ARISTOTLE

John Rist

PATON

Thank you.

You're being ironic, right? It's french you dumbass.

The more you know...

download the fucking clarendon translations theyre the best by far of the ones that exist, especially the categories one.

i'm about to embark on aristotle as well and my plan was just to go through metaphysics and ethics. i should add organon and physics too then?

That is 100% the opposite of what I have found after about a thousand pages of his commentaries. Aquinas adds almost nothing to Aristotle's thought, occasionally adding additional examples for clarification and VERY rarely going more than one step beyond what Aristotle himself said. I've seen maybe one or two references to Christian theology, and it appears that Aquinas either intends to keep it out of his writings about Aristotle, or just wants to see Aristotle as Aristotle instead of through a Christian lens.

Literally the only thing making Aquinas' commentaries worth reading is that they are the only full length, literally line-by-line discussions of whatever Aristotelian text is in question. Every single comment in the original treatise is reworded and, maybe, added to a bit. There is very little thorough and what we would call "academic" interpretation. On that front I say yeah, read something modern. But Aquinas has so far been the most approachable and intelligible commentator that I've found for a new reader.

Also it's easy to replace him for a commentary on, say, the NE which everyone and his mother has written about; Aquinas is one of very few commentators available in any capacity on the An. Post., De Anima, and Interpretatione (actually that last one I can't find in print anymore, but you get my point), and his is the the only full-length treatment of the Physics that's actually an introduction of it rather than a series of essays or an in depth analysis, both of which would probably be too much for a new reader.

I haven't read metaphysics, but having read and often struggled with physics, I cannot imagine having understood it without reading the organon first. I could be wrong but I very strongly suspect the metaphysics would similarly lean on the physics (and, so, the organon); the physics explicitly leave out specific issues to be considered in the metaphysics later.

The issue is the technical vocabulary moreso than any logic involved. The Categories seem totally nonsensical if it's your first Aristotle read (it was for me), but the categories are popping up over and over, even in my limited readings so far, and absolutely need to be familiar to have any idea what's going on. I don't think the physics would make any sense without them, and I suspect similar reasons less immediately apparent to me exist for needing the interpretatione and the two analytics.

If you're really opposed to the organon/physics, try the metaphysics, but note that any issues you have with the technical vocabulary and concepts would be resolved by reading those two. You can scrap the topics/refutations if you just want ammo for the metaphysics, and don't sweat it when you inevitably get bewildered by a few sections of the analytics; I think it's valuable to see how he structures his logic, but it doesn't explicitly come up again (at least in the physics). The analytics are great overall but go down a few rabbit holes that even modern scholars can't quite figure out. Get an idea of what's up, read maybe one commentary, and you'll be fine. Definitely recommend the Hackett edition of prior analytics (for the notes) and Aquinas' commentary on the posterior analytics. Telford for the categories/interpretatione, as I said above; easily the most interesting and helpful commentary I've read so far, with its effects reaching far beyond the two treatises explicitly covered.

>book about Aristotle
>can't even spell his name correctly

...

Daily reminder that you anglos spell Platon as "Plato" and Aristoteles as "Aristotle"

Hi sperg, language changes.

Daily reminder that uncultured latinate dogs spell Πλάτων as "Platon" and Ἀριστοτέλης as "Aristoteles"