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Wielcy filozofowie. Zachęta do filozofii. Fizyka

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Zachęta do filozofii (Protreptikos) to odwołanie do naszego zmysłu przyjemności. Nie ma bowiem większej rozkoszy, jak dowodzi Filozof, niż myśleć i badać. Wykształcona, poszukująca i wrażliwa dusza jest szczęśliwa niczym zdrowe i sprawne ciało.

Fizyka, słynne i kontrowersyjne dzieło Arystotelesa, pozwala poznać wyobrażenie starożytnych o świecie natury. Przedmiotem fizyki jest wszystko, co wiąże się z ciałem, powstawaniem, ruchem i zmianą, co składa się na kipiące bogactwo świata naturalnego, jakby domagając się uporządkowania w perypatetyckich ogrodach. Wywody i opisy są wyrazem fascynacji złożonością natury i jej tworów, szczególnie zjawiska ruchu. Zdają też sprawę z naszego doświadczenia natury, ze sposobu, w jaki przedstawia się ona naszemu zdrowemu rozsądkowi.

355 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 2010

9 people want to read

About the author

Aristotle

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Aristotle (Greek: Αριστοτέλης; 384–322 BC) was an Ancient Greek philosopher and polymath. His writings cover a broad range of subjects spanning the natural sciences, philosophy, linguistics, economics, politics, psychology, and the arts. As the founder of the Peripatetic school of philosophy in the Lyceum in Athens, he began the wider Aristotelian tradition that followed, which set the groundwork for the development of modern science.
Little is known about Aristotle's life. He was born in the city of Stagira in northern Greece during the Classical period. His father, Nicomachus, died when Aristotle was a child, and he was brought up by a guardian. At 17 or 18, he joined Plato's Academy in Athens and remained there until the age of 37 (c. 347 BC). Shortly after Plato died, Aristotle left Athens and, at the request of Philip II of Macedon, tutored his son Alexander the Great beginning in 343 BC. He established a library in the Lyceum, which helped him to produce many of his hundreds of books on papyrus scrolls.
Though Aristotle wrote many treatises and dialogues for publication, only around a third of his original output has survived, none of it intended for publication. Aristotle provided a complex synthesis of the various philosophies existing prior to him. His teachings and methods of inquiry have had a significant impact across the world, and remain a subject of contemporary philosophical discussion.
Aristotle's views profoundly shaped medieval scholarship. The influence of his physical science extended from late antiquity and the Early Middle Ages into the Renaissance, and was not replaced systematically until the Enlightenment and theories such as classical mechanics were developed. He influenced Judeo-Islamic philosophies during the Middle Ages, as well as Christian theology, especially the Neoplatonism of the Early Church and the scholastic tradition of the Catholic Church.
Aristotle was revered among medieval Muslim scholars as "The First Teacher", and among medieval Christians like Thomas Aquinas as simply "The Philosopher", while the poet Dante Alighieri called him "the master of those who know". His works contain the earliest known formal study of logic, and were studied by medieval scholars such as Pierre Abélard and Jean Buridan. Aristotle's influence on logic continued well into the 19th century. In addition, his ethics, although always influential, gained renewed interest with the modern advent of virtue ethics.

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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
Profile Image for Jerzy.
563 reviews138 followers
June 3, 2025
This was my 2016 reading from the Great Philosophers series from Gazeta Wyborcza. I've also read:
* 2015: Seneca's Moral letters to Lucilius
* 2017: Aristotle's Great Ethics and Poetics
* 2018: Plato's Symposium, Statesman, Sophist, and Euthyphro
* 2019: Plato's Republic

~~~

Protrepticus -- Zachęta do filozofii

Before this one, I read Seneca's Moral letters to Lucilius, and there's quite a difference between the Stoics there and Aristotle here.

* Aristotle seems to think the best position for practicing philosophy is to have wealth and power. The Stoics said anyone can and should be a philosopher, even slaves like Epictetus.
* Aristotle says philosophy's worth it because it's fun and easy! Nobody likes hard work, he says, but people like philosophy, so it can't be hard work. And the best part is contemplating the truth, not the grind of arriving at it. This is not like the Stoic approach, which seemed to put more value on work and duty. (And yet, at other times Aristotle concedes that joy comes not from knowing things but from applying that knowledge to do good.)
* Maybe Aristotle's most convincing argument: Those who reach the Fortunate Isles have no needs or wants, and get no benefit from anything, but spend their time on philosophical reflection. So if we can already do the same here in regular life, why wouldn't we?
* Aristotle is emphatic about reflection from "obvious" first principles being better than empirical arguments and learning from experience. (And yet he uses plenty of analogies: having reason vs actually using it is like having sight vs actually seeing, etc.) It really doesn't jive with us today to downplay empirical evidence---at least not the statisticians I hang out with :)
* The whole thing ends on some very dark notes: The soul is chained to the body, just like a certain tribe tortured prisoners by chaining them to corpses. And we should either take up philosophy, or kill ourselves, since all but philosophy is senseless and useless. Wow. Way to close with a flourish.

Overall, this was a rather strange defense of philosophy that didn't jive with my assumptions, experience, or conclusions. But it's worth reading to see how Aristotle argues and defends his positions.

PS -- Wow, already on the 2nd page of this millenia-old work, there seems to be 2016 election coverage :)
"Ignorance with power beget madness."
and
"The proverb 'don't give a child a sword' means 'don't give power to bad men.'"

~~~

Physics -- Fizyka

I read this alongside the helpful commentary in Aristotle's Physics: A Guided Study. I appreciated Sachs' very positive spin on the work, but the Physics still felt rather tedious, and I had trouble reminding myself why I'm even reading it.

Aristotle himself unwittingly describes how it felt to read him: "to prove what is obvious by what is not is the mark of a man who is unable to distinguish what is self-evident from what is not."

Everyone says this was the seminal work of Western natural philosophy until the scientific revolution. But why, how, in what way? What exactly was its impact?
Put another way, Newtonian physics lets you *do* stuff. It lends itself to engineering and invention and prediction, in very pragmatic ways. I don't see any of that in Aristotle's physics. So is there some other kind of benefit to reading & digesting Aristotle? Besides the innately interesting *questions* he raises (what is time? what is space? what is motion?), what do we get out of having his particular *answers*? (At one point he outright rejects the idea that the speed of motion can change; so it's not kosher to discuss acceleration; so what effect does that have on the engineers you train?)

Well, to be fair, it's good to understand *what* the scientific revolution challenged. Today's careful empirical hypothesis-checking wasn't just trying to displace ignorance; it was displacing Aristotle's careful exploration of "nature as primarily experienced" or "a disciplined reflection on our experience," in Sachs' words. Also, modern science focuses on mathematically describing inert elements, a dead universe, atoms in void; life is incidental, not foundational; cause is used in an immediate sense (A caused B to move by knocking into it) but not in the sense of taking responsibility. This gives us a useful toolbox, but a toolbox with its own limits; it doesn't even *try* to understand what nature, cause, or motion fundamentally *are*. Perhaps if you lived in early times (before science showed widely that it *could* have pragmatic applications), you didn't *expect* pragmatic applications. So the best you could hope for was to get a sense of meaning about these deep questions, and Aristotle's Physics was indeed a stab in this direction. For example, some things are heavy because they strive to get closer to the earth, their natural resting place, and resist being dragged away (up) unnaturally. Much more meaning-imbued than Newton's equation for gravity.

Some notes I found helpful from other reviewers:
One reviewer said:
"Of course, Aristotle's investigation of 'time' can be more properly called Aristotle's investigation of the human *experience* of time, but we need not fault Aristotle for not thinking there's a difference."
Also,
"To the student of modern physics, this book may present some interesting contrasts. We have learned, through painstaking experience, that the most productive questions to ask of nature begin with 'how' rather than 'why.' ... Aristotle seeks to understand nature in the same way that one might understand a friend."

Another reviewer said:
"The Physics is refreshing because Aristotle is interested in the world as humans experience it--not like Plato, who sees the real world as the world of the forms, or the naturalists, who see the real world as nothing but matter in motion. Neither of these two worlds are accessible to us. They do not account for our everyday experience. Aristotle, however, approaches the world through human eyes, and because of that he is in many respects the easiest ancient philosopher to understand."
[This is definitely not easy reading! But perhaps his starting assumptions are easier to swallow than, say, Plato's?]

On the other hand...
(begin rant)
I found the reading itself to be a slog. Much of this is the archetype of dry academic writing, even starting with literature reviews: "Previous thinkers on this topic said A. Their arguments are wrong because B. Now I will demonstrate why C is right instead." Some of the arguments rest on a simple claim "It's clear that D" which is completely unclear and never explained. Then, there are the intricately detailed arguments; most of these, I'm unmotivated to follow closely, because the assumptions and/or conclusions are so clearly wrong. There's still potential to learn something from the shapes of the arguments, but it's hard to stay engrossed. He breaks down each scenario hierarchically into a zillion cases, which is a useful way to form arguments, but tedious reading and unhelpful for getting a global sense of the big picture (I recall that Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance had major beef with Aristotle over this). Finally, modern physics shares with Aristotle the hijacking of common words and phrases, assigning specific technical meanings. This makes the arguments impossible to follow without a glossary. What's the difference between material, form, substrate, substance, ...? When he first defined them, I couldn't be bothered to memorize the differences; but then every argument that builds on these distinctions also becomes meaningless to me. Plus, sometimes he realizes it's all a big word game (incl. disambiguating definitions of "infinity," or nicely resolving one of Zeno's paradoxes by disambiguating "located in" vs "inherent in" in Book 4 Ch 3); but other times he goes on a goose chase trying to define something rigorously that doesn't need it, because it's a confusion caused by our sloppy ambiguous language and not because it needs to be a distinct well-defined concept. Or, worse yet, defines it in reverse from what you'd expect (e.g. his definition of "intent" intentionally *excludes* conscious intent, which is what everyone else means when they use that word).

Ah, also, I don't like his (implicit) theory of pedagogy. He often uses the example that you can't teach something unless you know it. It sounds like the common view that students' minds are empty vessels, and you just pour facts from a full vessel (the teacher) into their minds, until then they're educated. On the contrary, plenty of good education can happen when the teacher is learning along with the student, modeling the learning process *in general* to help the student learn something specific. In fact, isn't that what Aristotle is trying to do with this dialectical inquiry?
Meanwhile, in another place he says the opposite of learning isn't forgetting, but rather learning a falsehood. So in our heads, we all have a set number of places for facts, and education is the process of replacing false ones with true ones? Weird.
(end of rant)

Upsides and amusements:
His responses to Zeno's paradoxes are pretty satisfying. For instance, Zeno said you can't get from here to there, because you have to travel halfway first, then cover half the remaining distance, and so on, so you'll never reach the end in a finite number of steps and hence a finite time. Aristotle points out that not only the distance, but also the time taken, are infinitely divisible in exactly the same manner; so the times taken to traverse the sum of infinitesimal distances also add up to a finite time.

Next, as a statistician, I liked reading Aristotle's view of chance. He distinguishes natural vs. incidental happenings: I build houses *because* I'm a bricklayer (so it's my nature), vs. I can play the flute *and* I'm a bricklayer (so the flute-playing is incidental to my nature). Then he defines a chance event as one that *could* have been intentional, but in this case was only incidental, and is a rare event in situations where it's incidental (even if could be common/guaranteed if it had been an intentional goal or natural event). In other words, chance isn't about the statistician's idea of randomness, but about intent.
Maybe it's not too far from how the kids these days use it: "I *could have* meant to meet Bob downtown today, but I *didn't*; yet we *did* meet: that's, like, SO random!"
[Are there any modern philosopher-statisticians who could help clarify this? Is there any sense in which it could be the foundation for a new school of statistical inference?]

[PS -- the flute-player comes up a few times throughout Aristotle, enough that people joke about it: "I'm saying the cake should go to the best flute player. I am the best flute player."]

[I also see that I took a note-to-self: "Has anyone tried to implement Aristotle's ontology, say in software (like semantic web) or indexing / library science?" But I can't remember what I meant or which section that was about. Something about his hierarchy with natural/living things above others? Something about his definitions of material, form, etc? Something about the differences between motions that cause a change from A to B, vs bring A into existence, vs cause B to stop existing?]

Perhaps the coolest part: The book mentioned many ideas that we think of as "modern": a round Earth, Occam's razor, infinite summations, inertia, even natural selection (mentioned but dismissed in Book 2 Ch 8)... I guess some of these didn't catch on in Aristotle's time; but it's also clear that they weren't novel to Darwin and Newton, just better defended by those guys.

Finally, Aristotle does (indirectly) tackle one of my personal favorite philosophical questions: When I'm lying in bed on a lazy weekend morning (not hungry, no schedule for the day, etc.), why do I eventually get up at *this* moment and not *that* one? Aristotle's answer (if an animal at rest wakes and starts to move, it's due to external forces) doesn't feel satisfying. But I'm glad the question came up.
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