the truth.