Before we start talking about your selected Aristotle books, could you tell us a bit about your recent book, Aristotle’s Way, and why you wrote it?
I am a trained classicist and came across aristotle when I was studying classics at oxford. but, in fact, my own publications and research, previously, have been in literature and theater and cultural history. it’s really hard to talk about this without sounding like a cult you’re into, which it definitely isn’t, but I decided to practice Aristotelian ethics as a college student and it worked for me. I have been frustrated by the way that Aristotle, among all ancient authors, not just philosophers, is regarded by most academics as a thinker who, for some reason, needs to be held within the walls of academia. People never tell you that Aristotle himself was interested in writing accessible treatises, called his ‘exoteric’ works, in dialogue form, for the public; nor that he personally spoke before general audiences. he himself was an enthusiast of public engagement. he believed that if everyone, cobblers, fishermen, and peasants, became a virtue ethicist, then the world would genuinely become a better place. he thought that everyone was capable of learning moral reasoning and deliberation. it was what the Greeks called just another skill or area of knowledge, a technē, like navigation, poetry, medicine, or gardening. you can actually learn it, and he would have preferred everyone to.
You are reading: Best books by aristotle
I was scared to be a philosopher because of the whole culture around it in oxford in the early 1980s, where classical philosophers were treated as if they were analytic philosophers. I have a much more historicist approach. I was raised in a strict Protestant family by an Anglican priest on the Calvinist end of the spectrum. I lost my religion completely at the age of 13 and this left a huge gap. I almost went off the rails because I couldn’t see why there was any advantage to practicing virtue. without an interventionist or providential deity, he would see no point in trying to be a good person. of course, I later discovered that it was a major topic of discussion in moral philosophy. I had a disturbed adolescence, like many of us: I tried all kinds of weird religions, spiritualism and narcotics. I spent six years in the moral and miserable desert because I needed to have a goal in life, and a reasoned set of indicators of what would make me happier and those around me happier and, by extension, all of society happier.
The first thing I read from Aristotle was book three of the Nicomachean Ethics for an undergraduate essay on how characters deliberate and make decisions in tragedy. he was completely blown away by it. I realized that this was exactly what I had been looking for. Although I did not major in philosophy at the Ph.D. level, I have been doing so personally for nearly four decades. a couple of years ago, after i finished introducing the ancient greeks, my agent pointed out that he was always citing aristotle as a guide to life and that he should write about it for other people. then I realized, because I am almost sixty years old, I have had many friendships, I have been through workplace crises, divorces, bereavements, childbirth and raising young adults, that I now had forty years of life experience of practical ethics in politics, professional and personal life, and many good examples of what makes people happy and unhappy, and of moral dilemmas. I couldn’t have written this book when I was 20 years old.
That’s very interesting, because it ties into this whole notion that a lot of the ancient Greek philosophers were really concerned with: how to live in a practical sense, not just in an abstract “philosophical” sense. There is now a lot of interest in Stoicism but, in the academic world, Aristotelian virtue ethics remains a rather technical subject. it’s often about performance rather than action.
exactly. I decided to take a deep breath and submit a proposal. penguin, both in america and britain, were launched because they obviously had their finger on the pulse that people want advanced self-help. ultimately it has to do with secularization. there is a great void in the moral life of many people. if you look at the statistics on even intermediate beliefs in britain, though not among the immigrant community, because roman catholicism and islam are actually growing, both judaism and anglican christianity, in terms of attendance and regular religious practice, are massively on the list. wane. Sociologists typically date the beginning of this decline to around 1969. There was a dramatic drop in everything that happened socially in the 1960s, and people no longer have internalized ‘rules’ about what to do or how to live.
“they removed virtue ethics from the curriculum. they have left in epistemology and ontology, but not in the only thing that is useful”
I do a lot of school visits because my other project is trying to bring classical civilization and ancient history into public sector education. our teenagers are thirsty for basic moral philosophy. if I say, “how would Aristotle have made a decision?” or discuss how to make a life plan or how to choose a partner, they get very excited because no one has had that conversation with them before. sadly, they have eliminated virtue ethics almost entirely from the one-level philosophy curriculum. they have left in epistemology and ontology, but not in the only thing that is useful.
So, it may sound crazy, but I seriously wanted to bring Aristotle back to people outside of academia, obediently writing it as a middle-aged woman and mother with ethical examples taken from my own life and experiences. I’m a bit of a secular missionary and I think this approach can make people happier.
Aristotle himself was secular? I thought that, like many of his contemporaries, he believed in gods.
My last chapter of the book is about this. he believed there was some sort of deity out there. he called it the “still mover”. So, there is a kind of engine of the universe, an energetic force, which means that we and the rest of the universe are constantly changing. sometimes he quite boldly equated it with the mind or ‘nous’, as if god were the cosmic mind. sometimes it sounded eerily like stephen hawking. If we human beings got to the point where we fully understand the universe, Hawking said, then we would know the mind of God. Aristotle sometimes hints that he believed that very distant heavenly bodies could be gods. he was fascinated by astronomy. we know from the things he tells us that he had 20/20 vision. he was good at looking at things at a very far distance. He describes the moon passing in front of Mars in 357 BC. c., when he was still in plato’s academy, and he can infer that the moon must be closer to earth than mars. this means that he must have had excellent eyesight.
and, at the risk of sounding flippant, my theory is that plato invented the theory of forms because he was short-sighted instead. I myself am very nearsighted and had to create an advanced set of images in my head of how things look to help me get around when I can’t find my contacts. I think Plato was the smart, geeky kid born into a family of military-minded statesmen with tyrannical or oligarchic leanings. he became a philosopher because he couldn’t be a general, while aristotle came from northern greece with a 20/20 view of him. So, of course, Aristotle was interested in the empirical study of physical, material reality and what Plato would have considered to be the surface appearance of things.
Let’s go to the first Aristotle book you have chosen. This is Aristotle: His Life and School by Carlo Natali, a biography of Aristotle. Could you tell why you chose this book?
well, it’s more than a biography. It is not that a biography of Aristotle is not a good thing, but it is much more than that. Carlo Natali is an eminent classicist and ancient philosopher. he really knows Greek and Latin, and this is crucial when it comes to the peculiar ancient biographical sources on Aristotle. many of these sources are hostile. Aristotle had enemies, both in his time and in later antiquity, as well as among the early Christians and in the High Middle Ages. there is a great deal of derogatory material in his writings that needs to be carefully examined. The main source is a man named Diogenes Laertius, who wrote biographies of the ancient philosophers, but they are often more like comic caricatures. he has aristotle engaging in silly sexual shenanigans and being vain. but this is obviously part of the propaganda and counter-propaganda that goes on between the different philosophical schools. Reconstructing Aristotle’s life also includes archaeological sites at Mieza in Macedonia and in Athens, as well as inscriptions (epigraphic evidence) from near Assos, the city in Asia Minor where he lived for a time. And we have evidence contained in Aristotle’s own works: for example, when he writes about creatures he has seen on Lesbos, we have a strong idea of his time on that island.
“The original book was groundbreaking because, before it, studies of Aristotle’s life had been highly speculative”
But this book on Aristotle is much more than a biography. natali is at the university of venice and was published in 1991 in italian. d s hutchinson, who is a superb aristotelian in toronto, has not only translated it but has made new translations into english. he has gone back to all those old sources so things don’t get lost in his interpretation of the Italian translation. A few new fonts have also appeared since 1991. The current version is from 2013, so it’s pretty up to date. The original book was groundbreaking because, before it, studies of Aristotle’s life had been highly speculative. The Germans, including Werner Jaeger, built up huge hypothetical timelines, trying to put all the treatises (which I consider to be fundamentally undatable) in chronological order. They would say, look, there is an arc in which we can see Aristotle’s disagreements with Plato becoming more marked, or his views on the possibility or impossibility of changing an afterlife, and other similar alleged developments. everything is speculative. Natali reduced all that to empirically verifiable facts; Aristotle would have approved of that. It was a revolutionary book from that point of view.
the first chapter is about the life of aristotle and the second chapter is about the high school. We know quite a bit about the lyceum, the university he founded in Athens, and its legal status. the third chapter deals with radically new forms of activity that had not occurred in the academy, which included book collecting. Aristotle’s library at the Lyceum was legendary and his organization later became the model for the Library of Alexandria. there were also new pedagogical methods, including those public lectures. then, it is much more than a biography. it is the whole foundation of Peripatetic philosophy. and it is very readable.
let’s move on to your second choice, richard e rubenstein’s sons of aristotle. this is a book by aristotle about some of the ways his thinking impacted later generations. it is almost a cliché that he was known as “the philosopher” for much of the medieval period as if there had never been another.
exactly. he is sitting there in charge of all the other great thinkers of dante; he is the “maestro di color che sanno” [the teacher of those who know]. I chose this book because I really enjoyed it, learned so much from it, and found it fun to read, but also because its author has an agenda that goes beyond telling the story of Aristotle in the 12th century AD. the agenda is that he wants the book to help us resolve conflicts between religions, and prevent our contemporary theocrats from convincing people that god has any role in the state. Rubenstein was originally a lawyer. Three of the authors I have chosen here are not orthodox academic writers specializing in Aristotle. As a young man, Rubenstein was involved in the most radical causes: the Black Panther movement, campaigns for racial equality, and protests against the Vietnam War. He now writes a major conflict resolution blog and, in fact, is a professor of conflict resolution and public affairs at George Mason University.
“rubenstein sees this as a model for interreligious dialogue that puts philosophy at the center”
in the twelfth century, the way in which aristotle was received radically affected the way in which not only christians, but also jews and muslims saw the relationship between faith and reason, i.e. bringing aristotle to discussions of that relationship greatly increased the role of reason. rubenstein sees this as a model for interreligious dialogue. he puts philosophy at the center and allows people to move away from petty interdoctrinal conflicts and into mutual discussion and cooperation. so i see this as a really important book in terms of providing ways forward in the 21st century. and that’s how he intended it.
is that an explicit goal? the way the book is described online makes it sound like it’s a historical study.
says that the relationship between Aristotelian thought and Christianity in the Middle Ages was a stage of creative tension in which the great scholastics did not see faith and reason as a choice of one or the other. he says that the Aristotelian project that seemed irrelevant in the age of political and religious fragmentation (Aristotle fell out of fashion in the Enlightenment) could nonetheless serve in the next phase of human history as an inspirer of creative integrative thought. he writes, “one doesn’t have to be nostalgic for the dark ages to recognize that erasing this part of our past makes the present seem eternal, and erases alternate futures.” he believes that we should focus on the extraordinary meeting in spain of arabic philosophy and christian-boethian thought on the role of philosophy in education. This book offers a study of another time and another place where Aristotle was extraordinarily positive. his secular thinking and his interest in reason and logic were the reasons why the scholastics loved him so much in the first place. Only later did people like Aquinas take Aristotle as their own and try to make him a Christian.
One of the things that personally put me off Aristotle’s ethics was the way his ideas have been used in Catholicism to repress behavior. Aristotle became the philosophical guarantor of all kinds of moral conservatism.
absolutely. this is something that would have absolutely horrified him. And I’m not the only one who thinks this. There are many who see Aristotle as a promise of balance in the kind of debates we conduct in the secular age of the 21st century. Among the first to begin trying to make it conform to dogmatic Christianity was Tertullian, one of the early Christian fathers. They said that Aristotle had, in fact, accepted the faith and that he committed suicide, which he would never have done: he strongly disapproved of suicide. They said that he committed suicide because he could not understand the tides of the euripus.
This is a strait between mainland Greece and the island called Euboea. aristotle died there. he fled from athens because he was accused, like socrates, of impiety. But unlike Socrates (who wanted to be a martyr and could have left, but didn’t), Aristotle sensibly retreated back into safe exile in his ancestral motherland. he died, probably of stomach cancer, shortly after arriving there, a disappointed man, at the age of sixty-two. but the early Christians had said that he had, in fact, thrown himself into the euripus, which has these tides that no scientist has fully explained even today. They are violent, I have gone to see them. the church fathers said that he had accepted at death that there must be a deity and that the human mind could not explain everything, as he had previously maintained. they claimed that his last words were: “if Aristotle cannot grasp the euripus intellectually, then let the euripus take Aristotle”. but this was a Christian fiction. they desperately needed him to give up his attitude toward god. people realized that it was a problem for religion that this big brain had lived and died, but all along it had been absolutely clear that: a) there was no intervening deity; and b) there was no life after death. it was too much.
See Also: The best books on the Existence of God – Ed Feser on Five Books
Your third book on Aristotle is Ethics with Aristotle by Sarah Broadie. This is a more conventional commentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, isn’t it?
I wouldn’t call it a comment, because I tend to see comments as stemmed text with sequences of references to line numbers. that’s what I call a comment. this is a long and very committed critical reading. from Ethics to Nicomachean, you only miss friendship/partnership, which is very important, and some passages where Aristotle goes into real detail about the separate virtues.
Could you give us an idea of this book by Aristotle? Is it a fairly academic book?
it is. I think it would be much better to read some of Aristotle’s historical background first. but he is exceptionally lucid. it is very solid: more than four hundred pages. he is highly argumentative and also disagrees with many mainstream Aristotelians on one important point. She fights Aristotle every inch of the way, which means that, in the end, whether you agree with her or Aristotle, you’ve been on an Aristotelian journey. it’s quite a challenge.
“she fights aristotle every inch of the way; whether you agree with her or with Aristotle, in the end you have been on an Aristotelian journey.”
She is very Scottish and sensible. Relative to other philosophers, Broadie beautifully writes short sentences (what Aristotle recommends in his rhetoric). this makes it much easier to follow the arguments, though you’ll probably have to read it two or three times to understand his full line of reasoning. in my opinion, it is the best accompaniment to ethics in the English language.
The Nicomachean Ethics is very influential, although it was not the last written version of Aristotle. Wasn’t it his class notes?
well, we don’t know. the recension of his ancient texts is another story. It’s a disaster because they were all lost and trapped in a ditch for two hundred years in western turkey before being saved by the book dealers and then by the roman general sulla. he realized how important they were. he managed to get them back to rome. Various authors tell us this, including an ancient geographer named Strabo, who loved Aristotle very much. Strabo tells us the terrible story of how they were subsequently mis-copied by booksellers who were desperate for a quick buck and did not use systematic drafting of different manuscripts. Even with the surviving books, Aristotle wrote between one and two hundred, and we only have an eighth of the total. We have to be much more careful in assuming that every word is conveyed correctly, in a way that Plato does not. Plato was carefully copied from day one and is wonderfully preserved in the manuscript tradition of Byzantium.
do you think this is due to the different styles of their writing? Plato is incredibly literary and a beautiful writer, but Aristotle doesn’t present himself that way in what survives.
exactly, in what survives. But I would like to insist that we know from the way people talk about his exoteric works, the short, accessible treatises he wrote for circulation among the public, that they were dramatic dialogues like Plato’s, and famous for their beauty. it is very sad that they have not survived so that we can read them.
So, did you learn from Plato as a writer and as a thinker?
yes. Cicero speaks of the “river of gold” of Aristotle’s prose in popular works. this does not apply to what has survived, which is mostly advanced writing for philosophers-in-training. if you look at my texts for when I’m training my postgraduates, then I don’t bother to make them easy. if I need to use a neologism or a new language or shorthand or specialized technical terminology, then I will. it’s part of learning the technē of being a classicist. but I would never dream of publishing prose like that for the general public. you, as a public philosopher, will fully understand what I mean. So yes, Aristotle’s work is dense and difficult and that’s why I wanted to write a book that conveyed Aristotelian ideas through some real practical case studies and moral dilemmas that my friends and I have faced.
One of the criticisms often made against virtue ethics, as it appears in philosophy departments, is that it doesn’t really tell you how to live. it will say choose the middle path or do what a virtuous person would do. but you are perplexed, because you don’t know which extremes you choose between, and you don’t know what a virtuous person would do, because if you did, then you would be doing it.
yes, absolutely. however, Aristotle presents some radical views that have clear practical implications. for example, the one of omission/commission. Long before Roman Catholics invented sins of omission, Aristotle—in book three of the Nicomachean Ethics—has an extraordinary set of sentences in which he says that if you are responsible for something you did and it turned out badly, then if you chose not to do something and the omission had bad results, then you are still responsible. in britain we have a legal system that is far worse than almost any other in the world in terms of not holding people to account for not acting, and this notion of wrongdoing by omission radically changed my life. I stopped saying to myself, ‘Have I stayed out of trouble today?’ and I began to say to myself: ‘if I am three twenty years old, how do I want to make the world a better place?’ I don’t think we use that closely enough in our evaluations of politicians and celebrities and rich people and leaders. we just ask them to keep their noses clean and manage not to say anything racist or sexist, instead of what they have done or failed to do with their power, wealth, status and influence.
It is interesting that it comes more from utilitarianism than from Aristotelianism.
I know, but he made it up. what is clear is that the higher up the social ladder you are, and the more secure you are, the more compelled you are to use that status and security for good. Aristotle was very harsh on the rich who did not do something constructive with his money. This is a man who had to live in the court of Philip of Macedonia. he saw some of the worst behavior in the Greek world. And in Nicomachean Ethics, when he talks about financial pettiness, he uses some of the bitterest language about him.
There is an interesting passage about who should have the best flute. if you have a wonderful instrument, who should keep it? should it be the person with the most money or the person most capable of playing it? actually, our society says that it is the person who has the legal rights to it, probably the person who bought it, who should get it. if they are charitable enough to lend it to a great artist, they may deign to do so, but they are not obliged to do so. Aristotle seems to have a much stronger meritocratic bias, that people who make the best use of something should get it, not people who necessarily have the most money.
exactly. and that is like his other extraordinary idea of dynamis, of potential. everything has potential. even bits of wood and stone have the potential to become statues or parts of a temple. but in the case of the human being, realizing all his physical, intellectual and creative potential and doing it as an activity all the time, not just reaching that state and stopping, is inseparable from eudaimonia. that is exactly what it is. In a sense, you and I are in a state of eudaimonia right now because we’re doing what we enjoy most and have therefore become reasonably good at: talking about ideas.
but there is a downside to that. there are many other things you could have done. how do you choose between the various things you could pursue, since you can’t do everything?
I talk about this in the book; i have been very lucky i had a socialist-aristotelian mentor, an admirable woman named margot heinemann, an english teacher. I was really lost in my mid-twenties. he had not decided to do a doctorate; i did it pretty late she had me in for an hour and she said ‘she writes down everything you can do and then tell me what you’re doing it with’. she was an old marxist, so she just said ‘ok, you can’ go into politics. you are too emotional for the political plane. you are not properly working class, so you cannot work economically. then go and work on the ideological plane.” I said ‘well how do I do that?’ she said ‘you’ve got a brain. you have a first class degree. for the love of god, isn’t it obvious you need to go and be an academic? isn’t that brilliant? I was lucky because I had someone who was able to be a good mentor and cared. How many children do not have such an adult in their lives? she did that for me and I think we should be doing it for all of our young people.
My second chapter is about dynamics. the term is where alfred nobel got the name of the original gunpowder from him, which i hate because it’s such a constructive word. I wanted to call my book Aristotelian dynamite and the publisher wouldn’t let me. but the real dynamite is in every human being on the planet.
Let’s move on to your fourth option. This is Aristotle: Richard Kraut’s Political Philosophy. In this book by Aristotle we have gone from how we should live as individuals to what that means for society.
yes, here we move smoothly from ethics to politics. Richard Kraut has written several books on Aristotle and Plato. he is a wonderful man. he is the only one of these that I personally know. he is at northwestern university and warmly encouraged me to write my book about six years ago when he had a visiting position there. he told me to stop worrying about not being a recognized philosopher yet and just do it. he was terrified by the backlash from fellow academics. the terror, judging by the criticism of academics, was completely justified. ordinary people and non-academic reviewers like it, but academics (high-level men, anyway) mostly don’t.
richard kraut has written several excellent books. he could have chosen his aristotle on the human good (1989) but my favorite of all his books is aristotle: political philosophy (2002). Kraut is personally committed to public engagement, which is why he writes with unusual clarity. he says that he wants to write for newcomers to aristotle. but there is also much that is original and new to political theorists and philosophers. It’s a brilliant balance, because while everywhere you can feel that Kraut is fully committed to the most up-to-date scholarship, he uses it lightly. he doesn’t submerge the narrator’s voice from him at all.
if aristotle’s ethics is centered on eudaimonia, which is often translated as ‘flourishing’ rather than ‘happiness’, what is the focus of his political philosophy?
doing that ‘living well’ together as political animals advancing the living city-state, and how to do it together. it is a kind of maximization and magnification of those virtues at a collective level.
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was he in favor of democracy? Plato was clearly undemocratic.
Aristotle was more in favor of democracy. this is where the kraut comes in. most Aristotelians are clear that he believed that democracy, if it works well, is the best constitution. It’s interesting in his own life how, whenever he could, he would go back to Athens. He lived much more of his adult life in Athens, in the democracy, than anywhere else, even though he was only a resident alien. he might not even have full citizen rights.
but he had been Alexander the Great’s tutor.
I don’t think I had many options. people talk about this as if it had a range or alternatives. People who did not do what they were told by Philip of Macedonia, the terrible tyrant and one-eyed autocrat, were killed. poisonings and fights were the stuff of daily life in the pella. It is actually quite surprising that Aristotle was still alive. Philip, after all, besieged Aristotle’s hometown of Stagira in northeastern Greece, killing or enslaving its inhabitants. people talk like you could get summons letters from philip of macedon, and be able to say ‘well, no, actually’…
“poisonings and disputes were the stuff of everyday life in Pella. It’s actually quite surprising that Aristotle was still alive.”
but what i like about kraut’s book, and it’s similar to what i said about rubenstein, is that he’s clear that we need to use aristotle’s political ideas to help us live together today. he is very relevant right now. there is a continuous thread here in what I am saying. he says, “there are riches in Aristotle’s political thought that go unrecognized or underestimated, and his perspective deserves to be included in contemporary debates on social and political issues.” Aristotle himself was addressing the future political leaders who were studying with him in the fourth century BC. c., and modern public policymakers can still benefit from his ideas about a good society, justice, citizenship, equality, democracy, community, property, family, class conflict, and the corrosive results of extreme poverty and wealth .
That’s a very strong recommendation for that book.
It’s a wonderful book. it’s inspiring, beautifully written, and from the best Aristotelian mind there is.
Let’s go to the last book of Aristotle. this is the loophole: how aristotle invented science by armand marie leroi.
I love this book of aristotle. leroi is not a classicist; he is professor of evolutionary developmental biology at imperial college london. he discovered early in his career, as anyone studying zoology must, that aristotle is the founding father of zoology. His two great treatises on the reproduction of animals and the history of animals are an excellent place to start reading Aristotle because they are written in easy, flowing prose. They have a lot of color because they are horses, giraffes, mollusks and other animals. I often recommend them as a good way to learn about Aristotle for young people.
leroi decided to examine these works of Aristotle in detail. Aristotle often mentions specific places where he has seen creatures, notably the island of Lesbos. We know that he spent about 18 months there at a crucial moment in his career, when he was about 40 years old, with Theophrastus, who was his successor at the head of the lyceum. Theophrastus was 17 years younger, but Aristotle’s most trusted friend, and a lesbian because he was from the island of Lesbos. leroi visited lesbos. Aristotle drew beautiful pictures of the animals, but unfortunately they have not survived: Leroi’s book provides reconstructions. Leroi’s book is a panegyric on Aristotle the natural scientist. Aristotle was remarkable: he even seems to have invented the spreadsheet, so that he could compile dozens and dozens of parallel cases, collate them, and then infer general scientific principles from them. So this book is a love song to Aristotle by a scientist who writes much better prose than most scholars in the humanities. leroi also shows, many times, how these ideas cannot be separated from ethics. Aristotle has the belief that our virtue is based on nature, and that if we do not live according to our biologically determined animality, then we cannot achieve happiness. the physical pleasures enjoyed by all animals are not goals in themselves for us. they are not intrinsic goods, but they are guides to good.
Are they guides to the good and presumably elements of a good life?
yes, but only because they are instrumental. sexual desire will help you have a better relationship, but what you are looking for is a better psychological relationship.
Because, unlike pigs, deer, shellfish or whatever, we have the ability to have a thoughtful interaction with someone we respect beyond physical interaction?
exactly. it is the same with eating. he says that delicious food is important because delicious food is generally healthier and better for you and will make your body in better condition, which leads to better and more serious thinking. So, science is crucial for Aristotle. There is an excellent philosopher at Birkbeck College in London named Sophia Connell who really understands this. she has already produced wonderful articles explaining why we can’t do ethics without biology and aristotle on females: a study of the generation of animals came out with mug in 2016. she is also in the process of editing the cambridge companion for the Aristotle’s biology.
That’s very interesting. These aspects of Aristotle’s surviving works are generally studied independently, it must be said, particularly by philosophers who only lip-service about Aristotle as a scientist without really delving into what kind of scientist he was.
absolutely. I would suggest that the complete beginner go and read the history of the animals. It is full of charming anecdotes and conveys a strong sense of Aristotle, the animal lover. he is keen on horses, as my sister, an expert horseman, has confirmed.
How does so much fit into such a short life?
I don’t know. Plato called it “the brain.” They said that the academy was terribly quiet when he wasn’t there. but he read and read and read about everything: he read physical sciences, which socrates and plato did not do; he respected the study of rhetoric if it is used for morally correct ends; he wanted to do research in all disciplines and he was the first to theorize how we argue logically in all of them. he collected a vast library, but also collaborated with other thinkers. the fact that several of his works are labeled “bogus” is simply because they are equivalent to his Ph.D. students.
So, was he really a team player as well as an independent genius?
yes. in lyceum they rotated leadership roles, as proper colleges and universities used to do: intellectuals when I started my academic career still rotated the deanery instead of importing business managers and accountants to come in and tell us how to do our jobs.
It is clear that you deeply admire Aristotle. what would you say is its continuing importance?
The best answer to that is found in the last chapter of my Aristotle book. in fact, I couldn’t write that chapter for a long time: I was delayed a whole year because my mother was dying. I got in and out of her bed, and found a way to use Aristotelian ideas to help me. his theory of conscious recollection, which only humans can realize, was supportive to me. animals have memory, he argues, but they cannot deliberately remember. Aristotle says that this is a uniquely human ability. that idea has also influenced me as an academic: I believe that I am a custodian of deliberate memory because I write history books and consciously recover memories of our human past, activate our historical consciousness. but the very notion became invaluable to me personally as I went through my memory bank and shared all of my happiest childhood memories with my mother with her. I think that helped my mother too.
“Aristotle is simply the most important intellectual who ever lived”
We know that Aristotle used all kinds of memory aids. he had a picture of his mother, whom he had been very fond of. he never forgot his wife, who died young. he had a bust of socrates and a photo of a much loved former student in high school as well. he wrote a poem in memory of the ruler of assos who had been a close friend of his. he used deliberate memories to maintain links to the past, although he did not believe in any afterlife. I think that is moving. the man who met death head-on, one of the few people in ancient times to do that, had this fearless awareness that life is not only not a dress rehearsal, it’s the only performance and premiere in one . I found it extraordinarily useful in one of life’s most difficult situations.
I think Aristotle is simply the most important intellectual who ever lived. he has seminal status in so many academic disciplines, as well as having invented a revolutionary human-centered ethic. everyone deserves to have access to this wonderful thinker.
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