Ham:
Aristotle condemned ontological assumptions? What is your justification for
that assertion?
Ron:
Ever read metaphysics?
Ham:
Aristotle was more empirical than his mentor Plato and approached metaphysics
by studying the causes and principles of "being", rather than idealistic
"forms" per se. Is that not precisely what ontology is?
Ron:
He forwarded a theory of meaning, the term "metaphysics" did not exist when he
wrote it.
He did not study the causes and principles of being, he studied what we mean by
those
terms. He condemns the Pythagoreans for doing such a thing as you state.
Don't forget we are looking back at Aristotle through a whole chain of a
particular
evolution of thought and super imposing those assumptions on his work.
He really is not dedicating a science to the causes and principles of existence
as commonly thought, rather what we mean when we say that something "is".
After citing the most popular philosophies of the past and (his) present, he
states
their philosophical problems. In book Gamma he begins to layout the field of
the philosopher and first science. First science and first principle are the
the root
of meaning, the broadest generalizations concerning the broadest root
philosophical
problems. The very first, and the most general, is being. Being as being, in
Greek
it holds a meaning of our verbs,"to exist, to come into existence and pass out
of it", Aristotle then goes into the problem of being as being as a problem of
unity
and plurality, he says if we treat being as being as a plurality,nothing can
really
be said about it or anything at all for that matter, there can be no science.
For
science to have meaning being as being must be axiomatically treated as a
whole.
The first of these axioms
is that of non contradiction, for it defines what we mean when we say that
something
is "true" in terms of our beliefs. He goes on to describe what pragmatically
treating
a plurality as a whole unit means and what qualifies as a whole unit, and
basically he
states that they are forms, in that we define it as a recognizeable form. For
example we recognize a shoe by it's form not by it's parts, a building by it's
form not it's parts. Which is what Socratres (per Plato) meant by the forms
being eternal.
To be precise what we know as"ontology" is the study of basic root forms and
their meaning
or more generally the study of the art of measure, and the axiology of root
forms
and classifications which he deemed the province of philosophers.
In Gamma he makes it clear that assumptions are not part of this endeavor.
I am currently tracing the origins of realism (objectivism,positivism,SOM)
from Parmenides to Plato to the Pythagoreans, neopythagoreans, neoplatonists
Philo of Alexandria to Christianity which influenced early scientific thought
and
reason greatly.
-Ron
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