Aristotle General

About to get started on this.
Prerequisite reading?
Good secondary lit?

Other urls found in this thread:

youtube.com/watch?v=cxHz6E0KgKg
giffordlectures.org/lectures/varieties-goodness
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllogism#Examples)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_logic
twitter.com/NSFWRedditGif

I'm on book 4. It reads pretty slow, the notes in the back help, sometimes if I'm feeling especially productive I'll write notes in my journal as I'm reading. Then again I'm a slow reader objectively so it may be easier than I might be implying

>Good secondary lit?
"Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology" and "Philosophy: Who Needs It" by Ayn Rand will knock your socks off.
Best modern Aristotlean by miles.

Chapter 2 from Will Durant's "The Story of Philosophy" and this lecture
youtube.com/watch?v=cxHz6E0KgKg

I read this recently and got literally nothing out of it. I feel like his ideas in it are so absorbed into our culture that they're really just the most obvious common sense observations at this point.

The man is the father of reason and the scientific method so that's than accurate assessment.

Do you happen to know why Aristotle and not Plato is considered the father of reason?

Because Plato was an idealist mystic nut to be honest

Come on

That's actually a very fair point, but I would argue that it's valuable to explore those ideas for the sake of studying them on their own, stripped of the ideologies and institutions we've built around them. They seem "common sense" to us because, like you said, they're so absorbed into our culture already; that doesn't make it a waste of time to investigate them and take a look at the philosophical underpinnings of our culture.

Technically, because he championed rational science as nobody had before him; he invented logic which did not independently arise anywhere else in the world, ever, and which gave the western mind the power to reason and approach scientific truth; and because his accounts are the earliest scientific, rational, deductive accounts we have of a total, systematic attempt to understand the natural world.

Obviously huge strides had been made before (Thales and later pre-socratics giving us our first instances of attempting to rationally understand the physical world, Socrates and Plato trying to understand, among other things, the human mind), but Aristotle's scale and assiduousness is just insane; the breadth and depth of his treatises are astounding.

On a less technical note, I think this passage from Murray's "Human Accomplishment" is worth noting especially in terms of Platonic/Aristotelian ethics/politics:

>Plato preceded Aristotle, Aristotelian thought owes extensively to Plato, and it was, after all, Plato rather than Aristotle of whom Alfred North Whitehead famously said that all of Western philosophy is his footnote. And yet in the end Aristotle has had the more profound effect on Western culture. Some of Plato’s final conclusions, especially regarding the role of the state, are totalitarian. In contrast, Aristotle’s understandings of virtue, the nature of a civilized polity, happiness, and human nature have not only survived but have become so integral a part of Western culture that to be a European or American and hold mainstream values on these issues is to be an Aristotelian.

Also I haven't read the Ethics yet, but I would recommend the relevant section in Copleston's "history of philosophy" at the very least. For more in-depth study I would suggest (based on my experiences with these writers/series for other Platonic/Aristotelian writings):

-Aquinas' commentary on the NE (dumb ox books)
-Cambridge companion to the NE (essays vary in quality/significance; almost all that I've read from other cambridge companions have been worth the time)
-Kenneth Telford's commentary on the NE (if it's even nearly as valuable as his intro to Categories/De Int, I wouldn't skip this for anything)
-Cambridge critical guide, ed. Jon Miller (isbn 1107687691, had a great time on their book on Plato's Laws)

threadly reminder that aristotle is not Veeky Forums approved

t. brainlet

I posit that Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, John Locke, and Ayn Rand are the 4 greatest Philosophers that have ever lived.
Plato, Auguste Comte, Karl Marx, and Immanuel Kant the worst.

I always recommend the underrated "Varieties of Goodness" by von Wright. The method is close to "common sense observations" which is maybe why it was overlooked. Or maybe the 1960s just wasn't a good time for ethics. It's 21 years before After Virtue after all.

giffordlectures.org/lectures/varieties-goodness

Thanks for some great answers. One thing I'm confused about is how you said that Aristotle invented logic. Is Plato not using logic and attempting to rationally understand the world in his dialogues?

If Plato uses logic it's still in the form of verbal argumentation. Aristotle introduced syllogisms that are arguments in formal logic.

He is and that is what breaks his whole shoddy system.

Skip and read secondary. If you really want to the only essentials are The Organon and Nicomachean Ethics. The rest is pure gobbledegook. Metaphysics is incoherent trash that can only be understood via secondary sources.

Sorry, when I said that he invented logic I should have been more clear: Logic in some sense was used before him, just like "science" was done for millennia before the development of the scientific method. The significance of Aristotle's work is the system that he created. Forgive me for attaching another quote from that Murray book (I'm reading it now so apposite sections are on the tip of my tongue).

Basically Aristotle outlined the "rules" and principles of logic and pointed to different statements saying "that conclusion holds in every case, that other conclusion holds holds in some cases, that conclusion can't be made at all." He formalized "deductions" or "syllogisms" which enumerate the various structures we can use when trying to reach logical conclusions. They weren't 100% worked out but singlehandedly provided the grounds for logic to stand on for the next like 2000 years.

For a famous one, we can say (A) EVERY man is mortal, (B) Socrates is a man, therefore (C) Socrates is mortal. (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllogism#Examples)

Significantly as far as lasting influence goes, Aristotle singled out the one syllogism that provides a universally affirmative conclusion (e.g. if we change the one above from talking to Socrates to talking about a whole group of people, we can say, e.g., all men are mortal->all Greeks are men->ALL Greeks are mortal). It seems trivial but basically his "Barbara" syllogism (so called by medieval thinkers) is the way we can use two premises (basically building blocks of thought) to create new, equally strong building blocks which can themselves be used in further deductions.

Plato uses logic, but does not systematize it, and does not always use it in the same way. For example, he often gladly ends his discussions with aporia: "I know what I don't know," etc., which is powerful as a tool for inspiring wonder and contemplation, but is a very different result from the (supposedly) ironclad conclusions reached by Aristotle. Aristotle's logic is less "fun" and less glamorous, but is exciting in its own way once you realize how big of a boon it was to man to have that tool in his belt.

Is the entire Organon essential? What's the best translation?

Because plato had no dependable method.

The reason we look to Aristotle and not Plato is because Aristotle thought we could know things through experimentation and Plato thought we could basically know nothing. Aristotles methods were clear and easy to follow, his methods lead to the rise of empiricism ect.

There are transcendental truths with Aristotle's philosophy and there are none with Plato's philosophy. Plato's philosophies are generally speaking, not particularly pragmatic, while Aristotle's are extremely pragmatic and effective and delivering concise answers about the world.

Highschoolers doorknocking about AR as a philosopher should be permabanned

Probably not.
Cat/De Int are indispensable, period. Pretty much structure the rest of Aristotle's philosophy in almost every field. Read Telford's intro to the pair of them to figure out what the fuck is going on.

Prior/Post. analytics are the meat of it. Really fucking dry and slow. This is where you'll get all of the syllogisms. Crucial IF you want to understand Aristotle's logic. There are big chunks of it that are confusing and outright muddled; pages and pages worth of modal qualifiers are borderline incomprehensible to a new reader, and are basically universally accepted by academics as being unfinished and often contradictory. My advice is to read through both analytics and TRY to keep track, but to not sweat every detail, every syllogism.

Topics/Soph.Elench. are interesting but are geared more towards verbal sparring à la Plato, sophists, than towards physical science or anything else written by Aristotle later (possibly might be relevant to ethics, politics; I haven't read them so I can't be sure). Almost certainly skippable.

Translations don't really matter. Aristotle isn't fun to read, and anyone bothering to translate the organon will almost certainly be worth their salt. Probably most of it will be in the modern library "basic aristotle" and I'm sure that would be fine. Read some secondary lit as well (Hackett prior analytics; Aquinas commentary on posterior; the Telford I mentioned above for Cat/De Int).

I spent a summer taking adderall and reading Complete Works of Aristotle

I think the way the book was organized provides a reasonable structure; start with Cat. and De Inter, Prior Analytics and Posterior Analytics, then read Metaphysics, then On The Spirit, then Ethics -> Politics -> Poetics

Ethics is fucking great, take it slow, reflect, take notes, enjoy it.

>complete works
>lists like 1/3 of the actual complete works

>logic which did not independently arise anywhere else in the world, ever
>The development of Indian logic dates back to the anviksiki of Medhatithi Gautama (c. 7th century BCE) the Sanskrit grammar rules of Pāṇini (c. 5th century BCE); the Vaisheshika school's analysis of atomism (c. 2nd century BCE); the analysis of inference by Gotama (c. 2nd century), founder of the Nyaya school of Hindu philosophy; and the tetralemma of Nagarjuna (c. 2nd century CE). Indian logic stands as one of the three original traditions of logic, alongside the Greek and the Chinese logic. The Indian tradition continued to develop through to early modern times, in the form of the Navya-Nyāya school of logic.
>In the late 18th-century British scholars began to take an interest in Indian philosophy and discovered the sophistication of the Indian study of inference. This process culminated in Henry T. Colebrooke's The Philosophy of the Hindus: On the Nyaya and Vaisesika Systems in 1824,[8] which provided an analysis of inference and comparison to the received Aristotelian logic, resulting in the observation that the Aristotelian syllogism could not account for the Indian syllogism. Max Mueller contributed an appendix to the 1853 edition of Thomson's Outline of the Laws of Thought, in which he placed Greek and Indian logic on the same plane: "The sciences of Logic and Grammar were, as far as history allows us to judge, invented or originally conceived by two nations only, by Hindus and Greeks."[9]
>en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_logic

He wants reading relevant to Nicomachean Ethics, I think the trajectory I listed gives the best collection of works for someone interested in that topic.

Why?
She argued the epistemological and metaphysical premises of her Philosophy beautifully and competently. People just are butthurt because she is Capitalism's greatest advocate.