The original Statto
A handy man to have on a pub quiz team, Aristotle is rescued by Mark from his previous comedic fate at the hands of Monty Python.
Fancy a free magazine?
Jon Pike expains why Aristotle is known as the prince of philosophers.
Running through his work is a passion to understand. Aristotle can be set against the (post) modern tendency to regard the world as just too complicated, or variable, or ‘relative’ (whatever that means) to be understood.
His driving assumption is that, if we try really hard, we can work out how things fit together, and what they are for. And this is a collective effort, thinks Aristotle.Investigation of reality is in a way difficult, in a way easy. An indication of this is that no one can attain it in a wholly satisfactory way and that no one misses it completely: each of us says something about nature and although as individuals we advance the subject little if at all, from all of us taken together something sizeable results – and, as the proverb has it, who can miss a barn door?
His ethical work is still relevant and so (I’d suggest) is his take on politics. To argue this you need to assert that these are separable from his advocacy of slavery and the subordination of women – but that is a fairly straightforward task. This is because Aristotle’s omnivorous approach to knowledge and understanding stops him from developing a tight, formally structured system in which each part depends on every other part. In fact, this is one of the attractions of Aristotle’s thought: he is cautious about the amount of precision we should aim at in our answers – asking, he says, for no more precision than the subject matter has itself.
So if the thing under examination is slippery and vague, then our account of it must reflect this, rather than forcing it into an elegant system.The best way to get into Aristotle is to read him: get hold of a good translation of the Nicomachean ethics, for a start, and work through it. It can take a little while to get into Aristotle’s writing – but he is a lot clearer than some modern philosophers! It would also be sensible to combine this with a study of some of the most exciting topics in philosophy now, such as you would get on the Open University course A211: Philosophy and the Human Situation. If you have a background in philosophy, why not come to our residential school next year Doing Philosophy? But whatever you choose to do, Aristotle would be sure that we should keep on ‘investigating reality.’
< previous Page 2 of 2
Content last updated: 29/07/2004
