often they are highly technical and imply that our beliefs are largely mistaken. (We are, for example,
tempted to the belief that there is such a thing as 'void' or empty space, but Aristotle's analysis shows us,
surprisingly, that there cannot be, and that our concept of it is radically confused.) What is important is
that his analysis should explain the phenomena: he aims to show us not just what the right answer is, but
why we make both the advances and the mistakes that we characteristically do.
Aristotle's works are characterized by the kind of answers this methodology produces. He is subtle and
nuanced, often introducing technical terms to gain precision. The course of his thought may be difficult
to follow because he prefers inconclusive discussion of problems to the manufacture of speciously clear
solutions. All his writing is marked by a balance between doing justice to observed complexity and
bringing to our puzzlement the clarity of philosophical explanation. He strives always for the appropriate
level of generality which will illuminate without over-simplifying.
The Physics, one of his most attractive works, displays this concern perfectly. It is not 'physics' in the
modern sense. Rather it is the book where he argues for, and refines, the analytical concepts with which
we understand the physical world, notably time, space, infinity, process, activity, change. Pre-
reflectively, for example, we find it unproblematic that things change; but making philosophical sense of
change runs up against what seem to be impossible philosophical difficulties. Aristotle analyses the
sources of difficulty and shows them to be uncompelling in the light of his analysis of change, which
focuses on the central case of an object coming to have a property that it formerly lacked. Arguably his
paradigm is too restricted and blinds him to the importance of other kinds of changes, where we cannot
plausibly find an object with properties. But is an analysis that gives us a deepened view of what we
naturally perceive as basic examples of change; it gives us theoretically grounded insight into the reason
why we were right to find the world intelligible that way.
Equally characteristic is his analysis of explanation itself (the so-called doctrine of 'four causes'). Where
Plato, in the Phaedo, impatiently rejected all other kinds of explanation (aitia) for Forms, Aristotle, in
Physics 2, gives a careful analysis of four mutually irreducible types of explanation: 'form' or defining
characteristics; 'matter' or constituents; source of movement (the nearest to our 'cause'); and end or aim
(teleological explanation). The history of philosophy is full of (failed) attempts to reduce all kinds of
explanation to one favoured kind; Aristotle is notable in his firm refusal to over-simplify and to rush to
elegant, but falsifying, unification of phenomena which remain stubbornly complex. There are many
kinds and levels of explanation, and they do not exclude one another. Aristotle can be systematic. His
most systematic work is the Posterior Analytics, an ambitious classificatory structuring of the different
branches of knowledge into what seems like a Platonic hierarchy, in which from basic truths are derived
ever more specialized truths in various fields. But Aristotle's system is more realistic. The sciences each
have their own basic axioms and are not derived from a single source; and the system itself serves as a
regulative ideal, a representation of the ordered state of completed science, which we do not, of course,
possess now.
Aristotle's 'metaphysics' is in many ways a continuation of his 'physics'. He develops his concepts of
form and matter, actuality and potentiality, substance and attribute, as tools of explanation, used very
much like those of process and change. He does believe that some items are metaphysically