Sunday. Perfect time to spend some time on re-capturing thoughts. I have been reading about some philosophers lately and again I found it very interesting. Aristotle made many statements which I do not understand too much (yet). One thing is clear, he mainly wants to make statements which we would call "real" or "down-to-earth", opposing to his teacher Plato, who has a very speculative nature. According to Bertrand Russell, the ideas of Aristotle seem to have had a huge influence on modern ideas about ethics, physics (in a very broad context including biology and chemistry), logic and politics. I was mainly interested in the field of logic. Aristotle seems to have introduced the idea of "categories". A concept which can be quite broad. I was surprised that we have learned about a very similar concept in the German class of lower high-school without knowing it. So what are they, the categories ? Aristotle classifies different types statement or words (if I understand correctly). Those are substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, time, position, possession, action and passion. To demonstrate the use of the idea we could take an arbitrary sentence:
The musician plays an instrument.
Questions to this sentence could be: How ? Where ? When ? What instrument ? Or, changing the viewpoint: The instrument is played by the musician.
In any case, the next very important philosophers after Aristotle seem to be Descartes and Leibniz, almost 2000 years later ! Very interesting.... but sorry, I have to leave ;-) We'll see how the blog will continue....
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