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Aristotle: Forms
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Aristotle considered epic poetry, tragedy, comedy, dithyrambic poetry and music to be imitative, each varying in imitation by media, object, and manner. For example, music imitates with the media of rhythm and harmony, whereas dance imitates with rhythm alone, and poetry with language. The forms ... differ in their object of imitation. Comedy, for instance, is a dramatic imitation of men worse than average; whereas tragedy imitates men slightly better than average. Lastly, the forms differ in their manner of imitiation - through narrative or character, through change or no change, and through drama or no drama. Aristotle believed that imitiation is natural to mankind and constitutes one of mankind's advantages over animals.
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Aristotle says that the subject of his inquiry (theoria) is substance (ousia). As he has argued elsewhere in Metaphysics, substance is primary and therefore to have theoria, or to understand Reality, is to know substance, or as he put it, to know the principles and causes of substances: "For the principles and causes we are seeking are those of substance" (tôn gar ousiôn hai archai kai ta aitia zêtountai) (Metaphysics 12.1; 1069a 1). (The exact difference between the terms "cause" [aition] and "principles" [arche] is difficult to determine from Aristotle's use of these terms.) (In Metaphysics 1.1, Aristotle defines wisdom as a knowledge of the first causes and the principles of things [ta prota aitia kai tas archas].) Although he recognizes that this term has several meanings (Metaphysics 5.1), Aristotle, in this context, seems to mean by "principle" "that from which a thing can first be known" (hothen gnoston to pragma proton) (Metaphysics 5.1; 1013a 15). A principle of a susbtance is that by which the substance is first known or known fundamentally. A substance is an individual thing; to know this individual thing is to know its principle, which means that one has understood it generically, no longer as an individual. Aristotle uses the term "cause" to denote the four causes of a thing (the material, formal, efficient and final causes) (Meta 5.2).
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All Aristotle's writings for a larger audience, mainly dialogues, have been lost except for some fragments. What remains are treatises apparently meant for use within the school. These form the so-called Corpus Aristotelicum. In addition, there survives a mutilated version of his Constitution of Athens, some letters of doubtful authenticity, and some poems, including an elegy on Plato.
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After these preliminaries, Aristotle passes to the main subject of physics, the scale of being. The first thing to notice about this scale is that it is a scale of values. What is higher on the scale of being is of more worth, because the principle of form is more advanced in it. Species on this scale are eternally fixed in their place, and cannot evolve over time. The higher items on the scale are ... more organized. Further, the lower items are inorganic and the higher are organic. The principle which gives internal organization to the higher or organic items on the scale of being is life, or what he calls the soul of the organism.
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Aristotle described the psyche as a substance able to receive knowledge. Knowledge is obtained through the psyche's capability of intelligence, although the five senses are ... necessary to obtain knowledge. "As Aristotle describes the process, the sense receives 'the form of sensible objects without the matter, just as the wax receives the impression of the signet-ring without the iron or the gold.' (Britannica Online, "Physiological Psychology")." Sensitivity is stimulated by phenomenon in the environment, and memory is the persistence of sense impressions. He maintained that mental activities were primarily biological, and that the psyche was the "form" part of intellect. Aristotle insisted that the body and the psyche form a unity.
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Aristotle's understanding that ethics is only possible within a political community dictates that the community should be organized in certain ways so that happiness can be achieved for the largest amount of citizens. Hence the community must be organized to encourage maximum happiness by educating citizens in the correct way so that they practice right reason. An understanding of virtue is necessarily normative as it prescribes modes of conduct which a person must be self-discipline impose on themselves and the state can encourage with correct education. Aristotle prescribes for political life a form that encourages the person to control the desiring element in themselves and act according to right reason. Only a political life of a certain form can achieve this, but the process of description is vital to finding the nature of this form.
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