Aristotle is the person without whom smartphones would not exist today.
One may subtract any other thinker from the development of the Western world, be he philosopher, scientist, poet or religious, and technological evolution would come out unchanged save in minimal details. Without Aristotle, instead, scientific progress would not have been what it has been.
This assertion may sound enthusiastic, above all to whoever does not know what Aristotle said, or to whoever thinks that he was a Greek philosopher who unfolded concepts around 'being'; instead it reflects a truth evident enough. And this not only because science is, has always been and cannot but be, a handmaid of philosophy; but precisely because the method of thinking of Aristotle came to be recognised, after some centuries in which it remained more or less in shadow, as the perfect modality of thought itself. From the High Middle Ages to the present day, saving naturally some enclaves of Platonic or esoteric matrix, Western man — not only the philosophers (indeed some of these are the only ones who opposed it), but precisely anyone whatever — is intrinsically Aristotelian, for the most part without even knowing that he is.
From the time when the Arab philosophers, in particular Averroes, brought the thought of Aristotle into Europe, he became the guide, the reference, the authority upon which for centuries and centuries thought was founded: ipse dixit, 'he himself said it', thus was Aristotle cited. Scholastic philosophy, that is the philosophy of Christianity which succeeded the Patristics of Neoplatonic inspiration, is centred entirely upon the texts of Aristotle, from the difference between being and essence to the five ways of Thomas, who does not draw the existence of God from the concept, as Anselm does, but ascends to it from sensible effects, and the first way from movement to the first unmoved mover: where to the term of the causal series which reason cannot pursue further there is given the name of God — which is not demonstration but the baptism of one's own limit, or singularity, as one would say today. In the Comedia Dante defines Aristotle 'l maestro di color che sanno, the master of those who know (Inferno IV, 131); the Dantean conception of God is modelled upon his first unmoved mover.
Modern philosophy was born when Descartes willed to attempt a rebellion against the Aristotelian vision of reality, so as to substitute for it an approach that should move no longer from objective reality but on the contrary from the subject. Aristotelianism then settled into the several empiricisms which have made the counterpoint to the various idealistic orientations; and it constituted the very wellspring of positivism, founded as this was upon a purely mechanistic grasp of reality. Again, the late nineteenth-century rise of the logical philosophies was a prosecution, in symbolic key, of the logic described by Aristotle; and finally, again and therefore, the contemporary analytic philosophies are of evident Aristotelian matrix in so far as they are analytic. And one may mention, as an example of the ever crucial role of Aristotle, that Heidegger began precisely with Franz Brentano's dissertation on the manifold senses of the existent in Aristotle, and with the question he drew from it: if the existent is said in manifold significations, which then is the fundamental, guiding signification?
To what is owed this preponderant presence of Aristotle in Western thought, such that one must say his schemata constitute its fundamental logical structure? Said otherwise, does the reader know that his way of thinking himself and everything that stands around him is the direct enactment of what Aristotle described?
One may answer this question from several points of view, all convergent.
Aristotle, as one reads in the manuals, was a realist thinker, and the word is to be taken to the letter: he moved his philosophising from the concrete reality he had under his hand, and of it he gave the logical schemes; said otherwise, he derived from nature, according to reason, the laws immanent in her, and in the first place the laws of being, or better of the existent, giving its categories; and precisely these logical structures have constituted the framework of philosophical thinking and then of common thinking: that being is said in many senses, which is to say that there is not one sole mode of being but as many as are the modes in which a thing may give itself and be said, and first among them all the substance; becoming as the passage from being in potency to being in act; the categories of existents; form, matter and their compound; the taxonomy of the four causes, material, formal, efficient and final; and more besides.
But the fundamental notion that Aristotle discovered — discovered not in the sense that he invented it, but in the sense that he brought it to light — is that of the principle of non-contradiction.
Contemporary technology, upon what is it founded, at its base? Computers and the whole of electronic technology rest upon binary language: 1 or 0. If it is 1 it is 1 and is not 0, if it is 0 it is 0 and is not 1. Precisely the being 1 rather than 0, or conversely the being 0 rather than 1, of every single bit at the base of every machine language is the foundation of our present world: if a bit could be indifferently both 0 and 1, everything would collapse. Well then: the logical mechanism of thinking that a bit which is 1 be 1 and not be 0 is nothing other than an elementary explication of the principle of non-contradiction. And precisely this principle was enunciated by Aristotle, in book Gamma of the Metaphysics: 'it is impossible that the same attribute, at the same time, belong and not belong to the same object and under the same respect' (Γ 3, 1005b19-20). And this consideration holds also for quantum computers, not only because their creation is but an outcome of the Aristotelian approach, but above all because, with respect to the human mind, the states of the qubits, though not binary, are determinate, and resolve themselves into a univocal information, where probability is made true by statistics; and more generally one must consider that the quanta as such are and remain tode tì, a determinate somewhat, which is the standard Aristotelian definition for designating existents — that is, precisely, the quanta are entities, objects, phenomena standing on their own, things, before a subject who sees them, thinks them and elucubrates them: quantum physics is purely representation, and cannot not be so, whence the not few who invoke quantum physics to 'explain' the yoga states, which are the hither side of representation, by that alone show that they do not realise what they are speaking of.
The principle of non-contradiction is not at the base of the sciences alone; indeed these are in truth only a prosecution of the universal efficacy of the principle of non-contradiction. The whole life of every person is foundatively hinged upon the principle of non-contradiction, the whole objective life of the external world as much as the mental life. Take any aspect whatever of anyone's life: it lies entirely subject, whether one knows it or not, to the principle of non-contradiction, exactly in the terms in which Aristotle enunciated it.
Then Aristotle said a very great many other things, which like the principle of non-contradiction stand at the base of common life; but, one may say, every inference of Aristotle is itself hinged upon this principle, which he himself calls bebaiotátē archḗ pasôn, the most firm of all principles.
And it is not necessary to spend many further examples to agree that precisely this principle, once it has been thought, stands at the base of the extrinsecation of (ordinary) human nature, and is, with all evidence, the 'seal' of Western thought. And indeed all the philosophers of Western thought, and in consequence all the scientists, have always rested upon this rule, and it is precisely upon the basis of this rule that there have been validated the reasonings which then gave origin to the discoveries that have succeeded one another in progress. In a word, the whole of Western thought has always and only employed this criterion to distinguish what is true from what is false.
At this point one must take a small step further, posing the question of how and why Aristotle came to educe the principle of non-contradiction.
Aristotle came to it because he applied his superlative rationalistic mentality to nature, to nature in her whole and in her particular cases: he imposed his rational faculty upon reality, and therefore, precisely, logically, he saw that it mirrored the principle of non-contradiction as the rule of its own subsistence. Said otherwise, Aristotle illustrated how the rational mind functions, once and for all. After Aristotle it has been a matter only of applying the fundamental principle he unveiled, only of proceeding along the theory he laid down, and in effect thus it came to pass. Aristotle established the equivalence between logic and ontology, namely that of the real as of thoughts is true what is conformed to reason, and that alone; what this signifies in the concrete may be said with the words of Hegel, what is rational is actual and what is actual is rational: Hegel was idealist as much as Aristotle was realist, but, beyond the screen through which each of the two looks upon the 'real', the sensible for the one and the concept for the other, on the point their accord is the same.
And indeed Aristotelian logic, delineated step by step in the writings later gathered into the Organon but implicit in the Metaphysics and in the Physics and in all his texts, has remained unchanged, save the integration of the Stoics, who set beside it a logic of propositions without touching its frame, and the corrections of Kant, down to Frege, who innovated the operative mode discovered by Aristotle by substituting symbols for propositions.
The device that the Organon perfects, and which is the heart of that logic, is the syllogism, defined at the opening of the Prior Analytics: 'a syllogism is a discourse in which, certain things being posited, something other than the things posited follows of necessity by the fact that these are' (I 1, 24b18-20). Nothing external must supervene for the necessity to be produced, and the syllogism is perfect when it needs nothing other than what has been assumed. Two propositions sharing one term, 'every man is mortal' and 'Socrates is a man': the shared term, 'man', is the middle, which conjoins the other two and in the conclusion disappears, so that there follows of necessity 'Socrates is mortal'. Upon this skeleton Aristotle builds the entire edifice: the figures, according to the place the middle occupies in the premisses, and within each figure the moods that conclude and those that do not conclude, all enumerated and proved one by one with letters in the place of terms, which is the first formalisation in the history of thought, anterior by almost two millennia to whoever has repeated it. Of that edifice the young Nietzsche will say that everything distinguishing man from the animal depends upon the faculty of volatilising intuitive metaphors into a scheme, of dissolving an image into a concept, since only in the realm of those schemes does it become possible 'to build a pyramidal order of castes and degrees, to create a new world of laws, privileges, subordinations, delimitations' (On Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense).
The syllogism adds nothing: it transports to the conclusion the necessity that already lay in the premisses, and transports it perfectly, but of the truth of the premisses it can say nothing, for they lie outside the syllogism. The very necessity of that transport, moreover, is nothing other than the principle of non-contradiction in act: if it has been admitted that every man is mortal, one cannot at the same time and under the same respect admit that a man be not so, and the syllogism does nothing but render explicit what that prohibition already contained. So that the whole power of the machine rests upon something the machine does not produce, namely upon the first premisses; and to those Aristotle must arrive by another way, which is the matter of the last chapter of the Posterior Analytics, of which presently.
Naturally, it is not that Aristotle created ex nihilo the substance of the concepts he enunciated, but he was the one who had the power to individuate and educe it, so much so that no one, from then to now, has surpassed him upon his own plane. Or perhaps the undersigned has surpassed him, who in his Rivelazione della Sfinge makes known that the principle of non-contradiction, in analytic terms, is a petitio principii dissimulating the principle of identity, in that it does nothing but represent an entity and then repeat that it is an entity: a paralogism enfolding a self-contradictory principle. That the principle of identity is self-contradictory Heidegger indicated in a celebrated lecture, since in the very moment in which one says that A is equal to A two different entities are already postulated; and upon identity and contradiction a good part of the philosophy of the twentieth century was consumed, in Italy from Severino to Sasso. Mine is the step that descends from there: the principle of non-contradiction is the petitio principii of the principle of identity, that is, it is a captious sophism repeating under another name what it has already posited. Whence it comes, analytically, that the hómoios gàr phytôi of the elenctic proof of the principle of non-contradiction (that is, Aristotle's thrust whereby the principle of non-contradiction could not be refuted save by keeping silent — since in speaking one would have to assume the principle itself by attributing to words one sense and not another — so that he who is silent would not be an animal endowed with reason but 'is like unto a plant', Γ 4, 1006a14-15) is valid, yes, certainly and beyond doubt, but precisely within its own enclosure.
But, to continue the critique, the matrix of Aristotle's avidyā (nescience, in Sanskrit) lies in what he lays down in the nineteenth chapter, the last of the Posterior Analytics, which are dedicated to the demonstrative syllogism. The syllogism demonstrates from premisses, and the first premisses cannot in their turn be demonstrated, on pain of infinite regress; how then are they known? Aristotle answers: by induction, epagoghé, that is by ascending from repeated perceptions and from memory to the universal; and what grasps the principles thus emerged is not science, which is always demonstrative, but the noûs — which is for Aristotle the faculty that sees immediately, without demonstration, the true of the principles that induction has brought to light, whereas for others, Anaxagoras, Plato, Plotinus, the word has different meanings, each his own. The evidence of the principles being thus given, by noûs and by induction, the syllogism proceeds. This may be said correct; but Aristotle does not realise that evidence is already only a name for an hypostasis (he who criticised the Platonic ideas…), that is, beyond the labels, nothing other than doxa, opinion, founded upon one's own believing that one knows (Aristotle had been the pupil of Plato, not of Socrates). Some say that evidence is itself already the fruit of a syllogism; I say that it is opinion: what seems evident to Aristotle seems evident to Aristotle, as what seems evident to Hegel or to anyone else seems evident to him, and there is no guarantee whatever that it be 'evidence', because an intuition that seems a source of truth is but a thought, and what one contrives starting from the id quod plerumque accidit is only a variable; the thinking of it as evidence is already the prevarication of reason. What Aristotle asserts is, that is to say, exact, but this exactitude must be made precise in its effectivity: the human mind is nothing but statistical hermeneutics, just as statistical hermeneutics are the Large Language Models, with the difference that the artificial intelligences are representation without an I that believes itself mind, whereas men believe they know; the matrix of the artificial intelligences is precisely the nineteenth chapter of the Posterior Analytics; the disputing whether they think or reason or are conscious means not realising that the concepts of thought, reason and consciousness that the ordinary mind has are, precisely, only concepts. Naturally it is evident, for example, that the sun rises and cyclically disappears; to say that this too is opinion is not a critique of common thinking, but of the logical superstructure that one magnificently wills to install so as to satisfy the libido dominandi of the mind of the rational animal; Aristotle must name evidence as the closure of his system, because thus his reason demands — and this closure is nothing but a laying down of the believing that one knows as fundamental dogma and generator of dogmas.
And this flaw, in truth, of the all-too-human believing that one knows afflicts the whole thought of Aristotle, because when he speaks of any entity whatever he names it as it appears to him, without posing the doubt that what appears to him is not thereby the real. This point, however, must not be understood as an idealistic critique, for the idealists stand in the same nescience, taking for certain that there be 'the I', subjectivity, thoughts, as though they were intrinsically existent entities. The accusation that must be moved against Aristotle is that of having instituted ratiocinating representation as the law of knowing, and of having instituted the very law of truth, which is what representation itself institutes. Before him philosophers such as Parmenides, Heraclitus and Plato shunned representation and calculating reason; the foundative act of Western thought is instead precisely the laying down of representation as the source of truth. It is clear that the word and the concept of representation do not appear in Aristotle, and will be brought into focus and named in the history of philosophy only by Descartes; but, as Heidegger has moreover elucidated, the submitting of knowledge to the sole tribunal of reason is already the outcome of the operating of representation, unnamed but immanent. This is, that is to say, a critique of noetic nature before being a philosophical one: the having made one's own avidyā the source of judging. On the other hand, the nescience of the nature of the mind is accompanied in Aristotle by an adamantine introspective capacity, and it is for this that he must be numbered master of the Western world: the yoga teach that men know of themselves, in self-referential manner, only what they believe to be their own I, and not also the natural state upon which the egoic mind installs itself — the gnôthi sautón of certain Greeks means precisely this, the exhortation not to content oneself with the limited nature of the I, certainly not to live in a manner less coarse than the many —; well then, for those who live believing themselves to be their own I, Aristotle is the one who illustrated the schemes of how the rational I functions.
Aristotle created the forma mentis of rationality: by describing it, he taught how to master it. For this is the beating heart of Aristotelianism: not so much the concepts he rendered, but the very fact of having rendered them, and the how he rendered them. The point is not to learn by heart the institutes of Aristotle, in part later superseded, as is obvious, by the subsequent philosophies, but to apprehend the scheme of the operating of rationality, beyond the single contents. It is precisely the Stagirite's having explored the mind as rational that renders him, one may well say, a psychiatrist: which psychiatrists naturally do nothing other than apply according to reason the categories they have with reason created.
He is, in the proper sense of the word, the pristine psychiatrist of the West, first not only in time but in introspective power: a mind of rational capacity perhaps unsurpassed, limited to representation, which maps from within the functioning of that same mind, the machine of reason describing the machine of reason and with that description fixing it once and for all. Aristotle takes it as evident that human beings are rational animals, zôion lógon échon (Politics I 2, 1253a9-10), that is, sentient beings who perceive through sensations like all the other animals but differ from them in having in addition the logos, which for Aristotle and so many other thinkers means the rational faculty, whereas for others, for Heraclitus and for John for example, it means something else.
It remains to say, in order to comprehend the Aristotelian orientation to the full, what is the ambit of the principle of non-contradiction; it has been said that it is reality, but what does Aristotle intend by reality? For Aristotle reality is in the first place all that falls under the experience of the five ordinary senses; then there enter into reality those suprasensible entities, which will later be called metaphysical, whose existence must be held necessary on the basis of (his) reason (for example the first unmoved mover, which moves by attracting and therefore by standing still, whose necessity descends from the observation of movement upon the Earth and hence from the necessity of finding a cause for movement). Aristotle denies reality, instead, to the other entities individuated by the preceding philosophers, and in particular he denies the Platonic ideas as not necessary according to his logic. And under this aspect one will observe how the logical structure of contemporary science is intimately Aristotelian: on the basis of the findings of physical observations, the logically necessary consequences are drawn, as theories to be demonstrated on the basis of the principle of non-contradiction.
Aristotle then wrote also of ethics, of politics, and of the natural sciences (as his emulator Hegel would later do), in which last he too remained undisputed authority for centuries and centuries: for example the ether as the matter of space, as described by Aristotle, was held a natural element until Einstein (naturally a rational-Aristotelian himself) demonstrated with the theory of relativity that of it there is no need whatever.
But in regard to each of the matters with which he occupied himself, for Aristotle the ultimate foundation was always the principle of non-contradiction.
For this reason it is correct to assert that whoever believes reason to be the method of knowledge of reality must be called an Aristotelian.
The Western world has been centred for two millennia upon the goddess reason, and Nietzsche and a few overwrought souls say that reason serves for nothing?
At this point one must take a step back, and ascend from Aristotle to Plato, for Aristotle was Plato's disciple at the Academy in Athens.
While Aristotle takes it for granted that reason is the necessary and sufficient instrument for comprehending reality, Plato in many passages (in many passages which the scholars and the philosophers, all supine before the goddess reason, forget or seek to neutralise) says clearly that reason is indeed a useful instrument for comprehending reality, but is a limited, fallacious, succedaneous means, because the true knowledge of the true reality (which is not only that which 'offers resistance and contact', Sophist 246a-b) follows only upon the noûs, which is not the banal intuition it is for Aristotle, nor is it mystical rapture, but is, one may say, noetic experiencing — even if to give definitions of what lies on the hither side of the finite mind, and which Plato himself says is not communicable as the other knowledges are, remains futile. For Plato his dialectical philosophy is the opening of the tò tês psychês ómma, the eye of the psyche, out of the barbaric mire in which it lies buried (Republic VII, 533d; scholars rightly call the central books of the Republic crucial to Platonic thought, but this passage and other select ones are reduced to poetic metaphors), and with respect to this the other disciplines, such as mathematics and astronomy, are handmaids: for Plato men are indeed rational animals, but they can be also something different.
In the Platonic perspective, then, one should simply say that Aristotle, while recognising him as the supreme genius of Western thought, was devoid of noûs, and therefore believed that his reason could comprehend everything. One last remark upon reason itself: the many, who live in reason as all do, upon hearing that reason is in itself erroneous oppose to it instinctuality, the ferine dimension and other suchlike amenities, because precisely, limited to reason, they believe they know that there cannot be a dimension of the mind different from and 'better' than reason, and when they read philosophers who firmly affirm this they strive to cancel them. But the reason that must be submitted to critique, be it well made clear, is reason as founded upon representation, not reason in itself; the difficulty in asserting this is that whoever reads while living in representation cannot know what a reason unbound from representation may be, and therefore opines and holds for certain that 'his' reason is reason whole and sole — whereas what India calls viveka, discernment, is precisely reason without representation, fruit of yogic realisations.
Plato maintains what in India have been the rudiments of knowledge for many and many millennia; in India Aristotle would have been considered nothing more than a coarse self-referential sophist. With all this, one of the fundamental problems of the West is that the West itself is founded purely upon Aristotle, and does not read him.