Term Paper on "Aristotle Spinoza Hegel Kant Fichte"

Term Paper 4 pages (1170 words) Sources: 1+

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Hegel and Aristotle

Aristotle's belief that "man is by nature a political animal" and that men are best served when they join together under the aegis of the state was echoed years later by the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Both philosophers would also agree that the process of human thought is intrinsically linked to history and politics. Human thought itself is a process, and both men believed that such a process involved a system of logic. Aristotle's beliefs perhaps laid the groundwork for the much later ideas of Hegel, and the influence of both mens' philosophies on thought, logic, and politics continued to influence people and schools of thought for years after their deaths.

Aristotle was a scholar who was known to have strong opinions on many subjects from drama to politics to science. Because of his insatiable desire for knowledge, Aristotle "poured himself into research with gargantuan passion and energy across an almost incredibly wide range. He mapped out for the first time many of the basic fields of enquiry" (Magee 33-34). Hegel, too, was a man who studied and taught broadly. He was a student of theology as a young man, a tutor, an editor, a headmaster, and a professor. "He was extremely productive, and by the time of his death he was the dominating intellectual figure in Germany" (Magee 158). Like Aristotle, Hegel also published many books expounding his theories.

Aristotle believed in the power of experience and the observation of the world around us. His work in the field of logic outlasted his time period and he even named the field of study. Aristotle "systematized logic, working out which forms of inference were valid and which invalid -- in other words, what really does follow from what, and what only appears to but doesn't really; and he gave all these different forms of inference names. For two thousand years the study of logic was to mean the study of Aristotle's logic" (Magee 34). This concept of a logical study of the world was taken up by Hegel in the 18th and 19th centuries. Like Aristotle, he believed in a logical progression of change and development toward reality and self-awareness. "He saw everything as having developed. Everything that exists is the outcome of a process; and therefore, he thought, understanding in any broad area of reality always involves understanding a process of change" (Magee 159). Hegel was known to be among the most systematic of the philosophers in the period of "German idealism" and "attempted, throughout his published writings as well as in his lectures, to elaborate a comprehensive and systematic ontology from a 'logical' starting point" (Redding 1).

Hegel's system of logic is not unlike Aristotle's understanding of the forms that an object takes and his "four becauses" that lead "to an understanding of Aristotle's concepts of soul, form, and final cause" (Magee 37). Hegel also had a language to describe the thought process he called dialectical process. It was, in his view, a three-part process that consisted of thesis, antithesis, and, finally, synthesis. Conflict is what separates entities, a resolution joins them, but even in the final synthesis, a new conflict arises that causes the process to begin anew. "This, says Hegel, is why nothing ever stays the same. It is why everything -- ideas, religion, the arts, the sciences, the economy, institutions, society itself -- is always changing, and why in each case the pattern of change is dialectical" (Magee 159). The attempt by both men to… READ MORE

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