figure throughout Aristotle’s arguments, where he sets up his own position as
an answer to long-standing disputes. Part of Aristotle’s masterly tone is the
detachment with which he reviews contending positions, striving to pull out
the best side of each doctrine as he sees it. There were of course broad-ranging
intellectuals before Aristotle. Empedocles had taught (if not written) on nature,
medicine, religion, practical politics, and magic; the Sophist and mathematician
Hippias of Elis boasted of encyclopedic knowledge, which he mastered by his
system of mnemonics; Heraclides Ponticus (for a time in Plato’s entourage) was
astronomer, rhetorician, and wonder worker (Reale, 1987: 179–180, 354;
1985: 65–66, 390–391; DSB, 1981: 6:405). More centered on purely intellec-
tual matters, Democritus ranged over epistemology, physics, mathematics,
geography, botany, agriculture, painting, and the other special sciences and
arts. An admirer of Democritus and an appreciative critic of Empedocles,
Aristotle constructed an encyclopedic system, as if he had deliberately set out
to synthesize and mediate every rival school in existence.
Against Isocrates and the new schools of rhetoric, Aristotle provides a
philosophically grounded theory of rhetoric and of literature; against the
lifestyle schools and debaters over value, he provides a systematic analysis of
ethical doctrine as well as his own deliberately middle-of-the-road defense of
conventionality and moderation. He systematizes logic and metaphysics in
consciousness of the achievements of all existing schools, and thereby goes
beyond them in reflexive abstraction. Even the qualitative theory of music put
forward by his follower Aristoxenus is aimed at undercutting the rival doctrine
of the Pythagoreans based on numerical proportion (DSB, 1981: 1:281).
Aristotle’s creativity lay in finding a device for synthesis, and thereby for
reducing the surfeit of contending schools of his day. The most important result
was his fourfold classification of causes as material, formal, efficient, and final,
and his distinctions of potency and act, substance and accident. These clas-
sifications intermesh. The material cause (identified with substance) is poten-
tial; formal, efficient, and final causes are actual. With these tools Aristotle
unraveled the conundrums of the Eleatics and Heracliteans, mediated between
Platonic forms and the world of the senses, and rejected the relativists as
propounders of category mistakes. These were still hot contemporary debates
at a time, when the Megarians were pushing pre-Socratic paradoxes about the
illogicality of change, and Cynics and Skeptics were denying the possibility of
both knowledge and ethical judgment. Aristotle rescued both Being and change
with his analytical distinctions; found a place for nous, thought, in the material
universe by distinguishing potential and actual components of mind; and
answered the debate over the natural or merely customary nature of virtue by
distinguishing a natural potential for doing good from its actualization in
socially acquired habits.102 •^ The Skeleton of Theory