Seitz

Aristotle's Essentialism and its Seitz

Seminar paper from the year 2008 in the subject Philosophy - Practical (Ethics, Aesthetics, Culture, Nature, Right, ...), grade: 2,0, University of California, Berkeley (Department of Philosophy), course: Aristotle's Posterior Analytics, language: English, abstract: The Posterior Analytics, the oldest text on the philosophy of science known today, displays Aristotle's ideas of systematic acquisition of scientific knowledge and its proper demonstration. On the basis of the Posterior Analytics, and by means of two examples, this essay wants to sketch the critique on essentialism and universals in the mid-20th century. The focus is on Karl Raimund Popper's account given in The Open Society and its Enemies (1945), namely book II chapter 11, and on Williard Van Orman Quine's essay On What There Is (1948). Popper's Open Society and its Enemies mainly is an attack on what he calls Historicism, the view that historical development has inherent laws which, once discovered, allow to prophesy the course of future events. The three "great men" who are, according to Popper, the main exponents of historicist narratives and hence the "fathers of modern totalitarianism", are Plato, Hegel, and Marx; it is to them the majority of his work is devoted. Nevertheless, references to Aristotle are scattered throughout the two books and, most importantly, the chapter mentioned above contains Popper's reasons for his fierce attack on Aristotle's essentialism in this context, which, according to Popper, bears "all the elements needed for elaborating a grandiose historicist philosophy."1 Furthermore, Popper also focuses on the impact of Aristotle's account on science and its development, and this will be a major point here. Quine, at the very beginning of his essay, famously praises the "ontological problem" for its simplicity, answering his own question "What is there?" with the short answer "everything", but stating as well that "disagreement over cases has stayed alive down the centuries