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60 Aristotelian (Classical) Argument Model

Aristotelian argument.

The Aristotelian or classical argument is a style of argument developed by the famous Greek philosopher and rhetorician, Aristotle . In this style of argument, your goal as a writer is to convince your audience of something. The goal is to use a series of strategies to persuade your audience to adopt your side of the issue. Although ethos , pathos , and logos play a role in any argument, this style of argument utilizes them in the most persuasive ways possible.

Of course, your professor may require some variations, but here is the basic format for an Aristotelian, or classical, argumentative essay:

Introduce your issue. At the end of your introduction, most professors will ask you to present your thesis. The idea is to present your readers with your main point and then dig into it.
Present your case by explaining the issue in detail and why something must be done or a way of thinking is not working. This will take place over several paragraphs.
Address the opposition. Use a few paragraphs to explain the other side. Refute the opposition one point at a time.
Provide your proof. After you address the other side, you’ll want to provide clear evidence that your side is the best side.
Present your conclusion. In your conclusion, you should remind your readers of your main point or thesis and summarize the key points of your argument. If you are arguing for some kind of change, this is a good place to give your audience a call to action. Tell them what they could do to make a change.

For a visual representation of this type of argument, check out the Aristotelian infographic below:

Introduction to Aristotelian Argument

The Aristotelian or classical argument is a style of argument developed by the famous Greek philosopher and rhetorician, Aristotle. In this style of argument, the writer’s goal is to be convincing and to persuade your audience to your side of the issue through a series of strategies.

Start here!

Before you begin, review your assignment and ask yourself questions about what you might want to write about.

Use prewriting activities, such as brainstorming or listing, to help develop ideas for topics and angles.

Do your research! Find credible sources to help you build your argument.

But there’s more! There are some important concepts you need to learn about.

Modes of Persuasion

Ethos=credibility

Pathos=emotions

Logos=logic

Know Your Audience!

When writing a classical or Aristotelian argument, think about how you are going to be convincing to your audience!

Things to remember along the way…

Clear thesis

Support thesis

Opposing views

Cite sources

Sample Essay

For a sample essay written in the Aristotelian model, click here .

Aristotelian (Classical) Argument Model Copyright © 2020 by Liza Long; Amy Minervini; and Joel Gladd is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Aristotle’s Model of Communication: 3 Key Elements of Persuasion

What was Aristotle’s contribution to rhetoric? We explore his influential model of communication.

Aristotle took a stance on almost every possible philosophical debate of his time, but more importantly, he came up with new issues and kickstarted new discussions as well. Aristotle was one of the first thinkers to delve into rhetoric and contributed greatly to its forming and development. He came up with many insights and theories on the topic of linguistics within rhetoric. However, his communication model remains his most prominent theory to this day. Let’s see what his model of communication consists of.

Introduction to Aristotle’s Model of Communication

Before we begin analyzing Aristotle’s model of communication, some context is needed. Aristotle was one of the first philosophers that worked on the art of speaking. It was his treatise Rhetoric that founded the basic principles of rhetorical theory and spoke openly about the art of persuasion. To this day, most rhetoricians regard it as the most important single work on persuasion ever written. That’s why Aristotle’s model of communication is still used to this day.

Aristotle’s model of communication is also known as the “rhetorical triangle” or as the “speaker-audience-message” model. It consists of three main elements: the speaker, the audience, and the message.

1. The Speaker

The speaker is the person who is delivering the message. In this model, the speaker is responsible for creating and delivering the message effectively. This includes not only the words used but also the delivery style, tone, and body language.

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Please check your inbox to activate your subscription, 2. the audience .

The audience is the group of people who receive the message. In this model, the audience is considered an essential part of the communication process. The speaker needs to understand the audience’s needs, interests, beliefs, and values to effectively communicate the message.

3. The Message

The message is the content of what is being communicated. In this model, the message should be clear, concise, and persuasive. The message should be crafted with the audience in mind to ensure that it is relevant and engaging.

Aristotle’s model of communication is important because it seems plausible and valid even in our modern lives. His model consists of three bullet points or three main important elements. That’s why we’ll explore each of them one by one.

The First Element of Communication: Ethos

The first element Aristotle comes up with is what he calls ethos . Ethos is essentially the speaker’s credibility to talk about the subject that he’s talking about and discuss it openly and with certainty.

What Aristotle means by ethos is the process of the speaker establishing his credibility about the subject he’s talking about. That can simply be done by mentioning the area of expertise he had majored in, but it can also be done by demonstrating his ability to back up his arguments. Credibility can also be built by using evidence, citing sources, or drawing on the speaker’s own experience or expertise. That’s why having empirical data to back up your arguments with clear proof is essential for this point.

What this does to an audience is create an image of the speaker as someone who knows what they are talking about and as someone that they can easily rely on and trust. That’s why Aristotle mentions it as the first important point out of the 3 most important ones.

The Second Element of Communication: Pathos

The second most important element of communication is what Aristotle calls pathos . The literal translation of pathos is emotion. Pathos is essentially the speaker establishing an emotional connection with the audience he’s speaking to.

The idea behind pathos is that the audience has to feel that they are being communicated with or that they are, in a way, interconnected. Emotional bonds will make the listeners fascinated, and they feel the speaker is “one of them.” In certain situations, the audience might want to feel more confident; in others, sadder, angry, or emotional. So, in Aristotle’s model of communication, pathos refers to the emotional appeal of a message. It focuses on engaging the audience’s emotions and creating a connection with them in order to persuade or influence their attitudes, beliefs, or behaviors.

Pathos can be conveyed through various elements of communication, such as tone of voice, facial expressions, body language, and the use of vivid language and imagery. In order to effectively use pathos in communication, Aristotle suggested that speakers should have a deep understanding of their audience and their emotional state. By appealing to their emotions and creating a connection with them, speakers can make their message more memorable and impactful.

The Third Element of Communication: Logos

The third most important element of communication Aristotle points out is logos. Logos refers to the logical or rational appeal of a message. This element focuses on the substance of the message and how it is presented to the audience.

Logos can be seen as the argument or reasoning behind a message, and it is often used to appeal to the audience’s sense of logic or reason. While ethos refers to the credibility or trustworthiness of the speaker or source of the message, and pathos refers to the emotional appeal in a message, logos focuses on the logical appeal and the argumentative structure of the message itself.

In order to effectively use logos in communication, Aristotle suggested that speakers should use clear and logical arguments, present evidence or facts to support their claims, and use reasoning to connect their ideas and persuade their audience. By appealing to the audience’s sense of logic and reason, speakers can create a persuasive message that is grounded in substance and can effectively influence their audience.

Criticisms of Aristotle’s Model of Communication

Now that we’ve carefully analyzed Aristotle’s model of communication, it’s time to look into the strong and weak points of the theory.

When it comes to the theory’s strengths, we can mention the following. First and foremost, the model emphasizes the importance of understanding the audience and adapting the message to their needs and interests. This means that the model’s main focus is figuring out the best approach to get through to the audience and their concerns, needs, and interests.

The second advantage this model provides is a clear structure for organizing a persuasive message, including the use of logos, ethos, and pathos. This makes it easier for the speaker to tailor his speech easily by following a particular structure. The third strength of this model is that it shows the importance of effective delivery techniques, such as tone and body language, which can enhance the impact of the message. Through these techniques, the speaker can easily point out a particular sentence or saying that he wants the audience to notice, for example.

However, regardless of the model’s many strengths, many of them unmentioned here, it is important to think critically and mention some of its weaker points and limitations.

First, the model is primarily focused on persuasion and may not be as useful in non-persuasive communication contexts. The model’s main use is having an audience involved at an event of a certain kind, which is why it may not be efficient for everyday use.

The second and probably most notable limitation of this theory is that the model assumes that communication is a linear process and does not account for the dynamic and interactive nature of communication. This means that the model does not leave any space for any sort of feedback, questions, or brainstorming sessions from the audience, taking them to be passive listeners to the speech the speaker is giving. Thus, the model is only applicable to public speaking of a very specific kind.

Some thinkers object to this limitation. Even though Aristotle’s model of communication is mostly associated with public speaking and formal communication situations, they say, the principles of effective communication outlined in Aristotle’s model can also be applied to everyday communication. For example, understanding the audience’s needs and interests can help us communicate more effectively with friends, family members, and coworkers. Crafting a clear and concise message can also help us avoid misunderstandings and conflicts in everyday interactions. Aristotle’s model of communication emphasizes the importance of understanding the audience and crafting a persuasive message, which is an essential skill in all types of communication, whether it’s public speaking or everyday conversation. Still, the model’s limitation still stands and is plausible.

The third limitation is that the model may not account for contextual factors that can influence communication, such as cultural differences or power dynamics.

The Lasting Influence of Aristotle’s Model of Communication

In conclusion, Aristotle’s model of communication is a timeless framework that still has relevance today. The three elements of ethos, logos, and pathos provide a solid guide for speakers to effectively communicate their message and persuade their audience. Ethos focuses on the credibility and trustworthiness of the speaker, logos emphasizes the use of logic and reasoning in the message, and pathos is the emotional appeal that creates a connection with the audience.

While Aristotle’s model of communication is widely recognized as a classic, other similar models have emerged in the field of communication. For instance, Berlo’s model of communication incorporates four elements, including source, message, channel, and receiver, and emphasizes the importance of feedback in the communication process (thus avoiding one of the weaknesses of Aristotle’s approach). Similarly, Shannon and Weaver’s model of communication focuses on the transmission of a message through a channel and highlights the role of noise and distortion in the communication process.

It’s also important to mention that Aristotle was not the first one to notice the power that language can have. The Sophists taught a lot about language, and even Aristotle’s mentor Plato talked extensively about language as well. However, it was Aristotle that contributed the most to the forming of rhetoric as a discipline. Aristotle’s model of communication remains an important foundation for understanding effective communication, and it continues to influence contemporary models and theories in the field of communication.

Aristotle’s Philosophy: Eudaimonia and Virtue Ethics

By Antonio Panovski BA Philosophy Antonio holds a BA in Philosophy from SS. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje, North Macedonia. His main areas of interest are contemporary, as well as analytic philosophy, with a special focus on the epistemological aspect of them, although he’s currently thoroughly examining the philosophy of science. Besides writing, he loves cinema, music, and traveling.

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Argument Essay
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Aristotelian Argument

The Aristotelian or classical argument is a style of argument developed by the famous Greek philosopher and rhetorician, Aristotle. In this style of argument, your goal as a writer is to convince your audience of something. The goal is to use a series of strategies to persuade your audience to adopt your side of the issue. Although ethos, pathos, and logos play a role in any argument, this style of argument utilizes them in the most persuasive ways possible.

Of course, your professor may require some variations, but here is the basic format for an Aristotelian, or classical, argumentative essay:

Introduce your issue. At the end of your introduction, most professors will ask you to present your thesis. The idea is to present your readers with your main point and then dig into it.
Present your case by explaining the issue in detail and why something must be done or a way of thinking is not working. This will take place over several paragraphs.
Address the opposition. Use a few paragraphs to explain the other side. Refute the opposition one point at a time.
Provide your proof. After you address the other side, you’ll want to provide clear evidence that your side is the best side.
Present your conclusion. In your conclusion, you should remind your readers of your main point or thesis and summarize the key points of your argument. If you are arguing for some kind of change, this is a good place to give your audience a call to action. Tell them what they could do to make a change.

Aristotelian Infographic

Graphic containing information on the Atristotelian Argument. Text on the information provided below.

Introduction to Aristotelian Argument

Start here!

Before you begin, review your assignment and ask yourself questions about what you might want to write about.

Use prewriting activities, such as brainstorming or listing, to help develop ideas for topics and angles.

Do your research! Find credible sources to help you build your argument.

But there’s more! There are some important concepts you need to learn about.

Modes of Persuasion

Ethos=credibility

Pathos=emotions

Logos=logic

Know Your Audience!

When writing a classical or Aristotelian argument, think about how you are going to be convincing to your audience!

Things to remember along the way…

Clear thesis

Support thesis

Opposing views

Cite sources

Sample Aristotelian Argument

Now that you have had the chance to learn about Aristotle and a classical style of argument, it’s time to see what an Aristotelian argument might look like. Below, you’ll see a sample argumentative essay, written according to APA 7th edition guidelines, with a particular emphasis on Aristotelian elements.

Download here the sample paper. In the sample, the strategies and techniques the author used have been noted for you.

This content was originally created by Excelsior Online Writing Lab (OWL) and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-4.0 International License . You are free to use, adapt, and/or share this material as long as you properly attribute. Please keep this information on materials you use, adapt, and/or share for attribution purposes.

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Guide to Aristotelian Argument

Arguments come in all shapes and sizes. Hence, there’s no one way to compose an argument. Rather, you need to adjust how you shape your arguments based on your topic and rhetorical situation .

As always, you are wise to engage in rhetorical reasoning and rhetorical analysis to decide whether you should even respond to a call for an argument, much less invest the time in research your claims.

Introduces the Topic
Introduce Claims
Appeal to Ethos & Persona to Establish an Appropriate Tone
Appeal to Emotions
Appeal to Logic
Present Counterarguments
Search for a Compromise and Call for a Higher Interest
Speculate About Implications in Conclusions

1. Introduce the Topic

Before attempting to convince readers to agree with your position on a subject, you may need to educate them about the topic. In the introduction, explain the scope, complexity, and significance of the issue. You might want to mention the various approaches others have taken to solve the problem.

A discussion of background information and definition of terms can constitute a substantial part of your argument when you are writing for uninformed audiences, or it can constitute a minor part of your argument when you are writing for more informed audiences.

2. State Claims

Arguments are driven by claims. The claims can be about:

Facts (Females are better mathematicians than males).
Cause-and-Effect Relationships (Media violence creates a “culture of violence” in America).
Solutions (Vegetarian diets are healthier and easier on the environment).
Policies (Students who plagiarize should be expelled).
Value (It’s unethical to hurt animals to conduct medical research).

As discussed below, claims are typically presented near the beginning of arguments, but they can also be implied or presented in the conclusions of the texts.

3. Appeal to Ethos & Persona to Establish an Appropriate Tone

The ethos the person making the argument has an effect on its success. If the writer, speaker, knowledge worker . . . has a reputation as a credible source, their argument appears more persuasive.

Additionally, the persona you project as a communicator influences whether readers, listeners, users . . . will read and consider of your argument. Your opening sentences generally establish the tone of your text and present to the reader a sense of your persona, both of which play a tremendous role in the overall persuasiveness of your argument. By evaluating how you define the problem, consider counterarguments, or marshal support for your claims, your readers will make inferences about your ethos and pathos.

Most academic readers are put off by zealous, emotional, or angry arguments. No matter how well you fine-tune the substance of your document, the tone that readers detect significantly influences how the message is perceived. If readers dislike the manner of your presentation, they may reject your facts, too. If you do not sound confident, your readers may doubt you. If your paper is loaded with spelling errors, you look foolish. No matter how solid your evidence is for a particular claim, your readers may not agree with you if you sound sarcastic, condescending, or intolerant.

Occasionally writers will hide behind a persona. Their reasons for hiding may be totally ethical.

4. Appeal to Emotions

Advertising seeks to invoke your emotions and capture your attention because advertisers know people make some decisions based on emotion rather than reason.

We all tend to perceive certain situations subjectively and passionately—particularly situations that involve us at a personal level. Even when we try to be objective, many of us still make decisions based on emotional impulses rather than sound reasoning. Those who recognize the power of emotional appeals sometimes twist them to sway others. Hitler is an obvious and extreme example. His dichotomizing—”You’re either for me or against me”—and bandwagon appeals—”Everyone knows the Jews are inferior to true Germans”—helped instigate one of the darkest chapters in human history.

Additional emotional appeals include:

According to the EPA, global warming will raise sea levels).
I should be allowed to take the test again because I had the flu the first time I took it).
I wouldn’t vote for that man because he’s a womanizer).

Like arguments based solely on the persona of the author, arguments based solely on appeals to emotions usually lack the strength to be completely persuasive. Most modern, well-educated readers are quick to see through such manipulative attempts.

Emotional appeals can be used to persuade readers of the rightness of good causes or imperative action. For example, if you were writing an essay advocating a school-wide recycling program, you might paint an emotional, bleak picture of what our world will look like in 50 years if we don’t begin conserving now.

To achieve the non-threatening tone needed to diffuse emotional situations, avoid exaggerating your claims or using biased, emotional language. Also, avoid attacking your audience’s claims as exaggerated. Whenever you feel angry or defensive, take a deep breath and look for points in which you can agree with or understand your opponents. When you are really emotional about an issue, try to cool off enough to recognize where your language is loaded with explosive terms.

If the people for whom you are writing feel stress when you confront them with an emotionally charged issue and have already made up their minds firmly on the subject, you should try to interest such reluctant readers by suggesting that you have an innovative way of viewing the problem. Of course, this tactic is effective only when you can indeed follow through and be as original as possible in your treatment of the subject. Otherwise, your readers may reject your ideas because they recognize that you have misrepresented yourself.

5. Appeal to Logic

Critical readers expect you to develop your claims thoroughly. By examining the point you want to argue and the needs of your audience, you can determine whether it will be acceptable to rely only on anecdotal information and reasoning or whether you will also need to research facts and figures and include quotations from established sources. Personal observations have their place, say, in an argument about staying in athletic shape. But an anecdotal tone is unlikely to be persuasive when you address touchy social issues such as terrorism, gun control, pornography, or drugs.

Despite the forcefulness of your emotional appeals, you need to be rational if you hope to sway educated readers. Trained as critical readers, your teachers and college-educated peers expect you to provide evidence—that is, logical reasoning, personal observations, expert testimony, facts, and statistics. Like a judge who must decide a case based on the law rather than on intuition, your teachers want to see that you can analyze an issue as “objectively” as possible. As members of the academic community, they are usually more concerned with how you argue than what you argue for or against. Regardless of your position on an issue, they want to see that you can defend your position logically and with evidence.

6. Present Counter Arguments

At some point in your essay, you may need to present counterarguments to your claim(s). Essentially, whenever you think your readers are likely to disagree with you, you need to account for their concerns. Elaborating on counterarguments is particularly useful when you have an unusual claim or a skeptical audience. The strategy usually involves stating an opinion or argument that is contrary to your position, then proving to the best of your ability why your point of view still prevails.

When presenting and refuting counterarguments, remember that your readers do not expect your position to be valid 100 percent of the time. Few people think so simplistically. Despite the forced choices that clever rhetoricians present, few subjects that are worth arguing about can be reduced to yes, always, or no, never. When it is pertinent, therefore, you should concede any instances in which your opponents’ counterarguments have merit.

When considering likely counterarguments, you may want to elaborate on which of your opponent’s claims about the problem are correct. For example, if your roommate’s messiness is driving you crazy but you still want to live with him or her, stress that cleanliness is not the be-all-and-end-all of human life. Commend your roommate for helping you focus on your studies and express appreciation for all of the times that he or she has pitched in to clean up. And, of course, you would also want to admit to a few annoying habits of your own, such as taking thirty-minute showers or forgetting to pay the phone bill. Rather than issuing an ultimatum such as “Unless you start picking up after yourself and doing your fair share of the housework, I’m moving out,” you could say, “I realize that you view housekeeping as a less important activity than I do, but I need to let you know that I find your messiness to be highly stressful, and I’m wondering what kind of compromise we can make so we can continue living together.” Yes, this statement carries an implied threat, but note how this sentence is framed positively and minimalizes the emotional intensity inherent in the situation.

You will sabotage your hard-won persona as an informed and fair-minded thinker if you misrepresent your opponent’s counterarguments. For example, one rhetorical tactic that critical readers typically dislike is the straw man approach, in which a weak aspect of the opponent’s argument is equated with weakness of the argument as a whole. Unfortunately, American politicians tend to garner voter support by misrepresenting their opponent’s background and position on the issues. Before taking a straw man approach in an academic essay, you should remember that misrepresenting or satirizing opposing thoughts and feelings about your subject will probably alienate thoughtful readers.

7. Search for a Compromise and Call for a Higher Interest

Occasionally–particularly in emotionally stressful situations–authors extensively develop counterarguments. Some problems are so complex that there simply isn’t one solution to the problem. Under such circumstances, authors may seek a compromise under a call for a “higher interest.” For example, if you were writing an editorial in an Israeli newspaper that called for setting aside some of the Gaza territory for an independent Palestinian state, your introduction might sympathetically explore all of the Israeli blood that has been lost since the Gaza was seized in the Seven Day War. Then you could address the “eye-for-an-eye” mentality that has characterized this problem. Perhaps you could soften your readers’ thoughts about this problem by mentioning the number of Arabs who have died. Once you have developed your claim that some land should be set aside for the Palestinians, you might try to explore some of the “common ground” and call for Israelis and Arabs to seek out a higher goal expressed by both Jewish and Muslim peoples—that is, the desire for peace.

8. Speculate About Implications in Conclusions

Instead of merely repeating your original claim in the conclusion, you should end by trying to motivate your audience. Do not go out with a whimper and a boring restatement of your introduction. Instead, elaborate on the significant and broad implications of your argument. The wrap-up is an excellent place to utilize some emotional appeals.

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Aristotle’s Model of Rhetoric and Contemporary Patterns of Argumentation: On Some Aristotelian Challenges

First Online: 28 December 2023

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Giovanni Bombelli ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-0486-9902 23

Part of the book series: Law and Philosophy Library ((LAPS,volume 144))

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The chapter focuses on the interdependence of the concepts of dialogue, law and truth in Aristotle’s model of rhetoric. Taking some aspects of the new rhetoric and of the argumentation theory of Perelman, Alexy and Habermas as a starting point, it will be clarified that the Aristotelian and ancient idea of rhetoric involved a completely different pattern of reasoning. Our analysis will focus on Aristotle’s paradigm, in particular the aspects of dialogue, truth and justice, which highlight the complexity of his model and show how his approach differs from the new model of argumentation theory. The revival of aspects of the Aristotelian approach within the contemporary philosophical-legal debate demonstrates the enduring relevance of Aristotle’s theoretical framework and invites its use to analyze patterns of reasoning in the public debate on issues as equity and climate change.

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For a general historical-theoretical framework and an introduction concerning the contemporay debate and perspectives on argumentation see, for instance, Handbook of Legal Reasoning and Argumentation ( 2018 ); Walton ( 2006 ), in particular (about the connection argumentation-dialogue) Chaps. 1 , 5 and 8 ; Piazza ( 2004 ); Atienza ( 2020 ) on the nexus between a general theory of argumentation and the legal argumentation (with reference to authors as Viehweg, Perelman, Toulmin and the “standard theory” developed by MacCormick and Alexy) and, more generally, Atienza and Ruiz Manero ( 2016 ).

About this question see Toulmin ( 2003 ), which can be considered one of the starting points of the discussion, and Spranzi ( 2011 ), p. 162, who synthesizes the developments of the debate and approaches: “These approaches can be arranged along a continuous spectrum according to two criteria: the relative importance they give to various forms of dialogue, and the aim of dialectical exchanges”; Rapp and Wagner ( 2013 ); furthermore van Eemeren ( 2013 ) moving from the perspective of the “pragma-dialectic” as widely presented in van Eemeren and Grootendorst ( 1992 ).

Moreover the developments proposed in Perelman ( 1976 ).

Spranzi ( 2011 ), especially Chaps. 2 – 3 about the Latin tradition and the revival of dialectic in the Renaissance. See also below about Aristotle’s framework.

Perelman ( 1979 ), Chap. 1 . The chapter offers a historical glance concerning the development of rhetoric in the Western thought. On Perelman’s perspective Piazza ( 2004 ), Chap. 2 .

Perelman ( 1979 ), the introduction by H. Zyskind. Zyskind provides a general survey on Perelman’s theory, with special regard to the idea of “new rhetoric” (XII about the structural relation action-language) and the comparison with Aristotle’s framework (X-XIII). See furthermore the Chaps. 10 – 11 concerning Perelman’s criticism of the continuity rhetoric-dialectic developed by the Stagirite: in other words, according to the Polish author within the Aristotelian framework dialectic cannot be considered in light of a continuum with rhetoric (I do not agree with this position).

Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca ( 1971 ), pp. 30–31. In a fundamental passage the authors point out: “The first[type of the audience] consists of the whole of mankind, or at least, of all normal adult persons: we shall refer to it as the universal audience. The second consists of the single interlocutor whom a speaker addresses in a dialogue. The third is the subject himself when he deliberates or gives himself reasons for his actions. We hasten to add that it is only when the interlocutor in a dialogue and the man debating with himself are regarded as an incarnation of the universal audience, that they can enjoy the philosophic privilege conferred to reason, by virtue of which argumentation addressed to them has often been assimilated to logical discourse. Each speaker’s universal audience, but it nonetheless remains true that, for each speaker at each moment, there exists an audience transcending all others, which cannot easily be forced within the bounds of a particular audience. On the other hand, the interlocutor in a dialogue or the person engaged in deliberation can be considered as a particular audience, with reactions that are known to us, or at least with characteristics we can study. Hence the primordial importance of the universal audience, as providing a norm for objective argumentation, because the other party to a dialogue and the person deliberating with himself can never amount to more than floating incarnations of this universal audience.” See also ibid ., pp. 32–35 concerning the concept of “universal audience”.

About the relation between the figure of the “dialogue” and the dialectical dimension see the remarks of H. Zyskind in Perelman ( 1979 ), p. XV and especially, for some clarifications by Perelman, pp. 73–81.

Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca ( 1971 ), pp. 36–37: see also pp. 38–39 and furthermore p. 56 concerning the “duty of dialogue” elaborated by the Italian philosopher Guido Calogero ( 2015 ). About this topic see also the conclusion of this contribution as regards the idea of “dialogue” within certain patterns of logic in the last century.

Perelman ( 1980 ), p. XI: “[The universal audience is] the principle of universality conceived in rhetorical terms”. According to Spranzi ( 2011 ), pp. 162–164 although Perelman “claims to take his inspiration from Aristotle’s dialectic, he calls his approach the “New Rhetoric” and distinguishes it from demonstration in a way that is reminiscent more of Aristotelian rhetoric than of Aristotelian dialectic.(…)Thus, dialectical arguments are only a special (and less interesting case) of the wider class of rhetorical arguments.” I do not agree with this reading.

In general, Spranzi points out that “Perelman’s avowedly Aristotelian project is dialectical only in the extended and generic sense of emphasizing invention, stressing the importance of argumentation, and considering the positions of others in building arguments. However, the New Rhetoric differs markedly from Aristotle’s position in the Topics in two respects. In the first place(…)Aristotle does not consider dialectical arguments as means of persuasion but as means of testing—and indirectly establishing—claims to knowledge.(…)Secondly, Perelman views ‘endoxa’ as instruments for appealing to the target audience and creating as wide a consensus as possible, rather than as necessary instruments for gaining the opponent’s assent, and thereby putting a rational end to criticisms.(…)It is thus not surprising that Perelman—like so many others—interprets Aristotle’s ‘endoxa’ as expressing “generally accepted opinions”(…), which in Aristotle’s Topics are only one of the possible sources of ‘endoxa’, and not even the most representative at that.(…)Perelman’s rhetorical approach can thus be compared to Agricola’s view of dialectic, which encompassed the argumentative and emotional aspects of rhetoric to the exclusion of style and openly sophistical arguments.”

Perelman ( 1980 ), p. vii ( Preface of the volume): “Legal reasoning is to rhetoric what mathematics is to formal logic”.

Habermas ( 1979 )[1976], p. 3 (for both the quotations; emphasis in the text); more widely Habermas ( 2007 ) especially p. 87 and p. 201 (about the Aristotelian references) and Habermas ( 1984 ). About this point for instance Rasmussen ( 1995 ), pp. 60–63 and Moon ( 2006 ), pp. 143–64 who starts from the comparison Habermas-Rawls.

White ( 2006 ) Part IV on Discursive Democracy , with the relevant contributions of Mark Warren, Kenneth Bynes and Simone Chambers.

Alexy ( 2010 ), p. 16 and ibidem chapter four dedicated to the discussion of Perelman’s theory. See also p. 287 ff. about the legal and, in general, the practical discourse (especially the remarks concerning the partial correspondence in the claim to correctness). Moreover, as regards the idea of “claim to correctness” see also, in the same volume, pp. 104–105 and pp. 107–108; for the references to Aristotle pp. 21, 23, 84, 88, 103, 156 and 159.

Among many comments, see for instance Lafont ( 2012 ) who in some way suggests the same “double interpretation” of the claim to correctness proposed in this contribution: as a logical principle and at a “substantial level”. Furthermore Bongiovanni et al. ( 2007 ).

Alexy ( 2019 ), p. 43.

Alexy ( 2019 ), p. 45. See also ff. about the distinction based on the first-order and second-order correctness and the connection between justice and legal certainty related to the “ideal dimension pentagon”.

Russell ( 2010 ) and furthermore in Stanford Encyclopedia ( 2006 ) “Type Theory”.

In particular Ayer ( 1970 ).

This approach could be discussed also in light of the question of “human rights”: Sieckmann ( 2007 ). In some way, a similar position characterizes Habermas’ perspective on argumentation. It seems to fluctuate between two sides (Habermas 1996 about the role of law). On the one hand, the German philosopher builds up a coherentist or “narrative” approach, which is also related to the idea of “reasonableness” à la Rawls (Habermas 1995 ;furthermore Alexy 2010 , Chap. 4 about the debate Habermas-Rawls). On the other hand, Habermas sometimes seems to make room for a sort of “ontological perspective”, that is to say, a model related to a referential level and to a “substantial justice”.

Aristotle and Pickard-Cambridge ( 1984a ). Please control this point Topics (Top.) II–VII and Aristotle and Rhys Roberts ( 1984 ) Rhetoric (Rhet.) II 18–24; furthermore Spranzi ( 2011 ), pp. 15–20, 30–38 and 90. In the current debate about this topic Perelman ( 1980 ), pp. 81, 88, 92 and 100; Perelman ( 1979 ), p. 58; Hart ( 1994 ) for the idea of common sense; Hintikka and Vandamme ( 1985 ), pp. 249 and ff.; Perelman and Olbrechts Tyteca ( 1971 ) §§ 21-24). The topics discussed below were also deepened by me in Bombelli ( 2013 ).

For an introduction Árnason, Raaflaub, and Wagner, The Greek Polis and the Invention of Democracy ( 2013 ).

The close relation between rhetoric and dialectic was emphasized within the humanistic movement and especially, for instance, by Rudolph Agricola on the basis of Aristotle’s framework: see Spranzi ( 2011 ), pp. 62–63 and Chaps. 3 – 4 ; van Eemeren ( 2013 ) in a “pragma-dialectic” direction oriented to the idea of “strategic manoeuvring”.

Aristotle and Jowett ( 1984 ) Politics (Pol.).

In the sense elaborated by Bertea ( 2019 ), especially Chap. 10 .

Rhet. I, Parts 2 and 3. Aristotle notoriously distinguishes three divisions of oratory: deliberative, forensic and speech of praise and blame (epideictic).

Rhet. I, especially Parts 2, 3 and 4.

Rhet. I, 1; I, 2 and the entire book II. For instance: “Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion” ( Rhet. I, 2, 1355b 27-28, trans. Rhys Roberts). Notice that the relevance conferred to the emotive sphere highlights an important point: the rhetorical dimension cannot be interpreted as a formal scheme. It should be understood as a relation between orator and hearer involving a close connection among the argumentative, demonstrative and emotive level; see also Aristotle and Bywater ( 1984 ) Poetics (Poet.) I, 2.

In particular Rhet. , I, 2 and 4–8. After establishing the relation rhetoric-ethics-politics, Aristotle emphasizes the strong relation among the topics of political rhetoric and fundamental concepts like “happiness”, “utility”, “goodness”.

Spranzi ( 2011 ), p. 74 notes that the theme of the “power of truth” was common in the ancient world and that it can be found in Aristotle’s Rhetoric : “Rhetoric is useful because things that are true and things that are just have a natural tendency to prevail over their opposites, so that if the decisions of judges are not what they ought to be, the defeat must be due to the speakers themselves, and they must be blamed accordingly” ( Rhet , I, 1, 1355a 22–24, transl. Rhys Roberts).

Aristotle et al. ( 1984 ) (EN) VI, 8, 1142a; 1144a 6-9; 1145a 4-6.

Aristotle and Jenkinson ( 1984 ) Prior Analytics (APr.) I, 1, 24a 27-29.

Aristotle and Pickard-Cambridge ( 1984b ). Sophistical Refutation (SE). See also SE 2, 165b 7 ff .; more generally the paragraphs V–VIII.

See also Rhet. II, 18-26 wherein the distinction example-enthymeme highlights the role of the topoi in light of the theoretical circle among common/public knowledge and the rhetoric as a practice (on the concept of “enthymeme” Burnyeat 2015 ). This is the confirmation that Aristotle’s framework entails an embedded paradigm, which is the unescapable condition of the argumentative truth according to the epistemic continuity between rhetoric and dialectic established by the Stagirite (including the possible distinction aporetic-disputational dialectic: on this point, moving from Topics see Spranzi 2011 , introduction and Chap. 1 ; furthermore McAdon 2004 ).

For an analysis of the close circle polis -justice, in light of Aristotle’s framework, see Bombelli 2013 p. 297 ff., including the critical references. Furthermore Perelman ( 1979 ), p. XVIII.

EN , V, 5, 1134a 30-1134b 15: “For justice exists only between men whose mutual relations are governed by law; and law exists for men between whom there is injustice; for legal justice is the discrimination of the just and the unjust.(…)This is why we do not allow a man to rule, but law, because a man behaves thus in his own interests and becomes a tyrant.(…)(Justice or injustice of citizens are) according to law, and between people naturally subject to law (that is to say) people who have an equal share in ruling and being ruled.” (trans. Ross/Urmson, emphasis R/U)

See also Pol. III, 13, 1283b 42-1284a 3, trans. Jowett: “And a citizen is one who shares in governing and being governed. He differs under different forms of government, but in the best state he is one who is able and chooses to be governed and to govern with a view to the life of excellence”; see also Politics , III, 9, 1280b 5-13.

Pol. IV, 11, 1295a 25-1296a 19; on these categories Perelman ( 1980 ), p. 9 and Bombelli ( 2013 ), p. 305 and ff.

From this perspective the crucial role played by the figure of “dialogue” within Aristotle’s framework, including its communitarian horizon, can be compared to the “renaissance” of the dialogue in the philosophical and legal debate of the last century. It developed at least in two directions related to each other. On the one hand the so-called “philosophy of dialogue” or “dialogical movement”, which emphasized the “philosophical” aspect of dialogue dating back to Martin Buber’s intuitions and articulated, in different manner, by authors like Franz Rosenzweig, Ferdinand Ebner and the abovementioned Guido Calogero. On the other hand, the approach more closely focused on argumentation, which deals with the structurally dialogical-relational dimension of the discourse according to two theoretical orientations: the “formal dialogical logic” and the “informal dialogical logic”. The first one (i.e. the so-called dialogische Logik elaborated by the “Erlangen School”) moves from some of Paul Lorenzen’s works (Lorenzen 2010 , 1987 ; Lorenzen and Lorenz 1978 ) as well as Jakko Hintikka’s insights (related to the “Game Theoretical Semantics” encompassing the Aristotelian roots of his approach: Hintikka 1999 , 1997 , 1996 ; furthermore Hintikka and Vamdamme 1985 ) which deals with the structurally dialogical-relational dimension of the discourse. In particular, this orientation emphasizes the abstract structure of the dialogue in order to develop non-monological conceptual models. The “informal dialogical logic” has been developed by authors like Charles Hamblin ( 1970 , 1987 ), Douglas Walton with Erik Krabbe (Walton and Krabbe 1995 ) and Catarina Duthil Novaes ( 2021 , 2012 ): it aims at finding out rational criteria for understanding the ordinary argumentative speeches and their contexts.

In conclusion, some aspects of the contemporary philosophical-legal debate on argumentation seems to confirm the current theoretical usefulness of the Aristotelian perspective in order to rethink the logical conditions underlying the patterns of practical reasoning.

EN , V, 1137a31-1137b; see also Rhet. I, 13, 1374 a-b.

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Cf. Spranzi ( 2011 ), pp. 173–177, also starting from Aristotle: Lamb-Lane ( 2016 ).

Cf. Perelman ( 1980 ), p. 46 and ff. for a criticism).

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Bombelli, G. (2023). Aristotle’s Model of Rhetoric and Contemporary Patterns of Argumentation: On Some Aristotelian Challenges. In: Huppes-Cluysenaer, L., Coelho, N.M. (eds) Aristotle on Truth, Dialogue, Justice and Decision. Law and Philosophy Library, vol 144. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45485-1_9

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Aristotle Model of Communication

Aristotle Model of Communication: this article provides a practical explanation of the Aristotle Model of Communication . The article contains the definition of the Aristotle Model of Communication, and example of the diagram and practical tips. Enjoy reading!

What is Aristotle Model of Communication?

It was Aristotle who first proposed and wrote about a unique model of communication.

Today, his model is referred to as the Aristotle Model of Communication. The great philosopher Aristotle already created this linear model before 300 BC, placing more emphasis on public speaking than on interpersonal communication.

The simple model is presented in a diagram and is still widely used in preparing seminars, lectures and speeches to this day.

Aristotle model of communication diagram

The Aristotle Model of Communication diagram can roughly be divided into five elements. The speaker is the most important element, making this model a speaker-oriented model.

aristotles model of communication toolshero

Figure 1 – Aristotle model of communication diagram

Aristotle Model of Communication: the Role of the Speaker

According to the Aristotle Model of Communication, the speaker is the main figure in communication. This person is fully responsible for all communication. In this model of communication, it is important that the speaker selects his words carefully.

He or she must analyse his audience and prepare his speech accordingly. At the same time, he or she should assume the right body language, as well as ensuring proper eye contact and voice modulations.

In order to entice the audience, blank expressions, confused looks, and monotonous speech must be avoided at all times. The audience must believe in the speaker’s ability to easily put his money where his mouth is.

A politician (the speaker) gives a speech on a market square during an election campaign (the occasion). His goal is the win the votes of the citizens (the audience) present as well as those of the citizens potentially watching the speech on TV.

The people will vote (the effect) for the politician if they believe in his views. At the same time, the way in which he presents his story is crucial in convincing his audience.

The politician talks about his party’s standpoints and will probably be familiar with his audience. In other situations, it would be more suitable to actively research the audience in advance and determine their potential viewpoints or opinions.

The Rhetorical Triangle

The rhetorical triangle is essentially a method to organise and distinguish the three elements of rhetoric. The rhetorical triangle consists of three convincing strategies, to be used in direct communication situations.

Aristotle did not use a triangle himself in the Aristotle Model of Communication, but effectively described the three modes of persuasion , namely logos, pathos, and ethos.

These modes of persuasion always influence each other during conversations in which arguments are shared back and forth, but also in one-way communication, such as during speeches.

The Rhetorical Triangle by Aristotle - ToolsHero

Figure 2 – Aristotle’s Triangle of Reference

Ethos is about the writer or speaker’s credibility and degree of authority, especially in relation to the subject at hand. A doctor’s ethos is the result of years of study and training. Due to his qualifications, a doctor’s words involve a significant degree of authority.

One’s ethos can be damaged in the blink of an eye, however. For example, the reputable politician may be found out when corruption scandals come to light and his private life turns out to be in complete contrast with his political standpoints. Tips for building ethos in communication:

Use words that suit the target group
Keep communication professional
Conduct research before words are presented as facts
Use recommendations from qualified experts
Make logical connections and avoid fallacies

The literal translation of pathos is emotion. In the rhetoric, pathos refers to the audience and the way in which they react to the speaker’s message, the center in the Aristotle Model of Communication.

The idea behind pathos is that the audience must feel that they are communicated with. In certain situations, they want to feel more confident, in others more sad, angry, or emotional.

Before and during the Second World War, Adolf Hitler gave many speeches in front of tens of thousands of people. His words and particular pronunciation made his audience feel attracted to him. Pathos, emotion, can therefore also be abused. For example, people may become anxious as a result of the false consequences of not buying a product presented in the sales world.

The question of whether emotions may be manipulated in sales strategies is a sensitive one. When collecting money for charities, this is somewhat socially acceptable.

However, when selling products or services, many people will express their doubts. Nevertheless, capitalising on pathos can be very effective.

Tips for effectively addressing emotions:

People’s involvement is stimulated by humour. Always keep different types of humour in mind, though
Use images or other visual materials to evoke strong emotions
Pay attention to the intonation and tempo of one’s voice in order to elicit enthusiasm or anxiety

The direct translation of logos is logic, but in rhetoric it more broadly refers to the speaker’s message and more specifically the facts, statements, and other elements that comprise the argument.

According to the Aristotle model of communication, logos is the most important part of one’s argument. For this reason, it is crucial that sales talks always emphasise this particular element.

The appeal to logic also means that paragraphs and arguments must be properly ordered. Facts, statistics and logical reasoning are especially important here. When analysing logos, always ask yourself:

What is the context? What conditions are relevant?
What are the potential counter-arguments?
Is there any evidence that supports my argument? Always mention this
Do I correctly avoid generalisations and am I being specific enough?

The Complete Communication Skills Master Class for Life More information

An Example of Proper Use of Rhetoric

One man who understood rhetoric very well and applied it effectively was Steve Jobs , founder of Pixar Animation, NeXT, and Apple. He also applied the Aristotle model of communication effectively. This business guru stands head and shoulders above others of his generation in terms of communication techniques.

Much research has been conducted into the ways in which he used to communicate a constant series of messages and themes about his company’s products and his vision of the future.

Communication experts especially distinguish Steve Jobs’ ethos. His degree of ethos, or credibility, had a major influence on how he used logos and pathos.

If ethos was low, Steve Jobs would use high levels of pathos and low levels of logos. If ethos was high, he would use low levels of pathos and high levels of logos.

In addition to effective use of the rhetorical triangle, Jobs also used a mix of rhetorical strategies such as repetition, re-stirring of discussions to suit his vision and goals, and amplification. Amplification refers to a literary technique in which the user enhances a series of words by adding information to increase their value and comprehensibility.

Criticism of Aristotle Model of Communication

Despite the fact that at first glance there does not seem much wrong with Aristotle’s communication model, there are important points of criticism of the model.

The main point of communication is that the model considers a directional process, from speaker to receiver.

In reality, it is a dynamic process in which both the speaker and receiver are active. Evidence for this can be found, for example, in the technology of eavesdropping.

Because of the above, the model is useless in many situations because the feedback is not included.

Now it’s your turn

What do you think? Are you familiar with the Aristotle model of communication? How do you think you can use this information to improve your communication skills? Do you have any additional tips for effective communication? Do you have any other suggestions or additions?

Share your experience and knowledge in the comments box below.

More information

Kallendorf, C., & Kallendorf, C. (1985). The figures of speech, ethos, and Aristotle: Notes toward a rhetoric of business communication . The Journal of Business Communication (1973), 22(1), 35-50.
Griffin, E. M. (2006). A first look at communication theory . McGraw-Hill .
Braet, A. C. (1992). Ethos, pathos and logos in Aristotle’s Rhetoric: A re-examination . Argumentation, 6(3), 307-320.

How to cite this article: Janse, B. (2018). Aristotle Model of Communication . Retrieved [insert date] from Toolshero: https://www.toolshero.com/communication-methods/aristotle-model-of-communication/

Original publication date: 10/07/2018 | Last update: 11/08/2023

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Ben Janse is a young professional working at ToolsHero as Content Manager. He is also an International Business student at Rotterdam Business School where he focusses on analyzing and developing management models. Thanks to his theoretical and practical knowledge, he knows how to distinguish main- and side issues and to make the essence of each article clearly visible.

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2 responses to “aristotle model of communication”.

It would be great if we find Criticism of this model.

Yes we do have some criticisms of this model 1. There is no concept of feedback, it is one way from the speaker to the audience. 2. There is no concept of communication failures like noise and barriers. 3. This model can only be used in public speaking.

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Aristotle’s Natural Philosophy

Aristotle had a lifelong interest in the study of nature. He investigated a variety of different topics, ranging from general issues like motion, causation, place and time, to systematic explorations and explanations of natural phenomena across different kinds of natural entities. These different inquiries are integrated into the framework of a single overarching enterprise describing the domain of natural entities. Aristotle provides the general theoretical framework for this enterprise in his Physics , a treatise which divides into two main parts, the first an inquiry into nature (books 1–4) and the second a treatment of motion (books 5–8). [ 1 ] In this work, Aristotle sets out the conceptual apparatus for his analysis, provides definitions of his fundamental concepts, and argues for specific theses about motion, causation, place and time, and establishes in bk. 8 the existence of the unmoved mover of the universe, a supra-physical entity, without which the physical domain could not remain in existence. He takes up problems of special interest to physics (such as the problem of generation and perishing) in a series of further physical treatises, some of which are devoted to particular physical domains: the De generatione et corruptione (On Generation and Perishing) , the De caelo (On the Heavens) , [ 2 ] and the Meteorology , which lead up to the treatises on biology and psychology. [ 3 ]

The science of physics, Aristotle stresses, contains almost all there is to know about the world. Were there no separate forms—entities such as the unmoved mover at the pinnacle of the cosmos—which are without matter and are not part of the physical world, physics would be what Aristotle calls first philosophy ( Metaphysics 6.1, 1026a27–31). As there are such separate entities, physics is dependent on these, and is only a second philosophy ( Metaphysics 7.11, 1037a14f). Nevertheless, the interaction between these two “philosophies” is not completely exhausted by the causal influence exerted on the world by the supra-physical entities—the prime movers as it turns out. Aristotle’s metaphysics and physics use a common conceptual framework, and they often address similar issues. The prime and distinctive task of first philosophy is an inquiry into first entities; these, however, are not perceptible entities, and as a result they have to be investigated through a metaphysical investigation of physical entities. Hence the overlap between the two disciplines, which often verges on inseparability.

1. Natures and the four causes

3. the principle of causational synonymy, 4. priority among motions, 5. movers and unmoved movers, glossary of aristotelian terms, primary sources, secondary sources, other internet resources, related entries.

Nature, according to Aristotle, is an inner principle of change and being at rest ( Physics 2.1, 192b20–23). This means that when an entity moves or is at rest according to its nature reference to its nature may serve as an explanation of the event. We have to describe how—to what extent, through what other processes, and due to what agency—the preconditions for the process of change or of being at rest are present, but once we have provided an account of these preconditions, we have given a complete account of the process. The nature of the entity is in and of itself sufficient to induce and to explain the process once the relevant circumstances do not preempt it.

Natures as inner principles of change and rest are contrasted with active powers or potentialities ( dunameis ), which are external principles of change and being at rest ( Metaphysics 9.8, 1049b5–10), operative on the corresponding internal passive capacities or potentialities ( dunameis again, Metaphysics 9.1, 1046a11–13). When a change, or a state of rest, is not natural, both the active and the passive potentiality need to be specified. Natures, then, in a way do double duty: once a nature is operative, neither a further active, nor a further passive capacity needs to be invoked. Even so, as will be clear from Aristotle’s discussion, this general thesis will require a host of qualifications.

Because natures—beside the active and passive potentialities—are ultimate grounds in causal explanations, Aristotle sets out how they are integrated with the doctrine of causation.

An explanation for a state of affairs must specify some feature or some object (in general, some abstract or concrete entity) which is responsible for it. The entity responsible is, Aristotle submits, a cause ( aitia or aition , words used interchangeably by Aristotle). [ 4 ] Different explanations of a single state of affairs are possible, and indeed usually necessary, because there are different ways of being responsible for distinct facets of the same state of affairs. The varieties of responsibilities are grouped by Aristotle under four headings, the so-called four causes.

The first two of these are matter and form, what an entity is made up from according to Aristotle’s hylomorphic analysis. Understandably, both of them can be responsible for the features and the behaviour of the entity they make up. Hylomorphic analysis, together with the separation of the material and formal causes as distinct types, implies that if something is explicable in terms of matter or form, explanations in terms of form will be different in kind from those given in terms of matter. As a rule there is a collaboration between these causes: matter provides the potentialities which are actualised by the form. Accordingly, these causally relevant entities give rise to a hierarchic structure of explanation. [ 5 ] In order for a form to be realised, one needs to have suitable matter. This suitable matter brings with it the features required by a given hylomorphic composite. These features, then, are on the one hand the contribution of the matter, and as such the matter is the (material) cause of these features of the composite entity, whereas on the other hand they are indispensable presuppositions for the realisation of the form, and to that extent their presence is prompted by the form. [ 6 ] Such dependency relations between matter and form are labelled by Aristotle as cases of hypothetical necessity. Aristotle sometimes illustrates his point by appealing to the matter required for the construction of a house. If there is a house to be built, one needs building bricks, slabs, mortar, etc. Each part provides material with properties within a definite range of the sort required for a house to come into being. A house cannot, for example, be made out of liquid water. That sort of matter would provide potentialities not suited for the form of house.

Explanations often specify entities beyond the role played by the matter and the form of the entity itself. These cases are grouped by Aristotle as efficient or moving causes on the one hand and as final causes on the other. Efficient causes operate in a straightforward manner by initiating processes and bringing about their effects, whereas final causes account for processes and entities by being what these processes and entities are for, what they objectively intend to attain. [ 7 ] The fact that the role of efficient causes is not identical to that of the matter and the form of the entity whose features they are to explain does not require that every instance of efficient causation must issue from outside the entity moved. On the contrary, an efficient cause can also be internal. In cases in which the efficient cause is internal, it will be, in its specific function, one of the parts, or even the formal aspect, of the entity caused to move.

Natures, understandably, can feature in any of these four causal functions. However, when the matter of an entity functions as its nature—i.e., when its natural motion and rest are explained in terms of the matter it is made of—this matter must possess some causally relevant features, bestowed upon it by its own formal aspect.

This role of matter can be contrasted to the causal role of the three further types of causes—of form, of efficient cause, and of final cause, respectively. This is so, because, as Aristotle adds, form and final cause often coincide. Moreover, when a nature is specified as a first efficient cause, cause and effect are the same in form (or in species), though this is not to say that one and the same entity causes itself and is caused through its own causal efficacy ( Physics 2.7, 198a24–27, cf. Metaphysics 8.4, 1044a32–b1).

As internal principles of moving and rest, natures stand in an exclusive relationship to the efficient or moving causes of the motions and rests they bring about: in some cases when Aristotle is not specifying the first moving cause, he can assert the identity of nature and moving cause. Accordingly, the soul of living beings will be identified as the substance (i.e., form) and the moving cause of the organism whose soul it is. [ 8 ] But the identification, even in this restricted sense, will need some further important qualifications, to which we will return in Section 5 below, on movers and unmoved movers.

Because motion or change ( kinêsis ) is mentioned in the definition of nature, any discussion of nature will need to rely upon the explanation of motion. One might—erroneously—think that this is an easy task, because Aristotle’s categories (as listed in the Categories and also elsewhere) do contain two related types of entities, action and passion. Aristotle’s discussion of motion in the Physics , however, starts out in a somewhat different manner. When he submits that there is no motion besides the categories ( Physics 3.1, at 200b32–201a3), he does not assign motions to the categories of action and passion. After mentioning that the entities in the categories come in oppositions, Aristotle claims a few lines later (at 201a8–9) that there are as many kinds of motion and change as there are kinds of being. This means that motions are grouped here with the entities of the category where they effect change. [ 9 ]

Nevertheless, when making this claim, Aristotle speaks about four kinds of motion and change only—those in substance, in quality, in quantity and in place—whereas the number of the kinds of being should have remained ten.

Indeed, the Physics will later submit its own list of categories. That list is slightly reduced—it has seven or eight elements, depending on whether we include or exclude time. [ 10 ] The reduced list also concludes with the claim that there are three kinds of motion, plus the additional kind of substantial change. [ 11 ] That is to say, even where Aristotle enumerates a fairly complete list of categories, he will not have motions in every one of these categories, and he is not content to relegate motions to the categories of action and passion. [ 12 ] But this is a context where Aristotle stresses another issue: he is not interested in assigning a separate ontological niche for motions—regardless of whether that might or might not have been a feasible task within the categorization of entities. Here Aristotle is more intent on characterizing the ontological links which motions have to entities falling into different categories, and to find a general matrix of undergoing and effecting change. This happens in several steps. First Aristotle claims that changes of relations are not changes in their own right; rather they are accidental, as they occur also in entities in which no change occurs at all, if the entity which they stand in relation to undergoes some change. [ 13 ] After these considerations the crucial two categories of action and passion are eliminated. They cannot possibly house motions in the same way as the other four categories do. This is so because such a motion would require that there should be motion or change of an action or a passion. But there are no motions of motions, so even though actions and passions qualify as motions, or at least are intimately linked to motions, we can set aside action and passion as types in which motions can occur. [ 14 ] This leaves us with the shorter list of relevant categories, (1) substance, (2) quality, (3) quantity, and (4) place. [ 15 ]

Within the four domains where genuine change can occur, change always requires the existence of a potentiality which can be actualised. But change is neither identical to this potentiality, nor to the lack of a property, nor, without further qualifications, to the actuality which is acquired when the potentiality is actualised ( Physics 3.2, 201b33–35). It is a special kind of actuality, the actuality of the potential in so far as it is potential ( Physics 3.2, 201b4–5). Aristotle’s formulation strongly suggests that the potentiality actualised in the process of change is not a separate and independent potentiality for motion, alongside the entity’s potentiality for harbouring the end-state of the process: the process, say, house-building, and the end result, the house, are different actualisations of the same potentiality of a set of materials that is buildable into a house. Not only would Aristotle’s definition be uninformative otherwise, amounting to the tautologous claim that change is the actualisation of the capacity for change, the further qualification in the definition, that change is the actuality of the potential in so far as it is potential, would be completely idle. [ 16 ] This further restriction is easiest taken as selecting between the different types of the realisations of the same potentialities. [ 17 ] As Aristotle stresses these are the incomplete actualities belonging to these potentialities, adding also that what is actualised in a process of realisation is an incomplete potentiality only ( Physics 3.2, 201b32–33). Accordingly, potentialities of change may be admitted into the ontology. But even if they are admitted as additional potentialities, they]do not need to feature as potentialities in their own right, but as the incomplete variants of the fundamental potentiality for an end result. [ 18 ]

It is furthermore important to note that potentiality in this discussion throughout excludes actuality. In a formulation closely matching the formulation of the principle of non-contradiction, Aristotle asserts that “some things are the same [=have the same properties, are the same substances] both in potentiality and in actuality, but not at the same time or not in the same respect, as e.g. [a thing is] warm in actuality and cold in potentiality” ( Physics 3.1, 201a19–22). [ 19 ] Hence the ability of Aristotle’s definition to pick out the paradoxical entity, which is the actuality of a potentiality that can no longer be present once it has been replaced by the corresponding property in actuality.

The definition of motion suggests that such processes can be characterised in terms of a property or state of an entity, acquired as a result at the end of the process, which can be labelled the form within this process, and an initial lack of this form. Furthermore, Aristotle claims, there is a third component, which is not changed in the process, the substrate or subject of the motion ( Physics 1.7). [ 20 ]

In terms of this threefold division it is the duty of the entity effecting change to confer the requisite form on the object changed, as Physics 3.2, 202a9–12 puts it. But there are further important requirements for such a change to occur. First of all, these motions or changes occur at the interaction of two potentialities. One, the passive potentiality, is in the object undergoing change, while the other, the active potentiality, is in the entity initiating change. The two potentialities need to match each other: when there is a potentiality for being heated in the object undergoing change, the process needs to be initiated by another object possessing an active potentiality for effecting the heating. This is true to the extent that Aristotle can claim that the definition of passive potentiality is dependent on that of the active potentiality ( Metaphysics 9.1, 1046a9–13). These two potentialities need to work in tandem, and consequently Aristotle can claim that there is only a single process going on, which is located in the entity moved. Thus, for example, when a process of instruction is going on, it is identical to a process of knowledge acquisition, which happens in the mind of the learner. Hence although action and passion retain their categorical difference, because their accounts are different, what they subsist in, the motion, will be the same ( Physics 3.3, 202b19–22). [ 21 ]

Aristotle already by the introduction of a matching pair of active and passive potentialities for each causal interaction comes very close to admitting a separate potentiality for each and every change, something uncomfortably close to the vis dormitiva , ridiculed by Molière, according to which a sleeping pill allegedly induces sleep just in virtue of its power to induce sleep. Aristotle, however, subscribes to an even stronger principle, that causes in effecting change transmit the form they possess to the entity they effect change in. According to this claim the active capacity of the item effecting change is at its root an actuality, which is synonymous (in the Aristotelian sense) with the effect that is brought about by it. In Aristotle’s favourite example, only a human in actuality produces a human from what is a human in potentiality. If this is so, a sleeping pill need not only possess an active potentiality for inducing sleep: it needs also to be slumbering itself. [ 22 ] The principle—which we could term the principle of causational synonymy—comes from Plato (see e.g. Phaedo 100B–101D), but Aristotle has his own reasons for endorsing it. His science attests to the presence and operation of causally active forms at each level of analysis of the physical world. [ 23 ] Hence, as we shall see, Aristotle’s forms are the causally significant components of the substance effecting a change. Accordingly, when it comes to specifying the moving cause of an artefact, Aristotle will refer to the art of the craftsman as the fundamental component operative in the change. In cases where a living being is generated, it is the parental form which is transmitted to the newly emerging living being. [ 24 ]

But it is not only processes of generation that conform to this requirement. Instances of qualitative change are often mentioned alongside substantial generation, and as a crucially important instance of qualitative alteration—or of qualitative quasi-alteration, depending on how we interpret Aristotle’s theory of perception [ 25 ] —Aristotle presupposes that the principle of causational synonymy characterises also the causal link connecting the object of sensation and the sense organ.

It is, nevertheless, important to note that Aristotle restricts the principle of causational synonymy in different and subtle ways. Most significantly, an important domain of cases where a property of an object is actualised is exempted from the requirements of this principle. The actualisation of a property can be the continuation of a previous causal process to the extent that Aristotle claims it is a second actuality , following upon a previously acquired first actuality . In these cases the emergence of the second actuality does not necessarily require an additional external efficient cause. The operation of this first actuality, through which it reinforces and completes itself, can be the mere extension of the operation of the original efficient cause (this will be Aristotle’s claim about the natural locomotion of the elements, see Section 5 below), or the entity which has acquired this first actuality can be already causally responsible for its own activities, including the ones which bring it to a level of higher actuality [ 26 ] (Aristotle’s examples for this case are the soul of the embryo or of the newborn cub, which commands and effects the nourishing and the activities of the animal; or the actual application of a piece of knowledge one has acquired beforehand). It is important to note that these claims are far from trivial: they rest on further claims that the very definitions of these first actualities (what it is to be an element, an animal, or knowledge, respectively) inseparably include references to these activities.

Second, the principle of causational synonymy is couched in terms which do not include locomotions: it is substantial, qualitative or quantitative form which is claimed to be transmitted through the efficacy of the cause in Physics 3.2, 202a9–12. One of the reasons for this is that locomotion, as Aristotle claims, affects the least the substance, the ousia of the object undergoing motion ( Physics 8.7, 261a20f). Unlike the other types of change, locomotion does not change the being of the moved object at all. To some extent that should mean that the predication of place should remain extrinsic to the being of the entity that is at a particular location. [ 27 ] Hence the fundamental presupposition of causation, that it is intrinsic characterisations of entities which are conferred on the object moved cannot be in full force in cases of locomotion. [ 28 ] Accordingly, Aristotle will have a more intricate account for natural and forced locomotions.

Third, the principle of causational synonymy is restricted to substances at the end of Metaphysics 7.9, [ 29 ] and in the first half of the same chapter the non-standard presence of some causally relevant forms may also be envisaged. Aristotle’s example there is the heat in motion, which produces heat in the body when the doctor rubs the patient in the appropriate manner. This heat in the motion can be the presence of an active potentiality in the motion which is able to elicit heat in the body, without heat being predicable of motion itself. But even if such non-inherential subsistence of properties is only hinted at, and not expressly envisaged in this passage (on a more detailed description the heat in motion is the active capacity of motion to produce heat in the skin of the patient—and in the skin of the doctor—which as far as the treatment is concerned enters into the inner recesses of the patient’s body, becoming heat in the body), some similar sort of presence is required in two large classes of cases: natural generations and artificial productions.

Aristotle claims that in a chain of efficient causes, where the first element of the series acts through the intermediary of the other items, it is the first member in the causal chain, rather than the intermediaries, which is the moving cause ( Physics 8.5, 257a10–12). Then, both in cases of natural generation and artificial production, it is only this first efficient cause which has to satisfy the requirement of synonymous causation. Aristotle’s prime example, that human generates human, is also such a case. Here, the causal efficacy of the paternal human form is transmitted through the generative potentialities of the semen of the father. The semen, however, although it acts as an efficient cause in the process of the formation of the embryo, is not a human; it does not possess the form it transmits in the same way as the male parent does. Aristotle’s discussion makes it clear that this is not an isolated instance of an exception from the general principle. He compares the case to the activity of a craftsman, where the form of the product of the artistic production is in the soul of the craftsman, and then through the motions of the instruments this form can get imposed on the material manufactured into an artefact. The instruments and their motions are efficient causes of the process, but they do not contain the form in the same way as the soul of the craftsman ( On the generation of animals 730b14–23 and 740b25–29, for further discussion see the entry on Aristotle’s biology ). [ 30 ]

All these restrictions notwithstanding, Aristotle can claim that the principle of causational synonymy remains universally valid. This is so, because all the three restrictions above specify cases where Aristotle can claim that a preceding, more prominent cause has already satisfied the requirement: in the case of second actualities the first actuality was called into existence by a synonymous cause in the first place; locomotions, qualitative and quantitative changes, even if not caused by a synonymous entity, can be part of a larger pattern of causation, in which a substance is caused by a substance of the same kind; and causal chains producing substances can be claimed to start out invariably from synonymous substances.

Given his commitment to causal synonymy, Aristotle needs to invoke considerations through which a chain of efficient causes of some entity can be meaningfully compared in terms of causal efficacy. These considerations will on each occasion describe synonymous causes not only as temporally prior, but also as having priority in terms of causal efficacy over the intermediate causes, which are responsible only for the transmission of the forms of the original locus of causal efficacy.

This allows, then, that in the two major paradigms of such causation—in natural generation and in artificial production—the nature of the natural entity, and the art [ 31 ] of the craftsman exercising his art respectively, the relevant form is the causally operative entity initiating change. This has wide ranging consequences for the status of forms in several respects. First, the causal relevance of these forms shows that not any arrangement or configuration can qualify as a full-fledged form. While it is true that privations are also forms in some sense ( Physics 2.1, 193b19–20), this is not the sense in which the causally operative forms, describable in evaluative terms, can be called forms. Moreover, the causal relevance of forms allows Aristotle to switch (e.g. in De generatione et corruptione 1.7) without notice between the craftsman and the craft itself as the appropriate specification of the efficient cause in these cases. We should note that in the latter cases, Aristotle specifies causes which are unmoved. They do not effect motion by being in motion themselves, in so far as they are the causally effective forms within the causal framework; hence they are not under any reactive influence during this process either.

Even though the foregoing might have suggested that generation of substances is fundamental for all the other kinds of changes, in fact locomotion will have a privileged status. All other changes depend on locomotions, because any two entities involved in change, with their active and passive potentialities, respectively, need to come into contact in order for the interaction to occur. [ 32 ] Contact, however, as a rule needs to be established by locomotion: either the entity to be moved, or the mover, or both, need to proceed so that they meet ( Physics 8.7, 260a26–b7). Moreover locomotion is the form of change which can occur in isolation of generation, perishing and the other forms of change ( Physics 8.7, 260b26–29). Other changes are independent kinds of change insofar as they can occur in an entity which does not perform any other change. Nevertheless all these forms of change include or presuppose that some other entity engages in locomotion. [ 33 ]

Aristotle argues at the opening of Physics bk. 8 that motion and change in the universe can have no beginning, because the occurrence of change presupposes a previous process of change. With this argument Aristotle can establish an eternal chain of motions and refute those who hold that there could have been a previous stationary state of the universe. Such an eternal chain, Aristotle argues, needs to rely on a cause which guarantees its persistence: if each of the constitutive processes in the causally connected web were of finite duration, for every one of them it can be the case that it is not present in the world, indeed, at some later time it will not be present any longer. But then the whole causally connected series of events, Aristotle claims, would also be contingent. [ 34 ] Hence Aristotle postulates that the processes of the universe depend on an eternal motion (or on several eternal motions), the eternal revolution of the heavenly spheres, which in turn is dependent on one or several unmoved movers ( Physics 8.6, 258b26–259a9). [ 35 ]

The priority of the eternal celestial revolutions, furthermore, guarantees the causal finitude of the universe. This is so, even though there are infinite causal chains: behind every single individual of an animal species there is an infinite series of male ancestors, each causally responsible for the subsequent members in the series, because Aristotelian species are eternal and male parents are the efficient causes of their offspring. [ 36 ] Left to its own devices, the finite universe on its own would certainly reach a dissolution, a state of complete separation of the elemental masses into their concentrically arranged natural places. In view of the fact that such a complete segregation of the elemental masses is avoided through the constant excitation caused by the celestial motions, producing heat in the sublunary domain, especially around the regions of the Sun, [ 37 ] Aristotle will be entitled to assert that the cause of the human being is in the first instance his or her father, but is at the same time the Sun as it moves along its annual ecliptic path. [ 38 ] Between celestial revolutions and the individual natural processes there is always a finite causal chain, as these natural processes could not possibly have continued without the celestial motions. The infinite causal chains passing through male parents cannot subsist on their own without this constant external support, and this dependence can always be analysed in terms of finite causal chains.

The definition of motion as the actuality of a potentiality of the entity undergoing motion in so far as it is potential requires that in each case the passive potentiality for the change is present in the changing object. The presence of the potentiality can, nevertheless, be in accordance with the nature of the object—in which case the change is natural ( phusei ) or according to nature ( kata phusin ), or can happen in the face of a contrary disposition on the part of the nature of the entity—in which case the change is forced ( biâi ) or contrary to nature ( para phusin ). A major presupposition on Aristotle’s part is that this division is exhaustive: there are no changes to which the nature of the entity would be indifferent or neutral. [ 39 ] The major consideration behind such a presupposition is that natures regulate the behaviour of the entities to which they belong in a comprehensive manner, and not merely partially. Any influence the entity is exposed to interacts with its nature in a substantive manner. The entity does not possess potentialities for change which would not be directly related to the tendencies emerging from its nature.

Note, however, that even if we endorsed the exhaustiveness of the dichotomy of natural and forced motions, and accepted the thesis that simple bodies possess a unique natural motion ( De caelo 1.2, 269a8–9), we would not need thereby to accept Aristotle’s further major claim, that natural and forced motions come in pairs of opposites, with the result that if a motion is contrary to the nature of an entity, the opposite motion will be its natural motion ( De caelo 1.2, 269a9–18). Where there is room for some more complex relationships among the targets of changes than a simple opposition along an axis of a single dimension—and this is eminently so between locomotions along rectilinear and circular paths, respectively—there can be several forced translations in contrast to the single natural motion of the elements endowed with rectilinear natural motion, as Aristotle also admits in some passages of the De caelo (see 1.2, 269a30–b2 and 269b10–12).

Although this allows for several different motions that are contrary to the nature of the same entity, the natural motion will still have a single opposite motion, the one which is directed to the opposite location. Consequently, natural circular motion will have no motion that is opposite to it ( De caelo 1.4, 270b32–271a5). [ 40 ]

Aristotle’s classification of motions into those contrary to nature and those according to nature applies not only to the motions of the moved objects, but transfers also to the movers effecting motions. A mover can effect a motion which is contrary to its own nature. Aristotle’s example of such an unnatural mover is the lever, an object heavy by nature, with which loads can be lifted ( Physics 8.4, 255a20–23). Although such movers can effect motions in the contrary direction to the motion at the head of the causal chain (levers are operated by the downward push of something heavy at the other end), the crucial consideration for Aristotle in this case is that the original, initiating cause of the causal chain should effect the motion according to its nature. Taken together, these considerations imply that we have a complete account of the physical domain once we have a thorough description of what is natural to the entities in that domain, together with a specification of all the circumstances in which they operate. [ 41 ]

Bk. 8 of the Physics argues for the additional thesis that for each motion, whether natural or contrary to nature, there needs to exist a mover. [ 42 ] In cases of forced motion, movers are present in a conspicuous way. This need not be so, however, in cases of natural motion. Apart from the cases where the nature of the entity is at the same time a moving and efficient cause—i.e., apart from living beings, whose nature, the soul, is both formal and efficient cause—the mover may be inconspicuous. This is eminently so in the remaining large class of natural motions, the natural motions of the elements. The nature of these elements, their inner principle of motion and rest is not the moving cause of the motions of the elements, Aristotle claims. If it were, then it would be up to the elementary masses to determine when they should perform their motions, but plainly this is not so. Moreover, the principle of causational synonymy rules out that any homogenous mass, without an internal demarcation into separate components, one moving and the other being moved, could move itself ( Physics 8.4, 255a5–18). This is so because, on the assumption that one part of a homogeneous body could move another part, the active component of change would be, in every aspect, indistinguishable from the part in which change is effected, and this in turn would mean that change would occur even though there would be no transmission of a causally relevant property from the active part to the passive. This implies that even though we may answer the question as to why the elements move to their natural places—the light bodies up and the heavy ones down—by an appeal to their respective natures as causes (“that it is simply their nature to move somewhere, [ 43 ] and this is what it is to be light and to be heavy,” Physics 8.4, 255b13–17), we do not thereby specify their moving causes. Their thrust being in a single direction, the elements cannot circumvent even rather simple obstacles they may encounter on their way (a sealed container can retain air under water, the roof stays put pressing down on the walls of a building etc.). Hence, whoever removes an obstacle to an element’s motion is causally responsible for the ensuing elemental motions. But even such a causally responsible agent will not qualify as the moving cause, without yet further qualifications. For the identification of the moving cause of these locomotions Aristotle invokes his distinction of two potentialities. Some heavy material can be potentially light, as it can be transformed into a light material in a process of generation, whereas the emerging light material is still potential in a sense until it has acquired its full-fledged status, which involves its having arrived at that region of the cosmos which is its natural place. This analysis, then, describes the natural locomotion of the elements as a possibly postponed, completing stage within a single overarching process, and hence in these cases Aristotle can identify the cause of the second stage of the process with the efficient cause of the first stage, the entity which generated the element in the first place ( Physics 8.4, 256a1).

Once it is established that there is a mover for each change, the finite causal chains [ 44 ] can be followed up to the primary instance of motion, which are eternal circular motions. (In particular the Sun’s course along the ecliptic is responsible for many sublunar changes, the cycle of the seasons being foremost among them.) Whether these circular motions require external movers, and ultimately, whether the universe is causally closed or needs some external causal influence for its preservation, depends on the status of these revolutions.

In this regard the very first thing to establish is that they cannot be constrained motions. [ 45 ] But natural motions are also in need of movers, as Physics 8.4 argues. This does not apply only to the natural motions of living beings, which are performed under the causal influence of their soul. The natural motions of the four sublunary elements are also caused by specific external causes responsible for these motions, and on the basis of these considerations Aristotle feels entitled to assert that every motion whatsoever—including also, then, the eternal circular motions—require a mover.

But the entities performing these eternal circular motions cannot possibly be moved by moving causes of the same kind as the movers of sublunary elemental motions. These entities are eternal and ungenerated bodies. Consequently, there is no entity that could produce them. Nothing can be responsible for the circular motion on account of generating these eternal and ungenerated bodies. Moreover, as they do not encounter any hindrance during their revolutions, there is no room for an accidental mover which would remove any obstacle in their way.

Although Aristotle’s physical treatises do not discuss in what particular way their movers are causally responsible for these eternal circular motions, the general framework set out apparently applies to them as well. In accordance with this, motion is an incomplete actuality of the potentiality of what is movable ( Physics 8.5, 257b6ff). This incomplete actuality is always dependent on the causal efficacy of the corresponding actuality of a mover. The example presented here is the process of heating a potentially hot item, caused to be hot by an actually hot thing. The division of roles guarantees that the same item cannot possibly be the mover and the moved entity at the same time. Consequently, these eternal circular motions are envisaged as having a cause responsible for their motion, the causal influence of which produces (and upholds) this motion continuously in them. Aristotle does not specify in any detail what exactly the actuality of the mover is; nor does he indicate what relationship there is between this actuality and the actuality that is being continuously communicated by the mover to the entities in eternal circular motion.

A further requirement is that the mover of these eternal circular motions has to be unmoved. [ 46 ] But then the actuality of this mover should not be restricted to a causally efficacious single property. Rather, the mover should be actual all way through. Any potentiality it might have would carry with it the jeopardy that it might undergo possible changes of its own. [ 47 ] This is ruled out to the extent that such a first cause cannot house motion even accidentally. [ 48 ] In other words, the mover cannot be related to the moving object in the way the soul of an animal is related to the moving animal; in the case of an animal wherever the living being, the animal, moves, its soul will follow suit and will also move,—accidentally—to the same place. [ 49 ]

Moreover, the entity causally responsible for the eternal circular motions in the world has to possess an infinite power, [ 50 ] which it communicates to the bodies it moves. As a result, this entity cannot be divisible and cannot have extension. Moreover, it must be located where the motion is quickest, at the periphery of the physical realm ( Physics 8.10).

All this testifies to the exceptional status of the first movement, and behind it, of the first mover in the universe. The mover of these spheres possesses nothing but actuality, but this actuality is not what is transmitted in the process of causation. As we have seen in Section 3 above, this would not be exceptional as such: locomotion need not be caused on the transmission model of causation. But locomotions, although caused without the transmission of an actuality of being located in any particular location, were understood to be embedded in larger patterns of causation which observe the principle of causational synonymy. It is precisely any such larger pattern of causation which is missing in the case of celestial motions. [ 51 ] Note furthermore that what we hear in Metaphysics 12.6, that the first mover moves as an object of love and striving, [ 52 ] comes perilously close to abandoning the claims of Physics bk. 8 to the effect that there is an unmoved mover serving as the efficient cause of the motions of the cosmos. Such doubts, however, should be dismissed. In these two contexts Aristotle gives distinct descriptions of some principle that is beyond the realm of physics. First, still connecting it to the framework of the Physics , he is characterizing a supra-physical entity without which the universe could not function or persist, and then, second, in the Metaphysics , he is offering an account of the causal efficacy of the supra-physical substance in terms of what this entity itself is. Small wonder that these two accounts situate the mode of operation of this entity in two different frames of physical causation.

action: poiein
activity: praxis
actuality: energeia or entelecheia
art, craft: technê
capacity: dunamis
cause: aitia or aition
change: kinêsis or metabolê to effect change or motion: kinein to undergo change or motion: kineisthai qualitative change: alloiôsis quantitative changes—growth: auxêsis; decay: phthisis locomotion: phora
to come to be: gignesthai
coming to be: genesis
force: bia forced: biâi
form: eidos or morphê
in so far as: hêi
genus, kind: genos
goal: telos
kind, species: eidos
known, knowable: gnôrimon more known, more knowable: gnôrimôteron
matter: hulê
magnitude: megethos
motion: kinêsis
nature: phusis natural: phusikos, phusei according to nature: kata phusin contrary to nature: para phusin
passion: paschein
to perish: phtheirein
perishing: phthora
place: pou (as one of the categories, literally: where) or topos
potentiality: dunamis
power: dunamis
quality: poion
quantity: poson
substance: ousia
time: pote (as one of the categories, literally: when) or chronos
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The Activity of Being: An Essay on Aristotle's Ontology

Aryeh Kosman, The Activity of Being: An Essay on Aristotle's Ontology , Harvard University Press, 2013, 277pp., $45.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780674072862.

Reviewed by Christopher P. Long, Pennsylvania State University

Aristotle's thinking is peripatetic. It moves along paths, some well-worn, others newly cleared by the creative elasticity of his thinking. It pursues questions by traversing a course for a stretch, but when finding its way impeded, is unafraid to turn around, return to the start, or even to cut a new path of its own to navigate a hindrance, to find a way around an aporia.

To read Aristotle well is to cultivate something of that peripatetic elasticity of mind; it is to learn to walk with him, without rushing; it is to tarry with his thinking and to patiently pursue where it leads. To follow Aristotle in this way is no mindless passion, though it is not without a certain degree of suffering; rather, to follow Aristotle requires a heightened activity of mind, an attuned awareness of the movement of thinking itself, and a willingness to follow where it leads. The practice of Aristotelian thinking habituates us to the activity of thinking itself, which is, in the end, the very place to which Aristotle's thinking leads us: to the thinking of thinking thinking.

When walking with Aristotle, it is advisable to bring friends along, and whenever possible, a guidebook. There is no better companion to ask than Aryeh Kosman, for he has dedicated a lifetime to walking with Aristotle, and there is no better guidebook than his new volume. The best guides are pious, for they respect the terrain as much as the landscape. There is, at the heart of this book, a deep and abiding piety, which Kosman himself emphasizes when he claims to read "Aristotle with a worshipful hermeneutical eye" (xii). His approach combines the disciplinary patience of a disciple with the candor and critical attentiveness of a trusted friend. His stated purpose "is simply to try to make clear what [Aristotle] is saying" (xiii). This enterprise should thus to be understood as an attempt, that is, as a kind of assaying -- it bears, after all, the subtitle An Essay on Aristotle's Ontology .

The book is, in fact, an essay in the sense Michael Oakeshott associates with philosophical reflection when he writes:

Philosophical reflection is recognized here as the adventure of one who seeks to understand in other terms what he already understands . . . . Its most appropriate expression is an essay where the character of the utterance (a traveller's tale) matches the character of the engagement, an intellectual adventure which has a course to follow but no destination. . . . It is, in short, a well-considered intellectual adventure recollected in tranquility. [1]

The adventure Kosman's essay recollects is that of Aristotle's ontology, its tranquility informed by a lifetime dedicated to the pursuit of being in Aristotle. At the end of Metaphysics VII.1, that is to say, at the end of the chapter that begins Aristotle's deepest, most perplexing and rewarding investigation into the question of being, Aristotle himself articulates the course the quest for being must follow: "And indeed, in early times, now and always, the inquiry, indeed always the perplexity concerning what being is ( ti to on ) is just this: 'what is ousia ?'" [2]

If Oakeshott is right and the philosophical essay seeks to understand in other terms what has already somehow been understood, we might take this passage as itself a kind of assaying, an attempt to articulate in other terms the question 'what is being?'. The other term to which Aristotle points, ousia , is, of course, as elusive and perplexing as the cognate it is said to replace. Ousia is the substantive form of einai , to be, of which on is the participle. The shift from the participial articulation of the verb to its expression as a substantive noun seems, on the surface, to shift our focus from activity to thing. This impression is surely reinforced by the Latin into which ousia was translated, substantia , and by which it found its way into English as 'substance'.

Kosman suggests, and rightly, that "the choice of substance as the primary mode of being is not as arbitrary and tendentious as it sounds. . . . It is [ ousia 's] translation as substance that is the tendentious move" (256n3). This can be heard, however, only if we attend to the word in its ancient sense, as what is most one's own -- not only one's property, though also that -- but more significantly, the conditioned habits of being what one really is. [3] Heidegger is helpful in this regard: "What is characteristic of the customary meaning is that not only does it express a being, but a being in the how of its being." [4] Thus, the direction to which Aristotle points at the beginning of his inquiry into being is toward a being in the how of its being, toward a determinate being doing what it does, being what it is -- ousia .

And yet, although this is the direction in which Kosman intends to follow Aristotle in order to demonstrate how ousia is further and decisively determined as energeia , that is, as a being-at-work "best construed," Kosman suggests, "as activity," nevertheless, he retains "substance" as a translation of ousia because it "has by now acquired such authority in its own right that it would be a mistake to abandon it" (x). Here, however, Kosman's hermeneutical eye seems perhaps too reverent, not of Aristotle, but of a misleading tradition of translation, however authoritative it has become. This deference to tradition is somewhat surprising insofar as Kosman in a number of other places rejects traditional renderings of Aristotelian terms precisely in order to understand in other words the dynamic thinking of Aristotle himself.

Indeed, it would not be hyperbolic to suggest that the entire essay depends upon the rejection of the traditional translations of energeia and dunamis as actuality and potentiality, respectively. These translations, Kosman reminds us, "lead us to think of realization as the making actual of a possibility." But this, he goes on to say, "obscures what is fundamental in Aristotle," which is that "the paradigmatic realization is the exercise of a capacity " (viii). Rather than actuality and potentiality, Kosman rightly insists upon activity as the translation for energeia , and ability or capacity for dunamis . This shift in translation requires a shift in thinking away from an understanding of being as an entity, toward being as an activity. In attending to such subtle questions of translation, Kosman remains true to Aristotle's legomenological method, that is, to his recognition that the ways we speak about being provide access to the nature of being itself. [5]

By shifting our ways of saying energeia and dunamis Kosman brings us further along the path Aristotle's own thinking travelled, for activity and ability direct our attention to ousia as the how of being, the manner in which it is at work being what it is.

If Kosman sets us effectively onto the path upon which Aristotle's intellectual adventure in search of the meaning of being unfolds, moving from being as substance to being as activity, it proceeds, if not to a destination, at least to an articulation of being as divine.

Divine Being

In turning, in the last third of the book, to the question of divine being, Kosman suggests a reversal that enables him to develop an account of how Metaphysics XII, where we encounter the unmoved mover and the divine nature of the thinking of thinking thinking, ought to be read in connection with the middle books of the Metaphysics , where we encounter perceptible ousia in all its rich complexity. This reversal involves a particular way of ascribing divinity to what is divine. Kosman puts it this way:

Instead of imagining ourselves discovering what is divine and then coming to see it as the principle of being -- of ousia -- think instead of coming to see that which is the principle of being as, just because it is the principle of being, divine. (186)

This seemingly simple reversal of perspective subtly shifts our attention to the divine nature of the natural world. It enables Kosman to read Metaphysics XII not as an account of the divine sub specie aeternitatis , but as an account of the world sub specie divinitatis . Metaphysics XII is not an articulation of the divine from the perspective of eternity divorced from the vagaries of temporal existence, it is rather an articulation of ousia in a different register, under the aspect of divinity. Thus, Kosman insists that the proper path of thinking is precisely the path the Metaphysics traverses, namely, from the world to its divinity, and not from the nature of the divine into the world. The Metaphysics pursues the traces of the divine by attending to the manner in which beings are at work being what they are -- an activity Aristotle calls ousia .

First Mover

Metaphysics XII, then, must be read as consistent with the middle books, but in the register of theology (186). Thus, in framing the discussion of the unmoved mover, Kosman insists: "Rather than attributing the role of the first mover to divinity, think instead of conferring divine status on that which is revealed to be the world's motive principle" (186). This enables him to offer a compelling account of the continuity not only between the middle books of the Metaphysics and Metaphysics XII, but also of the strand of thinking about the first mover that connects the De Caelo , the Physics , and the Metaphysics .

Rather than falling into the traditional developmentalist reading that emerges from the notion that the first mover in the De Caelo is, unlike that found in the Physics and Metaphysics , itself in motion, Kosman proposes a more complex account in which "Aristotle's first mover remains a self-mover" (194). He accomplishes this by arguing that the motive principle of the heaven described in the De Caelo ought best to be understood as the soul of the visible world of motion (200). Thus, Kosman suggests, because the first mover in the De Caelo is said to be the living principle of the heaven ( De Caelo 1.9, 279a23-279b4), "We may therefore speak of it as forming with the heaven what is in effect the soul and body of a single divine entity" (201).

Understanding the first mover of the De Caelo in this sense enables Kosman to point to its continuity with the position articulated in the Physics in which the first mover is said to be itself unmoved ( Physics 8.6, 259b22-24). For Kosman, the emphasis on the unmoved nature of the first mover in the Physics is driven by the demands of that particular investigation, concerned as it is to give an account of natural motion. But this emphasis should not prevent us from recognizing a deeper continuity between the two texts, for there remains a sense in which the first mover in the De Caelo , understood as the soul of the world of motion, may itself be said to be unmoved in the sense required by the argument of the Physics .

A third shift in emphasis can be found, according to Kosman, in the Metaphysics , where the being of what is "unmoved" [ akinēton ] is further determined as an activity, energeia (205-06). Kosman puts it this way:

The systematic redescription of unmoved substance as active substance -- the replacement of the term akinēton by the term energeia -- is not an abandonment of the requirement that the first mover be unmoved. What it discloses is the sense in which the first mover must be understood. For it is a principle that is unmoved in a deeper and more subtle sense than the simple akinēton may capture, the sense revealed in recognizing the divine principle of motion and being alike as substance that is activity . (206)

This attention to the various senses of the unmoved is deeply Aristotelian. With Kosman, we experience Aristotle's thinking at-work being the elastic and dynamic thing it is. By tracing the contours of the activity of being in Aristotle, Kosman draws us into the very activity that is Aristotle's thinking and opens a path for us to appreciate the significance of Aristotle's most poignant formulation of the activity of thinking itself as divine.

Divine Thinking

Here again, we proceed in accordance with the reversal Kosman enacted earlier. If we were led to recognize the first mover as divine precisely insofar as it served as the principle of the world's motion, here we are asked to attend to the nature of thinking as divine. Thus, Kosman writes: "instead of imagining a cardinal feature of god as awareness, think instead of coming to see the principle of the awareness we have of the world -- of the consciousness that we know as nous -- as for that very reason being divine" (186). To see the world sub specie divinitatis is not to posit god as the first principle of the world, but to see our awareness of the world itself, the very activity of being aware, as divine.

For Kosman, this is precisely a way of seeing, one that emerges for us as we follow his highly cultivated worshipful hermeneutical eye. Less clear, however, is whether we miss something vital about the activity of being if we see thinking as analogous to vision without also attending to the manner in which it comes to expression in the things Aristotle says. Kosman rightly insists that in order to understand the connection between thinking and divine being, we need to attend to how it "reveals itself" (214); but this revelation unfolds largely, but at important moments not exclusively, as an analogy with seeing.

Specifically, when Kosman turns his attention to Aristotle's decisive formulation that thinking "if it is the most excellent, thinks itself and is the thinking of thinking thinking [ hē noēsis noēseōs noēsis ] ( Metaphysics XII.9, 1074b33-4)" he does not attend to the texture of the articulation itself, but moves quickly to the analogy between knowing and the thing known in order to illustrate that this most provocative of formulations does not entail reflective self-awareness. In so doing, he moves perhaps too quickly from the thing Aristotle says here, for the point he wants to make with reference to knowing and the thing known is itself already heard in the very articulation of the words " hē noēsis noēseōs noēsis ," the thinking of thinking thinking.

Kosman, however, moves quickly, and not without good reason, to the example Aristotle introduces immediately afterwards when he insists that there is a sense of understanding in which "understanding [ epistēmē ] is the thing [ pragma ]." The active identity between understanding and thing understood, epistēmē and pragma , helps us to see how it is possible for thinking to be identical with what is thought without becoming its own object. Kosman puts it this way: "it must reveal a mode of thinking in which there is no distinction between thinking and being thought, but in which thinking does not become its own object" (226).

Kosman further elucidates this mode of thinking by appealing to Aristotle's account of our capacity for vision in the De Anima . Taking as his example the seeing of a red door, Kosman rightly reminds us that our ability to see the red door depends upon a cooperative activity between the visibility of the door and our human powers of vision. He writes:

These correlative powers enjoyed by my body and the door are exercised in the activity of vision, in which perception and its immediate object become one by virtue of the oneness of the activity that constitutes their mutual realizations: perceiving and being perceived ( De Anima 3.2, 425b26). But while they do so, eye and door remain distinct. (227)

This detour through the economy of visual perceiving allows Kosman to return to the example of the active identity between epistēmē and pragma in order to suggest that this activity itself is not a simple act of self-reflection. "The pragma is nothing but the immediate object of understanding with which the understanding becomes one, and it therefore occupies the place in the economy of importance and value that is occupied in perception by the remote, that is, ultimate object of perception" (228).

Here Kosman is careful to tease out the significance of the analogy with vision for our understanding of divine thinking, but just as the powers of vision and understanding in their active identity with what is seen and understood don't simply reflect upon themselves, so too the activity of thinking Aristotle calls divine is not simply reflective self-awareness. Indeed, here Kosman returns to the formulation itself -- hē noēsis noēseōs noēsis -- in order to emphasize that "It signifies simply the internal self-presence that must characterize any act of cognition (whatever its object) insofar as it is an act of awareness" (230).

It is striking, however, that Kosman does not conclude his account of thinking as divine with this gesture to that awareness which conditions all acts of cognition. Rather, he goes on to emphasize the manner in which the formal principle of cognition is itself intentional, that is, the manner in which it touches upon the world in active awareness. Here Kosman takes recourse in the discussion of De Anima , book III, chapter four, where thinking is said to be apathēs , which points to its capacity, as Kosman puts it, "to become (without relinquishing its identity) whatever it takes as object" (231, De Anima , III.4, 429a21-2). This allows him to articulate consciousness as a power of receptivity, "a power of openness to determination by the other, given at once active being and determinacy by its intentional object" (231).

This move, however, to the receptivity of thinking, this turn to the world in order to articulate the dynamics of an activity capable of being determined without relinquishing its identity, is heard already in the very formulation Aristotle uses to give voice to divine thinking -- hē noēsis noēseōs noēsis -- the thinking of thinking thinking. The genitive in the middle gestures to the intentional openness Kosman's account so beautifully articulates even as the repetition of the name for the activity itself reinforces the integrity of its identity. In the very articulation of the phrase itself, we can discern the trace of a capacity at work in the activity of being, an active capacity Kosman has described as emblematic of the nature of substance -- ousia , an activity at once divine and mundane:

The emulation of divinity thus takes place in Aristotle's view not only in the activity of thinking, but in the activity of reproduction as well, in the complex biological, social, and in our case, political and cultural acts by which substances pass on to their progeny the bounded activity of their mortal lives. (234)

Here then, we hear again, the degree to which this book is itself an essay, for as Lukács has said, "the essayist who is really capable of looking for the truth will find at the end of his road the goal he was looking for: life." [6] Kosman, with his worshipful hermeneutical eye, keeps us close on the trail of the Stagirite, where, activating all our capacities of discernment -- perceiving, imagining, and thinking alike -- we might encounter the traces of the very activity by which life expresses itself.

[1] Oakeshott, On Human Conduct , vii.

[2] See, Metaphysics , VII.1, 1028b2-4; translation is my own, from Long, The Ethics of Ontology: Rethinking an Aristotelian Legacy , SUNY Press, 4.

[3] See, ousia , n. Liddell and Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon .

[4] Heidegger, Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy , Indiana University Press, 20.

[5] For a discussion of the legomenological method in Aristotle, see Long, Aristotle on the Nature of Truth , Cambridge University Press, 7."The things said, ta legomena , open a way into the nature of things; and it is the nature of things to express themselves."

[6] Lukács, Soul & Form , MIT Press, 27.

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Aristotle’s Communication Model

Aristotle, a great philosopher initiative the earliest mass communication model called “Aristotle’s Model of Communication”. He proposed model before 300 B.C who found the importance of audience role in communication chain in his communication model. This model is more focused on public speaking than interpersonal communication.

Aristotle Model of Communication is formed with 5 basic elements

(i) Speaker, (ii) Speech, (iii) Occasion, (iv) Audience and (v) Effect.

Aristotle advises speakers to build speech for different audience on different time (occasion) and for different effects.

Speaker plays an important role in Public speaking. The speaker must prepare his speech and analysis audience needs before he enters into the stage. His words should influence in audience mind and persuade their thoughts towards him.

Alexander gave brave speech to his soldiers in the war field to defeat Persian Empire.

Speaker – Alexander

Speech – about his invasion

Occasion – War field

Audience – Soldiers

Effect – To defeat Persia

Limited Effects Theory
Knapp’s Relationship Model
Functions of Mass Communication
BERLO'S SMCR MODEL OF COMMUNICATION
Westley and MacLean’s Model of Communication
De Fleur Model of Communication

put more information pliz aristotle bt its gud work really appriciate it thank yu

I understand the model clearly. thx

great work, as it take into consideration effect

I’m subversively impressed by the works of Aristotle though more could have been given on the negative dimension of the model

Thanks for your clear explanation… How about merits and demerits’ of this mode

i think this is allwrong and everybody who thinks diferent needs to do more reasearvh cause Aristotle is stupid

Aristotle wrote two thousand four hundred years ago but his clear and logical insights are still foundations for communications theory, as they are in theater (another form of communication ) as well. Besides writing on communications in the last four thousand years(!) there has certainly been a lot of really insightful work done in the last thirty years -in fact, I was amazed when I revisited the field recently, how much insightful and useful theory and investigation HAS taken place in these last thirty years.

thanks a lot , i now understand the theory clearly

how come my communication skills lecturer only mentioned three elements of the Aristotle model of communication i.e speaker-speech-audience?

Communication simply sharing idea

thank u so much i have got more than what i needed ur the best

I want to know more about this and in hence my brain wise

well researched have been assisted a lot thank you

I want to know more about this model communication so that I can enhance my knowledge….

I like cuz it has so many information 🙂

Well understood model

I understand the models so vividly. he gave a very important and fine explanation on communication. thanks to him.

model is too biased cause its largely one way communication

The model is explained in the simplest way that anyone can be in position to understand. I like it.

its good of know about the ancient way of communication, but put most recent for us to learn better. you’ve done well. thanks

pls add more information

Thanks so much

some senses surely…tnx

there is no consideration of feedback but is a good explanation,,,kudos to him

more source

Aristotle’s theory was groundbreaking during its time; it put so much power on the speaker and little on the audience. However, later day theories are conscious of the other major elements in the communication process, such as audience effect as well as barriers to communication resulting from siurce, channel or receiver. These important components were scarecely considered in Aristotelian theory. If the theory has any drawbacks, these could be some of them.

thanks so much eish…….that was the only thing that was likely to hinder me from getting my distinction but now i know uuum…..Thanks so much

Good exposition

Thanks for your explanation

It’s a awesome explanation and detailed very understandable

You didn’t give the basic explanation Arustotle’s communication model is sender based with four elements The sender The message The receiver and The Effect The main function is to persuade the other party irrespective of the feedback It dwells on the sender nit caring how the receiver receives the message.

i understand the model now but what are the limitations of this model

It’s very good and easy to understand,thanks but add more content like ways to improve this model of communication

And isn’t it STRANGE that NOBODY ever CHALLENGED Aristotle on his falsifiable assumption. He does not describe or define communicating, but sendership and listenership among human beings. No accountable science uses Classical philosophy as its bottomline… So why do professors in propaganda still do so?

Thankyou for the explanation

Aristotle's Rhetorical Situation

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Rhetorical Concepts

Many people have heard of the rhetorical concepts of logos , ethos , and pathos even if they do not necessarily know what they fully mean. These three terms, along with kairos and telos , were used by Aristotle to help explain how rhetoric functions. In ancient Greece, these terms corresponded with basic components that all rhetorical situations have.

Logos is frequently translated as some variation of “logic or reasoning,” but it originally referred to the actual content of a speech and how it was organized. Today, many people may discuss the logos qualities of a text to refer to how strong the logic or reasoning of the text is. But logos more closely refers to the structure and content of the text itself. In this resource, logos means “text.”

Ethos is frequently translated as some variation of “credibility or trustworthiness,” but it originally referred to the elements of a speech that reflected on the particular character of the speaker or the speech’s author. Today, many people may discuss ethos qualities of a text to refer to how well authors portray themselves. But ethos more closely refers to an author’s perspective more generally. In this resource, ethos means “author.”

Pathos is frequently translated as some variation of “emotional appeal,” but it originally referred to the elements of a speech that appealed to any of an audience’s sensibilities. Today, many people may discuss the pathos qualities of a text to refer to how well an author appeals to an audience’s emotions. Pathos as “emotion” is often contrasted with logos as “reason.” But this is a limited understanding of both pathos and logos ; pathos more closely refers to an audience’s perspective more generally. In this resource, pathos means “audience.”

Telos is a term Aristotle used to explain the particular purpose or attitude of a speech. Not many people use this term today in reference to rhetorical situations; nonetheless, it is instructive to know that early rhetorical thinkers like Aristotle actually placed much emphasis on speakers having a clear telos . But audiences can also have purposes of their own that differ from a speaker’s purpose. In this resource, telos means “purpose.”

Kairos is a term that refers to the elements of a speech that acknowledge and draw support from the particular setting, time, and place that a speech occurs. Though not as commonly known as logos , ethos , and pathos , the term kairos has been receiving wider renewed attention among teachers of composition since the mid-1980s. Although kairos may be well known among writing instructors, the term “setting” more succinctly and clearly identifies this concept for contemporary readers. In this resource, kairos means “setting.”

Current Elements of Rhetorical Situations

All of these terms (text, author, audience, purpose, and setting) are fairly loose in their definitions and all of them affect each other. Also, all of these terms have specific qualities that affect the ways that they interact with the other terms. Below, you’ll find basic definitions of each term, a brief discussion of the qualities of each term, and then finally, a series of examples illustrating various rhetorical situations.

Aristotle Virtue Ethics Summary

This essay about Aristotle’s virtue ethics connects the philosopher’s ancient teachings to modern personal development principles. Aristotle’s focus is on eudaimonia—translated as ‘flourishing’ or ‘well-being’—achieved through the cultivation of virtues, which balance between excess and deficiency. These virtues, such as courage and generosity, are not innate but are developed through practice, paralleling modern ideas of continuous self-improvement. The essay explores practical wisdom or phronesis, essential for ethical decision-making, and the role of community in shaping individual virtues. It reflects on the challenges of applying Aristotle’s flexible ‘golden mean’ in today’s fast-paced world and emphasizes the relevance of his ethical framework for personal growth and societal well-being. The discussion bridges Aristotle’s philosophy with contemporary themes, suggesting that personal and professional success is inseparable from ethical virtue and communal harmony.

How it works

At first glance, the ancient philosophy of Aristotle and the modern personal development industry might seem worlds apart. Yet, at the heart of both lies a profound exploration of what it means to lead a fulfilling and ethical life. Aristotle’s virtue ethics, articulated in his seminal work, Nicomachean Ethics, presents a timeless framework that remains strikingly relevant for today’s personal growth enthusiasts.

Aristotle was primarily concerned with the concept of eudaimonia, often translated as ‘flourishing’ or ‘well-being’. He posited that true happiness is found through the cultivation of virtue – traits that balance between excess and deficiency.

His approach is not about strict rules or the consequences of actions, but about developing character that consistently embodies rational moderation.

Consider the virtue of courage. Aristotle describes it as a middle ground between recklessness and cowardice. Applied to a modern context, think about the last time you faced a challenging situation. Perhaps it was speaking up in a meeting or taking a leap in your career. The reckless might charge forward without thought, while the cowardly hang back despite knowing they should act. Courage, then, is acknowledging fear and uncertainty but choosing to act thoughtfully and confidently.

Now, extend this analogy to generosity, another virtue Aristotle extols. Generosity today doesn’t just mean giving money or gifts; it also encompasses offering time, attention, and compassion to others. Here, the mean lies between giving so much that it depletes one’s own resources (prodigality) and giving too little, or not at all (stinginess). In our hyper-connected world, finding this balance is crucial as we decide how much of ourselves to share and with whom.

One of Aristotle’s most compelling ideas is that virtues are not inborn traits but developed through habit and practice. This aligns closely with modern theories of personal development that emphasize continuous improvement and lifelong learning. The suggestion is that by repeatedly practicing virtuous behaviors, we can reshape our dispositions and ultimately our identities. Aristotle’s model thus invites us to view each day as an opportunity to practice virtues like patience, diligence, or kindness, thereby weaving these traits into the fabric of our character.

Practical wisdom, or phronesis, plays a critical role in this ethical framework. It’s about knowing the right thing to do and being inclined to do it. In contemporary terms, this translates to emotional intelligence and situational awareness—skills highly valued in both personal and professional realms. A person skilled in practical wisdom can navigate complex situations and relationships with discernment and tact.

The community aspect of Aristotle’s ethics also has modern resonance. He believed that humans are inherently social creatures and that our virtues are cultivated through our interactions with others. Today, we might relate this to the influence of social environments on our behavior and decisions. From families to workplaces, the communities we engage with significantly shape our opportunities for practicing virtue.

Furthermore, Aristotle’s insistence on the alignment of personal actions with societal good offers a lens through which to view corporate ethics and social responsibility. This perspective challenges individuals and organizations alike to consider not just the legality or profitability of decisions, but their impact on community well-being.

Yet, despite its broad applicability, Aristotle’s virtue ethics is not without challenges in the modern world. The flexibility of the ‘golden mean’—the idea that virtue lies between two extremes—can be difficult to apply in a world that often values quick, clear-cut solutions over nuanced approaches. Additionally, the relativism implied in Aristotle’s thought—that what is virtuous can vary between individuals based on their unique circumstances—raises complex questions about universal moral standards.

In essence, Aristotle’s framework encourages a form of ethical personalism, where the focus is on developing oneself in the context of one’s specific life and relationships. This is echoed in the personal development world’s emphasis on self-awareness as a key to growth. By understanding and practicing Aristotle’s virtues, one can aspire not only to personal success but also to contribute positively to the lives of others, fulfilling both individual potential and communal obligations.

In summary, Aristotle’s virtue ethics provides a rich, robust foundation for thinking about personal and societal flourishing. It compels us to consider not only the kind of person we want to become but also the kind of society we want to live in. While ancient in origin, these ideas prompt ongoing reflection and dialogue about our values and actions in today’s fast-paced, complex world. As we strive for personal and professional growth, Aristotle’s teachings remind us that true success is inseparable from ethical virtue and communal harmony.

By merging Aristotle’s ancient wisdom with contemporary themes of personal development, we find not only a philosophical bridge across millennia but also practical guidance for cultivating a life well-lived. This reflection encourages both individuals and communities to ponder deeper questions of character and contribution, ensuring Aristotle’s legacy endures as a cornerstone of ethical inquiry and humanistic aspirations.

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Model Essay Plato and Aristotle

August 14, 2018.

‘Episteme comes from reason, not doxa.’ Discuss (34/40 Grade A)

This essay title wouldn’t appear int his form in the exam, as the technical vocabulary episteme and doxa are not in the specification H573. However it is good to practise questions which contain extra technical vocabulary to get you used to using this vocabulary. So I ahve included it here as a question to consider – an it’s a good, A grade answer. For further essays go to our Model Essays book available int he shop – all answers heavily marked by our experts to justify the grade given. PB

Plato, a Greek philosopher, believed that episteme, true knowledge, came from reason. He believed doxa came from experiencing the world, which he believed in fact gave humans the true knowledge they seek. His student, Aristotle believed doxa was the first step in gaining true knowledge as it existed in the physical world. Through Plato’s theory of the FORMs, I believe episteme comes from reason, and this is how we gain true knowledge.

This is an excellent introduction showing the different points of view on the question about the origin of knowledge. The candidate identifies that Plato favoured reason while Aristotle argued from experience. The candidate has also shown what the line of reasoning will be in this essay: the Platonic thesis. The essay should therefore argue towards that rationalist perspective and conclude likewise.

Plato’s main theory is that of the World of FORMs. Plato states that the World of FORMs is recognisable by humans as our souls transmigrated. Before reincarnating, our souls were able to recognise the true FORMs before we forgot them in our earthly bodies. Plato describes the World of FORMs as unchangeable. This is backed up by philosopher Parmenides who says “The world is unchangeable”. Plato states we can experience the examples of the FORMs in our earthly bodies. Those who do not understand the FORMs however will say there are different types of tree. Plato condemns this type of thinking and says we in fact recognise the examples of the perfect FORM of tree-ness. In the allegory of the cave, the free prisoner symbolises the attainment of true knowledge by recognising the true FORMs when escaping the cave. The shadows watched by the other prisoners is not the true reality, however they believe this is true reality as this is what they experienced. This illustrates that Plato’s ideas of attaining true knowledge through the FORMs and not by the examples we see in the temporal world. Therefore, episteme comes from reason.

The candidate has reviewed Plato’s perspective by commenting upon his approach to FORMs, how we perceive FORMs in the temporal world and how it is reflected in Plato’s Cave allegory. Given the time constraints of an essay, only 40 minutes, it is impossible to detail everything, so the candidate must sacrifice great depth to cover all points. Here the candidate has shown an understanding of the FORMs, the cave and influences on Plato. The candidate then links back to the question by showing that this approach shows that episteme comes from reason.

Aristotle challenges Plato’s theory however by presenting the ‘Third Man’ theory. Because the FORM of ‘man’ is a man itself, surely there must be a FORM for the FORM of a man. This challenges Plato’s theory, as it demonstrates infinite regression. Aristotle challenges his teacher further by stating that the World of FORMs cannot be proved as it relies on reincarnation. The World of FORMs is not in the temporal world meaning there is no empirical proof of it. Aristotle’s challenges show that not only is true knowledge gained by doxa, but episteme does not come from reason.

The candidate has attempted to undermine Plato by presenting the Third Man Fallacy which has been done fairly well, though some additional explanation would be better. The challenge from the evidence for reincarnation could be better emphasised. The candidate has missed the challenge that Plato’s argument implies a FORM for everything, even one-legged-pirates. This reductio ad absurdum is a good challenge to use against Plato.

However, it should be noted that Plato’s theory only applies to abstract notions such as love, justice and maths are the true FORMs, not necessarily physical object. Aristotle questions if there are FORMs for everything such as a sick dog or a three-legged cat. Plato however is supported by Pythagoras. Pythagoras’ theorem states abstract notions such as maths do not exist in the temporal world but in fact there is a perfect FORM of it in the world of FORMs. He also states that all things are static and unchanging, suggesting that the World of FORMs and the FORMs are perfect and eternal. Plato is also supported by Heraclitus who says that “You can never step in the same river twice” and the world is constantly in flux. This signifies that humans cannot experience the world the same way twice, indicating that true knowledge is eternal e.g. maths cannot come from experience. From the support of philosophers and examples, episteme comes from reason.

The candidate managed to refer back to the reductio ad absurdum challenge in the response to Aristotle’s challenge. This is a very good response identifying that Plato’s theory only works with abstraction notions rather than everyday things.

Aristotle’s approach to attaining knowledge by experience challenges Plato, however. Aristotle emphasised the value of studying the physical world and this approach is empirical. His theory of the four causes also question Plato’s theory. Aristotle believed that everything is related to having four causes. This included matter, form, their efficient cause and their final cause; telos. An example of this is a wax stamp the matter if the wax stamp is the stamp itself while the form is what it is made of. The actuality of the wax stamp is what actually, physically it is, and the potentiality is what it could become, in this case a seal for a letter. This reason illustrates that all things have a purpose and the potentiality of it is effect. Aristotle’s four causes perhaps shows that experiencing the world and observing it with and empirical approach will improve it. Therefore, episteme does in fact come from experience.

The candidate has overviewed Aristotle’s theory of causes, and given particular attention to matter and form. The wax stamp is an excellent example to use. It is always a good idea to use the scholars’ own examples. Another would be the bronze statue showing bronze matter, in the statue form, created by the sculptor with the purpose of honouring the gods. The link back to the question might have been better emphasised: that we know the world through this empirical approach rather than from the armchair.

In response to this, Aristotle’s mistakes questions if his observations are true. A better way of stating this would be ‘Aristotle’s errors in observation bring into question the reliability of empiricism as a source of knowledge.’ He stated that women are deformed and have fewer teeth than men and in this time, society as patriarchal. Aristotle also states that people who aren’t smart were born to be slaves. He believed that they are unable to control themselves and should be enslaved which we would not accept as truthful.

This should be rounded up and a mid-conclusion should be drawn, then linked back to the question as the next part of the paragraph is on a different aspect of the response to Aristotle.

Democritus, a Greek philosopher believed that if a rock was continuously cut into to, a piece would be so tiny that it could no longer be divided. He called this a-toms and believed they were eternal. A-toms in atoms however was a failure as atoms can be divided into protons, neutrons and electrons. This shows that experience just gives changing opinion and episteme comes from reason, further supported by the change in physics from Newtonian mechanics to Quantum physics.

This is an excellent challenge against Aristotle as it shows that reason established what empiricism never managed to achieve, an understanding of the theory of non-divisibles. This conclusive point should be made clear and linked back to the question.

Plato’s theory of the FORMs shows that the attainment of true knowledge does in fact comes from episteme as experiencing and observing the world can result to changing opinion. The World of FORMs illustrates that everything we experience now is primarily not the true reality and only our souls can experience the World of FORMs. Aristotle’s statement of observing the world to gain knowledge is questionable as we can “never step in the same river twice” meaning the word cannot be experienced the same way, therefore people’s knowledge may be different, therefore episteme comes from reason.

Overall: 34/40 Grade A

The candidate has shown how the reasoning and responses to the challenges of the essay have come to the point where Plato’s perspective is the more believable. The use of supporting scholars throughout have helped to draw that conclusion so it is unsurprising, though validly done, that this conclusion is drawn.

The candidate has shown a very good breadth and some good depth of knowledge. The use of additional scholars is an excellent way of showing a wider understanding of the topic and the context of the theories. Some additional depth in Plato’s theory of FORMs and Aristotle’s Causes might have been worth investing.

Further, the candidate showed a good nuanced selection of knowledge concerning additional scholars and Aristotle’s weaknesses.

The candidate challenges Plato and then responds to the challenges very well. All challenges are resolved so that the conclusion is expected, but balanced. All arguments are developed well and justified with evidence and scholarly opinion which is excellent.

The line of reasoning begins in the introduction and continues all the way through to the conclusion. This is exactly what should appear in an essay. The thesis statement in the introduction should sign-post where the essay will go and it should all come to a final conclusion validly argued and demonstrated in what has been presented.

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16 Aristotle on Memory and the Self

Published: November 1995
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This essay argues that Aristotle’s view of memory is more like that of the modern psychologist than that of a modern philosopher; he is more interested in accurately delineating different kinds of memory than in discussing philosophical problems of memory. The short treatise On Memory and Recollection is considered a treatise on memory and loosely associated phenomenon and recollection. It is suggested that this work is better regarded as a treatise on two kinds of memory.

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Aristotle - Contemporary Perspectives on his Thought

On the 2400th anniversary of aristotle's birth.

Edited by: Demetra Sfendoni-Mentzou
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Language: English
Publisher: De Gruyter
Audience: Scholars and students of Aristotle, Ancient Philosophy, Classical Studies, Humanities, Aristotle and Contemporary Thought.
Front matter: 14
Main content: 366
Coloured Illustrations: 5
Keywords: Aristotle
Published: July 23, 2018
ISBN: 9783110566420
ISBN: 9783110564174

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Environmental Factor

Your online source for niehs news, papers of the month.

Extramural By Mali Velasco

Bacteria and material made from corn kernels can clean up PCBs in aquatic environments

Researchers funded by NIEHS demonstrated a new method to clean up aquatic ecosystems using biochar — the carbon-rich byproduct of burning plant matter — and bacteria. Their cost-effective strategy has the potential to destroy polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), a group of harmful chemicals that persist in sediments.

Current strategies to remove PCBs from the environment, such as excavating sediments from the bottom of aquatic ecosystems, are costly and can result in water contamination. Remediation strategies that use bacteria to break down pollutants show promise, but bacteria are unable to fully degrade PCBs in the environment. To address this challenge, the team investigated whether adding biochar to solutions with bacteria and PCBs could enhance the performance of a type of PCB-degrading bacteria called Paraburkholderia xenovorans.

The scientists tested different types of biochar, including three natural biochars — made from burning corn kernels, bamboo, and wood — and activated carbon, which is commonly used in water treatment. Next, they measured the effects of each biochar on bacterial growth, bacterial attachment to biochar particles, and expression of bacterial genes that degrade PCBs.

Imaging analysis revealed that bacteria cells attached to the corn kernel biochar in greater numbers compared to the other types of biochar. Bacterial growth was also higher in the solution with the corn kernel material. In addition, there was increased expression of bacterial genes involved in PCB degradation in the corn kernel biochar solution compared with the other materials.

These findings suggest that combining biochar made from corn kernels and PCB-degrading bacteria may provide a cost-effective strategy to clean up contaminated sediments while protecting public and ecosystem health, according to the authors.

Citation : Dong Q, LeFevre GH, Mattes TE. 2024. Black carbon impacts on Paraburkholderia xenovorans strain LB400 cell enrichment and activity: implications toward lower-chlorinated polychlorinated biphenyls biodegradation potential . Environ Sci Technol 58(8):3895-907.

New lab model reveals the underlying mechanisms of PM2.5-induced lung disease

NIEHS-funded researchers developed a new model to study how fine particulate matter (PM2.5) exposure may lead to respiratory disease. The new multicellular model addresses the limitations of current methods, which use only one type of lung cell and are unable to capture the biological complexity of the respiratory system.

Upon breathing in PM2.5 air pollution, tiny particles enter the lung and are deposited in the alveolar capillary region (ACR), where gas exchange occurs. This exposure is linked to respiratory disease; however, the mechanisms are not well understood.

The scientists created a model using three types of lung cells and assembled them to mimic the structure of the ACR. The model included alveolar cells, which cover the surface of the ACR; fibroblasts, which support ACR connective tissue; and endothelial cells, which form the inner lining of blood vessels within the ACR. Then, they exposed the alveolar cells to a type of PM2.5 found in diesel exhaust for 24 hours and analyzed each cell’s response.

PM2.5 altered gene expression in both alveolar cells and endothelial cells. However, endothelial cells had more gene expression changes, despite having indirect contact with the particles. Endothelial cells also developed a type of biological stress, which led them to produce proteins that cause inflammation — an indicator of respiratory disease. Further analysis revealed that a cell signaling pathway in epithelial cells, known as mitogen activated protein kinase, played a key role in the changes observed in the endothelial cells.

The study shows that changes in endothelial cells may play an important role in how PM2.5 exposure leads to lung disease, according to the authors. They also noted that models that include multiple types of lung cells can help expand our understanding of how respiratory disease develops.

Citation : Vitucci ECM, Simmons AE, Martin EM, McCullough SD. 2024. Epithelial MAPK signaling directs endothelial NRF2 signaling and IL-8 secretion in a tri-culture model of the alveolar-microvascular interface following diesel exhaust particulate (DEP) exposure . Part Fibre Toxicol 21(1):15.

New strategy to prioritize PFAS for health risk assessments

An NIEHS-funded team developed a screening method that uses human-derived cells to evaluate how PFAS might affect health. The new approach might help prioritize different PFAS for further testing in efforts to improve health risk assessments.

PFAS are a large group of chemicals widely used in consumer products, but the majority lack toxicity data, making risk evaluation difficult. The most widely accepted approach to assess large numbers of PFAS organizes the chemicals based on structural similarities and then selects a few representative compounds for further testing.

In this study, the team explored a different approach using liver and heart cells grown in a lab and exposing them to 26 different PFAS. They looked at how the chemicals affected cell function and gene expression.

PFAS had minimal effect on liver cell function. In contrast, exposure to eight of the 26 compounds resulted in decreased beating frequency in heart cells. Genetic expression analysis of liver cells showed increased activity in genes that regulate stress and cellular structure, but decreased activity in genes that break down fats. In heart cells, PFAS exposure decreased the expression of genes related to how the heart contracts.

To compare their approach to the traditional structure-based grouping method, the team looked for associations between PFAS molecular weight or chemical structure and the observed biological effects. They found no structural similarities among compounds with similar biological effects.

These results suggest that grouping PFAS by structure alone might not adequately predict individual chemicals’ health effects, according to the authors. Their strategy could guide researchers and policymakers in determining which chemicals to prioritize for future evaluation.

Citation : Tsai HD, Ford LC, Chen Z, Dickey AN, Wright FA, Rusyn I. 2024. Risk-based prioritization of PFAS using phenotypic and transcriptomic data from human induced pluripotent stem cell-derived hepatocytes and cardiomyocytes . ALTEX; [Online 22 Feb 2024].

Inhibiting mitochondria-related protein may protect against neurodegenerative diseases

Partially blocking Drp1, a protein critical for mitochondrial division, may protect against neurodegenerative diseases, according to an NIEHS-funded study. Mitochondria are small cellular structures that produce energy for cells to carry out various functions.

Mitochondrial dysfunction and errors in autophagy, a cellular process that degrades and recycles old cellular components, have been linked to various neurodegenerative disorders, including parkinsonism — an umbrella term for conditions that cause movement symptoms that closely resemble Parkinson's disease. Previous studies have shown that partial reduction of Drp1 may shield against neurodegeneration, but the mechanisms behind this process are not well understood.

First, the scientists used lab-grown cells, derived from human and rat brain cells, to examine the effects of blocking Drp1. Then, they conducted studies in mice with normal Drp1 protein levels and mice that produced approximately one-half the typical amount. They gave the mice either water alone or water containing manganese, a metal implicated in mitochondrial and autophagy impairment, daily for 30 days. Finally, the team analyzed alterations in mouse brain genes and mitochondrial activity.

Results from both cell and animal studies showed that exposure to low nontoxic levels of manganese had no effect on mitochondrial function. However, low-level manganese exposure decreased autophagy rates and increased levels of alpha-synuclein, a protein linked to parkinsonism. In addition, partially blocking Drp1 significantly reduced the damaging effects of manganese on autophagy.

According to the authors, these findings indicate that Drp1 plays an important role in autophagy, independent of mitochondrial activity, and may be a useful target for interventions to treat certain neurodegenerative diseases. Furthermore, the results suggest that exposure to manganese may increase the risk of parkinsonism by increasing the accumulation of alpha-synuclein.

Citation : Fan RZ, Sportelli C, Lai Y, Salehe S, Pinnell JR, Brown HJ, Richardson JR, Luo S, Tieu K. 2024. A partial Drp1 knockout improves autophagy flux independent of mitochondrial function . Mol Neurodegener 19(1):26.

(Mali Velasco is a research and communication specialist for MDB Inc., a contractor for the NIEHS Division of Extramural Research and Training.)

Read the current Superfund Research Program Research Brief . New issues are published on the first Wednesday of every month.

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COMMENTS

Aristotelian Argument
Aristotelian Argument. The Aristotelian or classical argument is a style of argument developed by the famous Greek philosopher and rhetorician, Aristotle. In this style of argument, your goal as a writer is to convince your audience of something. The goal is to use a series of strategies to persuade your audience to adopt your side of the issue.
Aristotelian (Classical) Argument Model
Aristotelian Argument. The Aristotelian or classical argument is a style of argument developed by the famous Greek philosopher and rhetorician, Aristotle. In this style of argument, your goal as a writer is to convince your audience of something. The goal is to use a series of strategies to persuade your audience to adopt your side of the issue.
Aristotle's Model of Communication: 3 Key Elements of Persuasion
Aristotle's model of communication is also known as the "rhetorical triangle" or as the "speaker-audience-message" model. It consists of three main elements: the speaker, the audience, and the message. 1. The Speaker. The speaker is the person who is delivering the message. In this model, the speaker is responsible for creating and ...
Aristotelian Argument
Aristotelian Argument. Aristotelian Argument. The Aristotelian or classical argument is a style of argument developed by the famous Greek philosopher and rhetorician, Aristotle. In this style of argument, your goal as a writer is to convince your audience of something. The goal is to use a series of strategies to persuade your audience to adopt ...
Classical Argument
The classical argument is made up of five components, which are most commonly composed in the following order: Exordium - The introduction, opening, or hook. Narratio - The context or background of the topic. Proposito and Partitio - The claim/stance and the argument. Confirmatio and/or Refutatio - positive proofs and negative proofs of ...
Aristotelian Argument
Aristotelian Argument is a deductive approach to argumentation that presents a thesis, an argument up front — somewhere in the introduction — and then endeavors to prove that point via deductive reasoning and exemplification.. Scholarly conversations regarding this style of argument can be traced to the 4th century BEC, including, especially Aristotle's Rhetoric as well as the later ...
Aristotle's Rhetoric
The methodical core of Aristotle's Rhetoric is the theorem that there are three 'technical' pisteis , i.e. 'persuaders' or 'means of persuasion'. Persuasion comes about either through the character ( êthos) of the speaker, the emotional state ( pathos) of the hearer, or the argument ( logos ) itself.
Aristotle
1. Aristotle's Life. Born in 384 B.C.E. in the Macedonian region of northeastern Greece in the small city of Stagira (whence the moniker 'the Stagirite', which one still occasionally encounters in Aristotelian scholarship), Aristotle was sent to Athens at about the age of seventeen to study in Plato's Academy, then a pre-eminent place of learning in the Greek world.
Aristotle's Model of Rhetoric and Contemporary Patterns of
The chapter focuses on the interdependence of the concepts of dialogue, law and truth in Aristotle's model of rhetoric. Taking some aspects of the new rhetoric and of the argumentation theory of Perelman, Alexy and Habermas as a starting point, it will be clarified that the Aristotelian and ancient idea of rhetoric involved a completely different pattern of reasoning.
Aristotle's Theory of Matter
A statement of Aristotle's position must begin with his account of change. 1 The first important claim that he makes about this is that there is no such thing as generation ex nihilo; on the contrary, in every change there is something to start with, and during the change that thing becomes something which it was not before.It may acquire some accidental property which it previously lacked ...
Aristotle Model of Communication
Aristotle model of communication diagram. The Aristotle Model of Communication diagram can roughly be divided into five elements. The speaker is the most important element, making this model a speaker-oriented model. It is the speaker's task to give a speech to the public. The role of the audience is passive.
Aristotle's Natural Philosophy
Aristotle's Natural Philosophy. First published Fri May 26, 2006; substantive revision Mon Apr 24, 2023. Aristotle had a lifelong interest in the study of nature. He investigated a variety of different topics, ranging from general issues like motion, causation, place and time, to systematic explorations and explanations of natural phenomena ...
The Activity of Being: An Essay on Aristotle's Ontology
Aristotle's thinking is peripatetic. It moves along paths, some well-worn, others newly cleared by the creative elasticity of his thinking. It pursues questions by traversing a course for a stretch, but when finding its way impeded, is unafraid to turn around, return to the start, or even to cut a new path of its own to navigate a hindrance, to find a way around an aporia.
Aristotle's Communication Model
Aristotle, a great philosopher initiative the earliest mass communication model called "Aristotle's Model of Communication". He proposed model before 300 B.C who found the importance of audience role in communication chain in his communication model. This model is more focused on public speaking than interpersonal communication. Aristotle Model of Communication is formed with 5 basic
Aristotle
Aristotle (384 B.C.E.—322 B.C.E.) Aristotle is a towering figure in ancient Greek philosophy, who made important contributions to logic, criticism, rhetoric, physics, biology, psychology, mathematics, metaphysics, ethics, and politics.He was a student of Plato for twenty years but is famous for rejecting Plato's theory of forms. He was more empirically minded than both Plato and Plato's ...
Aristotle's "Rhetoric": Philosophical Essays on JSTOR
In the field of philosophy, Plato's view of rhetoric as a potentially treacherous craft has long overshadowed Aristotle's view, which focuses on rhetoric as an independent discipline that relates in complex ways to dialectic and logic and to ethics and moral psychology. This volume, composed of essays by internationally renowned philosophers ...
Aristotle's Rhetorical Situation
Telos is a term Aristotle used to explain the particular purpose or attitude of a speech. Not many people use this term today in reference to rhetorical situations; nonetheless, it is instructive to know that early rhetorical thinkers like Aristotle actually placed much emphasis on speakers having a clear telos.
Aristotle Virtue Ethics Summary
This essay about Aristotle's virtue ethics connects the philosopher's ancient teachings to modern personal development principles. Aristotle's focus is on eudaimonia—translated as 'flourishing' or 'well-being'—achieved through the cultivation of virtues, which balance between excess and deficiency. ... Aristotle's model thus ...
Model Essay Plato and Aristotle
Aristotle emphasised the value of studying the physical world and this approach is empirical. His theory of the four causes also question Plato's theory. Aristotle believed that everything is related to having four causes. This included matter, form, their efficient cause and their final cause; telos.
Aristotle on Memory and the Self
This essay argues that Aristotle's view of memory is more like that of the modern psychologist than that of a modern philosopher; he is more interested in accurately delineating different kinds of memory than in discussing philosophical problems of memory. The short treatise On Memory and Recollection is considered a treatise on memory and ...
Aristotle
This collection of essays by leading Aristotle scholars worldwide covers a wide range of topics on Aristotle's work from metaphysics, politics, ethics, bioethics, rhetoric, dialectic, aesthetics, history to physics, psychology, biology, medicine, technology. The thorough exploration of the issues investigated deepens our knowledge of the most fundamental concepts, which are crucial for an ...
Aristotle and the Ethics of Business Communication
Through a study of the role of language in creating and disseminating values, the essay first extends the Aristotelian paradigm for ethical communication to the rhet oric of business. Two case studies then show how this model works in practice, while a third case poses questions of ethics and communication for the read er's consideration.
Aristotle
Aristotle's most famous teacher was Plato (c. 428-c. 348 BCE), who himself had been a student of Socrates (c. 470-399 BCE). Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, whose lifetimes spanned a period of only about 150 years, remain among the most important figures in the history of Western philosophy.Aristotle's most famous student was Philip II's son Alexander, later to be known as Alexander ...
Environmental Factor
NIEHS-funded researchers developed a new model to study how fine particulate matter (PM2.5) exposure may lead to respiratory disease. The new multicellular model addresses the limitations of current methods, which use only one type of lung cell and are unable to capture the biological complexity of the respiratory system.