Metaphysical Foundations Of States

Aristotle’s Politics is an extremely vital book on state’s political theory, also the first one talked about political system and related theories specifically in western history. Therefore, a research on this book can lead us to the source of western political philosophy. There are two paths to analyze Politics, one is from the perspective of political philosophy history, and another one is from Aristotle’s own philosophical system. In this paper, the second path will be taken. Various comparisons have been conducted in Aristotle’s system, such as the comparison among his physics and metaphysics, politics and ethics, or the logics and metaphysics, and so on. All of these have been familiarized and deeply studied by annotators who work on Aristotle in a long run. Outside these areas, a new land, which is an overlapping zone in politics and metaphysics, is expected to be explored in this paper, namely, the metaphysical foundation of PoliticsThe positing of polis’s end is the most obvious usage of metaphysical conception in the Politics, and this is just the issue of final purpose said in Metaphysics. Apart from this, the whole and part are also two conceptions borrowed by Politics to emphasize that state is prior to individuals. For this reason, we conclude that there are large numbers of metaphysical conception usages in the Politics and act as the basis of political theories. This kind of dependence can also be seen in the relationships between citizens and materials, constitutions and forms, generation and states’founding, etc. At the same time, the overall structure of Aristotle’s politics is developed by focusing on its end. Whereas, a problem is hidden here that the mutual repellent between the end and motivation. They contradict each other as the factors involve in the process of state’s forming, one requires the whole prior to parts, and another requires parts prior to the whole.As the student of Plato, Aristotle inherits from his teacher’s political theory affirmatively, but he also criticizes the Republic in his Politics. We can clearly identify how these differences turn out from the view that metaphysics acts as the foundation of politics.