Aristotle's critics

Aristotle has been criticised on several grounds.

   1. At times, the objections that Aristotle raises against the arguments of 
   his own teacher, Plato, appear to rely on faulty interpretations of those 
   arguments.
   2. Although Aristotle advised, against Plato, that knowledge of the world 
   could only be obtained through experience, he frequently failed to take 
   his own advice. Aristotle conducted projects of careful empirical 
   investigation, but often drifted into abstract logical reasoning, with the 
   result that his work was littered with conclusions that were not supported 
   by empirical evidence; for example, his assertion that objects of different 
   mass fall at different speeds under gravity, which was later refuted by 
   Galileo.
   3. In the middle ages, roughly from the 12th century to the 15th century, 
   the philosophy of Aristotle became firmly established dogma. Although 
   Aristotle himself was far from dogmatic in his approach to philosophical 
   inquiry, two aspects of his philosophy might have assisted its 
   transformation into dogma. His works were wide ranging and systematic so 
   that they could give the impression that no significant matter had been 
   left unsettled. He was also much less inclined to employ the skeptical 
   methods of his predecessors, Socrates and Plato.
   4. Some academics have suggested that Aristotle was unaware of much of the 
   current science of his own time, and that he was a far lesser mathematician 
   than many of his learned contemporaries.

Aristotle was called not a great philosopher, but "The Philosophers Stone" by 
Scholastic thinkers. Scholastic thinkers blended Aristotelian philosophy with 
Christianity, bringing the thought of Ancient Greece into the Middle Ages. It 
required a repudiation of some Aristotelian principles for the sciences and 
the arts to free themselves for the discovery of modern scientific laws and 
empirical methods.

The Western mind is "Aristotelian". By this we mean that it formats the 
external world into factual and "scien"-tific categories. (By "Scien"-tific 
we mean that something is knowable or known.)

Under the premise of external categorization, the Aristotelian mind has come 
to equate "experience" with the unified chronical and spatial ontological 
structure that is the "external" universe -- visible, audible and sensible 
by the handful of our common, well-identified senses.

By so equating the two, the Aristotelian mind is fully confident, or fully 
"positive" of the meanings of its utterances and the purposes of all actions. 
That is to say, it dismisses the possibility of dubious meanings as 
interpreted by subjects that are at variance in perspectives or phenomenology, 
and it dismisses the importance of anything other than an objectively defined 
"purpose" to an action.

Therefore, the Aristotelian mind assumes that when subject A utters "I am X," 
he or she is referring to the same experience and is expressing the same 
purpose as subject B who also utters "I am X."