 Peripatetics Aristotle had the custom of teaching as he strolled with his pupils in the covered walk area (peripatos) of the Athenian Lyceum. His students were therefore called the Peripatetics. Aristotle differentiated three sciences: Mathematics; Physics, or natural sciences; and Metaphysics. ( Metaphysica = after the Physica, that is following the chapter Physica in his text ). |
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The purpose of all three is simply knowledge,
and they are therefore grouped together as theoretical sciences, distinguished by their purpose from the productive disciplines
[art & rhetoric], which are intended for the making of things (and the means of persuasion that a speaker may exercise); and from the practical disciplines [ethics & politics], which are directed to action and conduct.
The theoretical disciplines are for the sake of contemplating, defining, or knowing it, while the practical disciplines are incapable of the exactness of the theoretical sciences, for their subject matter involve habits and skills, which can be acquired and lost, and associations and institutions, which in their changes affect the accomplishments of political actions and the practicabilities of moral ends. The end of human activity, or the highest good, is happiness, or perfect and reasonable activity in a perfect life. |
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In his ' Metaphysica ' the doctrines that Aristotle sometimes referred to as comprising ' wisdom ' or
first philosophy or ' theology ' were developed.
Metaphysics is assigned the responsibility of establishing and criticizing the first principles
of all scientific knowledge, it therefore transcends the individual classes of things and focusses instead upon undifferentiated existence, thus characterizing it as the science of ' being qua being '. It concerns the relation of the principles and causes of things to the principles and axioms of knowledge. With careful distinctions between how men think about things and how they state what they know ( thus embracing with one stroke the meanings of knowledge, statement, and being ) Aristotle transmuted the principles of formal and material causality into the active and passive principles involved in any process such as motion or knowledge. |
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