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Friday, September 20, 2019

Aristotle’s Philosophy Is Not Closed, But Open

John Herman Randall, Jr. notes that while Aristotle’s thinking is systematic and he is a great systematizer, his philosophy is an open system. Here’s an excerpt from Randall's book Aristotle (Page 30):

"Aristotle’s own thinking is not closed… but open. For Aristotle knowledge is not a neat “system,” but a living growth, like a tree—it goes on and on, it is biological. Nous is life, the flowering of the world-life. Note Aristotle’s keen sense of the continuity and the cumulative growth of scientific inquiry. Each science, and knowledge as a whole, is provisional and open. Aristotle makes many distinctions not to classify and catalogue a subject matter—he is no Linnaeus—but as instruments of living research."

Randall makes a good point on the openness in Aristotelian logic (Page 30-31):

"Even logic, “Analytics,” is for Aristotle not a science but a dynamis, a “power”; a techne, an “art”; an organon, a “tool.” Aristotle’s analysis is never an end in itself, but is always for the sake of “knowing,” of science. It may be suspected that Aristotle would have had little sympathy with modern mathematical logic, which aims at beauty rather than use, and takes the view of the Platonic tradition, that logic is a “science,” the science of order."

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