This is the sixth in a series of posts on my own philosophical journey; the first post is here.

Toward the beginning of Aristotle’s Physics he discusses the theories of his predecessors, and makes what seems to me a radical and ingenious move with almost no fanfare.

His predecessors were interested in two related problems: the One vs. the Many, and Change vs. Stability. Some, like Parmenides, thought that everything there is, is One. There is only the One. And since there’s only the One, it cannot change, so change is an illusion. Others took the opposite point of view. Everything is change. You can’t step in the same river twice. Stability is an illusion. Reality is Many.

The thing about these arguments is that they were all about reality as a whole. And reality as a whole is really hard to get a handle on. Aristotle took their concerns and their arguments and brought it all down to human scale: instead of the cosmos as a whole, what about this house, this dog, this tree, this man?

This house is one thing, a house, but it has many parts. It is one and many at the same time. This tree was planted some years ago; it constantly gets bigger, but it remains the same tree. This man has many parts; but if you remove an arm, or a leg, it doesn’t remain an arm or leg for long; and quite possibly the man doesn’t remain a man for long either, depending on how you do it. A dog eats a piece of meat, and somehow the piece of meat becomes part of the dog–or, at least, some of it does.

Change exists. Stability exists. Things can be one in one way, and many in another. We know these things; we live with them every day. What does it all mean? How does it all work?

Aristotle went looking for the answers—but he never forgot to ground everything he did in the every day world.

The world is bigger, richer, more complex than we can possibly imagine. Any set of first principles we might care to define cannot help but leave things out. Have principles, axioms, and postulates, by all means! We cannot think without them. But never forget the world around us, because truth is what is.

Part VII