Methodology

Aristotle defines philosophy in terms of essence, saying that philosophy is 
"the science of the universal essence of that which is actual". Plato had 
defined it as the "science of the idea", meaning by idea what we should call 
the unconditional basis of phenomena. Both pupil and master regard philosophy 
as concerned with the universal; the former however, finds the universal in 
particular things, and calls it the essence of things, while the latter finds 
that the universal exists apart from particular things, and is related to them 
as their prototype or exemplar. For Aristotle, therefore, philosophic method 
implies the ascent from the study of particular phenomena to the knowledge of 
essences, while for Plato philosophic method means the descent from a 
knowledge of universal ideas to a contemplation of particular imitations of 
those ideas. In a certain sense, Aristotle's method is both inductive and 
deductive, while Plato's is essentially deductive.

In Aristotle's terminology, the term natural philosophy corresponds to the 
phenomenon of the natural world, which include: motion, light and the laws of 
physics. Many centuries later these subjects would later become the basis of 
modern science, as studied through the scientific method. The term philosophy 
is distinct from metaphysics, which is what moderns term philosophy.

In the larger sense of the word, he makes philosophy coextensive with 
reasoning, which he also called "science". Note, however, that his use of the 
term science carries a different meaning than that which is covered by the 
scientific method. "All science (dianoia) is either practical, poetical or 
theoretical." By practical science he understands ethics and politics; by 
poetical, he means the study of poetry and the other fine arts; while by 
theoretical philosophy he means physics, mathematics, and metaphysics.

The last, philosophy in the stricter sense, he defines as "the knowledge of 
immaterial being," and calls it "first philosophy", "the theologic science" 
or of "being in the highest degree of abstraction." If logic, or, as Aristotle 
calls it, Analytic, be regarded as a study preliminary to philosophy, we have 
as divisions of Aristotelian philosophy (1) Logic; (2) Theoretical Philosophy, 
including Metaphysics, Physics, Mathematics, (3) Practical Philosophy; and (4) 
Poetical Philosophy.

Aristotelian science

Aristotelian discussions about science had only been qualitative, not 
quantitative. By the modern definition of the term, Aristotelian philosophy 
was not science, as this worldview did not attempt to probe how the world 
actually worked through experiment. For example, in his book "The history of 
animals" he claimed that human males have more teeth than female. Had he only 
made some observations, he would have found out that this claim is false.

Rather, based on what one's senses told one, Aristotelian philosophy then 
depended upon the assumption that man's mind could elucidate all the laws of 
the universe, based on simple observation (without experimentation) through 
reason alone.

One of the reasons for this was that Aristotle held that physics was about 
changing objects with a reality of their own, whereas mathematics was about 
unchanging objects without a reality of their own. In this philosophy, he 
could not imagine that there was a relationship between them.

In contrast, today the term science refers to the position that thinking alone 
often leads people astray, and therefore one must compare one's ideas to the 
actual world through experimentation; only then can one see if one's ideas are 
based in reality.

Aristotle's Four Causes

Aristotle names four "causes" of things, but the word cause (Greek: a?t?a, 
aitia) is not used in the modern sense of "cause and effect", under which 
causes are events or states of affairs. Rather, the four causes are like 
different ways of explaining something:

The material cause 
    This is the material that makes up an object, for example, "the bronze 
    and silver ... are causes of the statue and the bowl."
The formal cause 
    This is the blueprint or the idea commonly held of what an object should 
    be. Aristotle says, "The form is the account (and the genera of the 
    account) of the essence (for instance, the cause of an octave is the ratio 
    two to one, and in general number), and the parts that are in the 
    account."
The efficient cause 
    This is the person who makes an object, or the unmoved mover (God) who moves 
    nature. For example, "a father is a cause of his child; and in general the 
    producer is a cause of the product and the initiator of the change is a 
    cause." This is closest to the modern definition of "cause".
The final cause 
    The final cause or telos is the purpose or end that something is supposed 
    to serve. This includes "all the intermediate steps that are for the end 
    ... for example, slimming, purging, drugs, or instruments are for health; 
    all of these are for the end, though they differ in that some are activities 
    while others are instruments."

An example of an artifact that has all four causes would be a table, which has
material causes (wood and nails), a formal cause (the blueprint, or a generally 
agreed idea of what tables are), an efficient cause (the carpenter), and a final 
cause (using it to dine on).

Aristotle argues that natural objects such as an "individual man" have all four 
causes. The material cause of an individual man would be the flesh and bone that 
make up an individual man. The formal cause would be the blueprint of man, that 
which is used as a guide to create an individual man and to keep him in a 
certain state called man. The efficient cause of an individual man would be the 
father of that man, or in the case of all men the “unmoved mover” God who 
breathed (anima-breath) into the soul (anima-Latin translation) of man. The 
final cause of man would be as Aristotle stated, “Now we take the human’s 
function to be a certain kind of life, and take this life to be the soul’s 
activity and actions that express reason. Hence the excellent man’s function 
is to do this finely and well. Each function is completed well when its 
completion expresses the proper virtue. Therefore the human good turns out to 
be the souls’ activity that expresses virtue.”
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The Difference Between Natural Objects and Artifacts

The difference between natural objects and an artifact is that natural objects 
have self movement. Aristotle defined the difference between a natural object 
and an artifact when he stated, “In contrast to these, a bed, a cloak, or any 
other artifact-insofar as it is described as such i.e. as a bed, a cloak, or 
whatever, and to the extent that it is a product of a craft-has no innate 
impulse to change; but insofar as it is coincidentally made of stone or earth 
or a mixture of these, it has an innate impulse to change and just to that 
extent. This is because a nature is a type of principle and cause of motion 
and stability within those things to which it primarily belongs in their own 
right and not coincidentally.” The natural objects are changed to artifacts 
through crafts but they have an innate impulse of self movement to convert 
through time to their natural state, and they will all turn into that state 
when all animals with reason are extinct from earth.