Would anyone here be interested in a weekly club dedicated to reading and exposition of Aristotle?

Would anyone here be interested in a weekly club dedicated to reading and exposition of Aristotle?
I haven't seen any such groups on here in some time, I think it could be cool. Far too few people seem to bother with Aristotle, which is tragic given his place as perhaps the most important thinker in the western tradition.

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Do Poetics instead of any of the Ethics. Everyone always tries to shill Nicomachean Ethics and they're always surprised when nobody wants to read that shit.

I'd start with Categories and continue on to logical works, then the Physics and finally the Metaphysics. Seems much more relevant to understand subsequent philosophy IMO. Ethics and Politics I'd leave after the "theoretical" works.

are reading the Greeks valid in this day? all i see is people reading all these modern thinkers and their existential bs, is there any value in reading the ancients?

Aristotle is ALWAYS relevant, user. Among other things, he set the foundations for most scientific fields, formed a formal system of logic that remained essentially complete until the 18th century, and thought up a system of ethics that has been predominant through Western history and currently undergoing a major revival. Reading him it's really amazing that such academic genius was writing in 4th century BC. I mean, Plato is a fascinating thinker and covered a bunch of topics, but nothing matches the sheer rigour of Aristotle's systematic thinking when taken into account how little he had as a reference.
Asking "is Aristotle worth reading?" is a pointless question. I don't know who would be, then.

>Organon
You're gonna lose a lot of people. Poetics is pretty board relevant; predicate logic is a sure way to make your threads mostly autists who didn't read.

Does anyone read Aristotle cover to cover? How much of his work is actually regularly read? Is the less popular stuff too dry, boring, difficult, irrelevant, or what?

It depends on the scribe, I think? Nichomachean Ethics is a prime example of bloat, but some of his stuff like Parva Naturalia is concise and beautiful. I think NE is more popular/well known because it deals with ethics and the idea of balance between extremes of emotion, but it takes for fucking ever to get to the point. PN by contrast will explain to you why the dress is white and gold, not blue and black, in a neat little paragraph with gorgeous prose.

I'd be down.

>Everyone always tries to shill Nicomachean Ethics and they're always surprised when nobody wants to read that shit.
>Ethics and Politics I'd leave after the "theoretical" works.
At least according to Aristotle, the proper path of inquiry is to start with what is better known to us and then proceed to what is better known by nature/in itself. This seems to mean the matters closest to us as humans, and in that way, I would think the Ethics, Politics, On the Soul, and Poetics would be good starting points. At least as a suggestion.

The other possibility is that we could jump right into the Physics and move into the Metaphysics. The Organon, while certainly useful in many ways to read generally, is itself dependent on and posterior to the Physics and Metaphysics in order of inquiry. Plus, as already pointed out, starting with the Organon chases a lot of people away.

>and they're always surprised when nobody wants to read that shit.

Lol, the Ethics(both of them)and Politics are literally the only works of him worth reading.

Categories is horribly dry and reminds me of Thucydides.

>Categories is horribly dry
it is a must though

I studied philosophy in college an categories was one of the books i had to read for ancient philosophy class

>he hasn't read Poetics or Parva Naturalia
>laughing_catamites.fresco

I have read Poetics, but I consider the Ethics and Politics more important and relevant.

Deal with it fag.

You have awful taste and are willing to waste a lot of time on it.

>You have awful taste

Well that's just your shitty opinion, and why should I care about it?

You'd know why I hold that opinion if you'd read and understood Poetics.

Nah, I'm pretty sure you're just a cunt at this point.

You have a good day now.

Guess you didn't understand Rhetoric either.

I read ethics cover to cover. Found it in bookstore for 50c bought it gf laughed and said I wouldn't even read it. I proved her wrong and now I can't stop reading Greeks it's amazing that so long ago they had thinkers like this.

bump

Plenty of people read his stuff cover to cover. Poetics is actually quite straightforward in this regard.

Rhetoric was the more often read work not all that long ago, common wisdom is that they're practically the same book and you should just read one. I can assure you this is not at all true. Maybe some people would find it a bit much to read them one after another but I doubt this honestly, if anything they'd cover a good chunk of writing. Poetics is concerned with narrative and drama while rhetoric is about presenting information.

They're both practical books and are probably best read alongside a set of plays that get analysed.

I started with metaphysics. Is this retarded? The only other greek philosophy I'd read is the republic.

>remained essentially complete
?
Just because people didn't know any better doesn't mean his logic wasn't shit and lacking in expressive power.

Don't bother. We've had a reading group for Plato earlier this summer and we only discussed 3 dialogues.

3 dialogues is impressive tbqh

yeah, but whoever was running it wasn't really trying to manage it or anything. they should've been asking more questions to help focus discussion.

>he thinks he's better than aristotle

get hit by a bus

I have this fantasy that all reading groups are just smoke-screens for blind-dating that eventually escalates into orgies.

This never lasts

I'm currently reading Nicomachean Ethics, and when I'm done with it I'm planning on reading Metaphisics. Will I be fine? I've read a bunch of Plato's dialogues also, including The Republic.
It would be nice to have a group to comment these books

OP here, fuck it I'll give it a go.
I'll make a thread tomorrow about Categories and try to foster discussion about it.
It's a short work and every pleb can read it. I'll decide where to go next if this has any popularity.

>Does anyone read Aristotle cover to cover? How much of his work is actually regularly read? Is the less popular stuff too dry, boring, difficult, irrelevant, or what?
Some of his works, yes, though most people reading him carefully tend to do lots of re-reading, and work through a text pretty slowly, maybe looking back at certain passages (an example: the way pleasure and happiness are both taken up in book 1 of the Ethics, and how they reappear as topics in later books).

Stuff of his that doesn't get read is usually ignored because scholars think it's not by him, or of historical curiosity only.

Some of them, it's just a result of the specialization of fields today; no one who wants to be doing "strict philosophy" as understood today wants to spend time reading his many treatises on animals, even though they're clearly related to the Physics and On the Soul.

>Nichomachean Ethics is a prime example of bloat
Huh, the Ethics always seemed to me like an excellent example of his use of dialectical reasoning. Plus his writing in that work is fairly polished compared to, say, the Politics, which, while also dialectical, is so much messier in the arrangement of topics.

>Plus his writing
Nichomachus was his son, user. It's why it's named after him. Aristotle has several different scribes.

I'm down to join in

I'm cool with reading whatever but I have a preference for reading it in the proper order and not just jumping to fun and meaty stuff like Poetics and NE

>Nichomachus was his son, user. It's why it's named after him.
I'm perfectly aware of this. Nichomachus, mind, was also the name of his father.

>Aristotle has several different scribes.
That's pretty conjectural though, ja? What source do you have in mind for the claim? No one's really sure what to make of Aristotle's relationship to the corpus of texts that have survived and are attributed to him. The common explanation of the title of the Ethics is that it's dedicated to Nichomachus, but there's no evidence that the work itself was scribed by him, or that Aristotle did not write it himself. Certainly there's some question about other works, like the Physics and Metaphysics, though even then, with the Physics, say, while it is partly titled "a course in listening" (lectures), it doesn't obviously consist of student's notes, nor is it clear that if the text consisted of Aristotle's "lecture notes", that they need be understood to be as incomplete and sparse as modern day lecture notes can certainly be.

>mind,
>ja?

>I have a preference for reading it in the proper order and not just jumping to fun and meaty stuff like Poetics and NE
There's not really a proper order that came passed down to us with the texts. The Organon was organized as it was because those texts also function well as starting points for learning about argument, but those texts are themselves also inquiries into what argument is, how it works, the differences and possibilities of demonstration and dialectical reasoning, and so on. See

Bullshit. Logic was clearly meant to be studied first.

By this line of thinking Pythagoras is far more important than Aristotle

>Bullshit. Logic was clearly meant to be studied first.
Not necessarily. Again, the Categories, which offers an explanation of what predication is, depends on the inquiry conducted in the Metaphysics. Aristotelian logic, as counter-intuitive as it seems to modern philosophers, follows an account of ontology. No ontology, no epistemology to describe. Aristotle might be wrong about that, but it's not wrong to notice that that's certainly how his treatises relate to each other.

Oh neat, I actually really want to discuss Nicomachean Ethics.

I just finished The Republic and found almost everything straightforward and pretty elegantly presented. (I know there's lots of layers, especially involving the characters, but the main points are clear).

However, I'm really struggling with Ethics. It seems like he's repeating himself OVER AND OVER and I can't parse the argument. It seems like he's using circular logic everwhere, like "Pleasure and pain relate to things because pleasure and pain relate to things." Maybe my attention span isn't good enough to get through it? I'm just kinda dumb? I'm starting book 3 after this post, so we'll see how I handle it.

I've caught some insight, but not as much as I did from The Republic. Am I doing it wrong?

I'm using the Bartlett Collins translation by the way.

Pics unrelated, but they're phenomenally good drawings, so hopefully some of you enjoy them.

You're doing it the right way. Just note the qualifiers Aristotle uses to describe the inquiry, and pay attention to differing treatments of pleasure throughout. The arguments, starting from a survey of common opinions, seems to suggest that the inquiry is in largest part dialectical. It's going somewhere, but he needs to address different ways of life, and how prominent pleasure is to arguments over the best way of life. If you feel you need extra help, the essay included in the Bartlett-Collins edition is helpful without dotting all of the "i"s for you.

I've read Politics, Nicomachean Ethics, and i'm 30 pages from finishing metaphysics. I want to read Physics next because i read he wrote about divination trough the dreams.

Has anyone read it?

>Nichomachus, mind, was also the name of his father
It's almost like that was the tradition, to skip a generation in naming. Aristotle's father died when he was a child though, so I think we can rule him out as a scribe for his later works and commentaries.
>What source do you have in mind for the claim?
The chain of bequests and re-emergence of Peripatetic texts with commentary. Aristotle willed his library to Theophrastus' school where Nicomachus wrote the commentaries. Those then are willed to Neleus of Scepsis and practically lost for a while because nobody bothered to clear out his basement when he died.

Anything which re-emerges then from his collections returning to Athens goes through a further set of editing fuck ups, which is where we get most of his extant work from.

Books 1-4 are likely from Aristotle himself, with minor edits and comments from Nicomachos under Theophrastus and errors from later editing, but by the time you get to Book 10, it's likely all Nicomachos and later edits.

Most of what survived came from the books which weren't meant to survive as the public image of Aristotle's school, which are those available during his lifetime, but from the books he willed to Theophrastus/Nicomachos as private works and only come back later after the additional edits.

so which works do I read if I want to read Aristotle's unadulterated words?

Prepare questions
Good luck OP
also link here the new thread so I can sleep tight

Fuck m8 are you just starting from the very beginning of the complete works, or was that just a coincidence?

>tfw no reading buddy for all of Aristotle

I don't think anyone's "better" than anyone else, but it is a fact that Aristotle's syllogisms aren't very powerful nor useful compared to the formal systems of the 21st century.

>It's almost like that was the tradition, to skip a generation in naming. Aristotle's father died when he was a child though, so I think we can rule him out as a scribe for his later works and commentaries.
Sure, but I pointed that out because we completely lack the kind of information that would actually settle the matter. The title could be in tribute to one or both, and we're completely guessing when we do make an attribution.

>The chain of bequests and re-emergence of Peripatetic texts with commentary. Aristotle willed his library to Theophrastus' school where Nicomachus wrote the commentaries.
So you're inferring that? We have an account that Nicomachus wrote a six-book Ethics, but that doesn't show us that the Ethics that's come down to us is his. I mean, we know very little about him.

>Those then are willed to Neleus of Scepsis and practically lost for a while because nobody bothered to clear out his basement when he died.
>Anything which re-emerges then from his collections returning to Athens goes through a further set of editing fuck ups, which is where we get most of his extant work from.
Carnes Lord has an interesting account contesting a few elements of the traditional story of how the Aristotelian corpus has been passed down to us in his translation of the Politics; I think the whole of his account can be read at google books (skip to page xvi):

books.google.com/books?id=DJP44GomyNoC&pg=PR7&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=3#v=onepage&q&f=false

>Books 1-4 are likely from Aristotle himself, with minor edits and comments from Nicomachos under Theophrastus and errors from later editing, but by the time you get to Book 10, it's likely all Nicomachos and later edits.
Are you inferring this yourself, or do you have some other source in mind?

>Most of what survived came from the books which weren't meant to survive as the public image of Aristotle's school, which are those available during his lifetime, but from the books he willed to Theophrastus/Nicomachos as private works and only come back later after the additional edits.
Sure.

for god's fucking sake

>you're inferring that
From Strabo explicitly stating that? From knowing that corpus is generally being well accepted as passing from Neleus to Apellicon from whom we get the erroneous passages? From Sulla stating his providence from Apellicon? From all of these mentioning the commentaries Nicomachos wrote? Yes, I'm inferring that like one can infer tomorrow will come after today; it's a well sourced line of commentary. Likewise the sourcing of the bits of "Aristotle" that are Theophrastus more than Aristotle.
>Are you inferring this yourself
Every study that shows up Cicero's and Piso's error in assuming the other Ethics is scribed by who it's named for?
>Sure
So you mean you've no idea who Theophrastus is and you're going to quote a wikipedia aritcle or source at me, while trying to avoid the pieces of the same source that will highlight how you're wrong. Yeah, sure, keep on at that.

fucking autocorrect
>corpus is
corpus as
>providence
provenance

>From Strabo explicitly stating that?
I should've been more clear, but I'm talking about your ascription re: Nicomachus, and your use of the story about how the texts were willed to make the claim that Nicomachus had some definite hand in Aristotle's Ethics. Strabo says nothing about him.

>From knowing that corpus is generally being well accepted as passing from Neleus to Apellicon from whom we get the erroneous passages? From Sulla stating his providence from Apellicon? From all of these mentioning the commentaries Nicomachos wrote?
I'm aware of the story, and pointed to Carnes Lord's account as an interesting account of how little we really know about what's up with the Aristotelian texts and how much can still be argued about their transmission.

Where in Strabo and Plutarch is Nichomachus mentioned, such that you think there's a perfectly incontestable link between his hand and the text of the Nicomachean Ethics?

>Every study that shows up Cicero's and Piso's error in assuming the other Ethics is scribed by who it's named for?
Cool, so Cicero and Piso thought the NE was scribed by Nicomachus. Again, where are you getting this definite information that "books 1-4" are "likely" by Aristotle (with not just minor edits by "comments" by Nicomachus consisting of what passages exactly?), and that "by the time you get to book 10" it's all "likely" Nicomachus?

>So you mean you've no idea who Theophrastus is and you're going to quote a wikipedia aritcle or source at me, while trying to avoid the pieces of the same source that will highlight how you're wrong. Yeah, sure, keep on at that.
I was agreeing with you broadly about the characterization, because I'm already familiar with the Strabo, Plutarch, and Diogenes accounts. The fuck's your problem.

>I should've been more clear, but I'm talking about your ascription re: Nicomachus, and your use of the story about how the texts were willed to make the claim that Nicomachus had some definite hand in Aristotle's Ethics. Strabo says nothing about him.
Strabo, Geographia, 13.1.54.608 details how the texts were willed to Theophrastus.
Suda claims the six books of commentaries written by Nicomachos.
>Carnes Lord
>Plutarch
I never mentioned Plutarch, Mr Wikipedia Scholar. The Wikipedia page which mentions Carnes Lord does though,so I see why you're conflating him with Strabo. Plutarch's a propagandist though, in case that escaped your attention.
>Cicero and Piso thought the NE
The *OTHER* ethics is the Eudemian Ethics, so the studies I'm referring to are those those disprove their assumption that Eudemian Ethics, not the Nicomachean Ethics, are scribed by Eudemus. How they do this is in part by affirming Book X of NE is a separate commentary. If Book X of NE isn't a separate later commentary, then the argument against them being wrong about Eudemian Ethics starts to fall down. Which NE edition Cicero read is subject to debate, but I'm spoonfeeding you enough as it is.
>, because I'm already familiar with the Strabo, Plutarch, and Diogenes accounts
Diogenes Laertius' account on that section has been considered suspect or outright incorrect for a long time. At least he's an autistic collator, but Plutarch is just laughable. The bits considered well attested for DL's section are the bits that line up with the Suda.
>inb4 Suda's after DL/Plutarch
Don't make that much of a retard of yourself. My problem is you've cited three disproven propagandists with severely questionable sources and want me to treat you like you're not citing wikipedia tier shit.

>those those
those that

>Strabo, Geographia, 13.1.54.608 details how the texts were willed to Theophrastus.
>Suda claims the six books of commentaries written by Nicomachos.
1) Yeah, I've read that passage in the Geographia.
2) I've read that passage in Suda; all he says is that there's a six-book Ethics written by Nicomachus. That doesn't necessitate that the Ethics that came down to us as the NE is a four-book Ethics by Aristotle with the Nicomachus Ethics appended to it.

>I never mentioned Plutarch, Mr Wikipedia Scholar. The Wikipedia page which mentions Carnes Lord does though,so I see why you're conflating him with Strabo. Plutarch's a propagandist though, in case that escaped your attention.
You think referring to Plutarch's account, one of the primary sources of the story of how Aristotle's texts were passed down, and one of the sources for the claim that Sulla brought the corpus to Rome is being a Wikipedia scholar?

By the way, I linked to the Carnes Lord text *because I was re-reading his translation of the Politics earlier and didn't want to spend an inordinate amount of time typing his account on my busted keyboard just to offer an account that says that there's peculiarities with taking the Strabo (AND Plutarch) accounts straightforwardly.

The *OTHER* ethics is the Eudemian Ethics, so the studies I'm referring to are those those disprove their assumption that Eudemian Ethics, not the Nicomachean Ethics, are scribed by Eudemus. How they do this is in part by affirming Book X of NE is a separate commentary. If Book X of NE isn't a separate later commentary, then the argument against them being wrong about Eudemian Ethics starts to fall down. Which NE edition Cicero read is subject to debate, but I'm spoonfeeding you enough as it is.
I'm not seeing why I should need to take these other scholars to be correct; it's perfectly plausible to take Book 10 as not a later commentary, but as a part of the overall argument, as do Tessitore, Salem, and Burger in their studies of the Ethics.

Diogenes Laertius' account on that section has been considered suspect or outright incorrect for a long time. At least he's an autistic collator, but Plutarch is just laughable. The bits considered well attested for DL's section are the bits that line up with the Suda.
No fucking duh you can contest their accounts; it would irresponsible NOT to consdiering they were writing as long after the authors they're detailing as they were, with all the ridiculous legends popping up about them. They're still our primary accounts of the what happened to Aristotle's writings, in Plutarch's case (which doesn't even differ much from Strabo's account), and catalog lists in Diogenes's case.

>Don't make that much of a retard of yourself. My problem is you've cited three disproven propagandists with severely questionable sources and want me to treat you like you're not citing wikipedia tier shit.
Where did I contest Suda's account regarding Nicomachus having written a six-book Ethics? I don't have any reason to disagree with that, but I have no clear reason to be persuaded that his Ethics makes up the last six books of NE as you seem to be doing, nor that if I even grant that he was Aristotle's scribe for the NE (which is the plainest speculation), that it necessitate that the peculiarities of the argument are better explained by Nicomachus's commenting on passages or adding his own work in, rather than that the peculiarities are better explained by the fact of the work being dialectical.

I've started using hacker's keyboard, and aside from the annoyingly placed and oversensitive esc key in landscape mode it's pretty decent.

>You think referring to Plutarch's account, one of the primary sources of the story of how Aristotle's texts were passed down, and one of the sources for the claim that Sulla brought the corpus to Rome is being a Wikipedia scholar?
Yes, because nobody trusts Plutarch. He's renowned for skipping over things and reframing things and generally being a lying liar when it suits the story. Strabo is the reliable source for Sulla's acquiring Apellicon's works. Without Strabo, Plutarch would be entirely suspect.
>Politics
You keep trying to bring this up like it's Nicomachean Ethics.
>I'm not seeing why I should need to take these other scholars to be correct;
Well, you take Plutarch as the main source on Sulla and Diogenes Laertius as a reliable source on Nicomachos, so it would follow the trend.
>They're still our primary accounts of the what happened to Aristotle's writings
Strabo is, which is why Plutarch and DL are considered more contested and outright wrong in comparison, especially if they contradict the Byzantine work. They're not our primary accounts, because we'd all be as wrong as you if they were. Plutarch is well known to be unconcerned by meddling little things like facts. Enjoy your fairy stories though.

>Where did I contest Suda's account
inb4 suggest a preemptive move. Lrn2 Veeky Forums.

>Yes, because nobody trusts Plutarch.
Maybe 50 or 100 years ago.

No, now, still. He gets pwned by Strabo's and Arrian's and everybody else's accounts on so much shit that it's not even worth listing. He wasn't trying to write accurate history of events, he was trying to write good stories. He does write neat stories, but they are not a good source for what actually happened.

let's do it

>Yes, because nobody trusts Plutarch. He's renowned for skipping over things and reframing things and generally being a lying liar when it suits the story. Strabo is the reliable source for Sulla's acquiring Apellicon's works. Without Strabo, Plutarch would be entirely suspect.
None of which contests that he is, to the chagrin of some scholars, a primary source for recorded history. With respect to the issue we were even arguing about, he doesn't disagree with Strabo, and is relevant as an additional account no matter how you contest it.

>You keep trying to bring this up like it's Nicomachean Ethics.
Did you just wake up deciding not to reading comprehension today? Do you find that you have difficulties parsing such unclear passages as, "Carnes Lord has an interesting account contesting a few elements of the traditional story of how the Aristotelian corpus has been passed down to us in his translation of the Politics"?

>Well, you take Plutarch as the main source on Sulla and Diogenes Laertius as a reliable source on Nicomachos, so it would follow the trend.
Which is not an argument for accepting that most of the NE owes something to Nicomachus to the extent you've been pushing for. I don't need to pretend that scholars are correct just by virtue of being scholars, as if they didn't disagree with each other on numerous points, and as if they couldn't be mistaken in their understanding of a work.

>Strabo is, which is why Plutarch and DL are considered more contested and outright wrong in comparison, especially if they contradict the Byzantine work. They're not our primary accounts, because we'd all be as wrong as you if they were. Plutarch is well known to be unconcerned by meddling little things like facts. Enjoy your fairy stories though.
Man, it's really easy to pretend to know something if you just keep insisting on it over and over again, isn't it?

>inb4 suggest a preemptive move. Lrn2 Veeky Forums.
No fucking duh. Still doesn't explain why you have such terrible fucking preemptive reasoning.

>No, now, still. He gets pwned by Strabo's and Arrian's and everybody else's accounts on so much shit that it's not even worth listing.
Holy shit, it's not even worth *proving*?!?!?!?!?!?

Also, can you seriously not tell the difference between history as such and Plutarch's Lives, such that you don't see the super obvious pedagogical purpose of said work?