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Common Knowledge

Canonical name: Aristotle
Legal name: Aristoteles
Other names: Stagiriet, de
Birthdate: 384 BCE
Date of death: 322 BCE
Gender: male
Education: Plato's Academy
Occupations: teacher
philosopher
ethicist
Organizations: Lyceum
Royal Academy at Macedon
Relationships: Plato (teacher)
Alexander the Great (student)
Ptolemy I Soter I (student)
Cassander (student)
Herpyllis (wife)
Nicomachus (son)
Nationality: Macedonia
Birthplace: Stagira, Macedonia
Places of residence: Athens, Greece
Place of death: Chalcis, Euboea, Greece
Map Location: Greece

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480 reviews

nwcasebolt78 272 reviews

Complete Works of Aristotle, Volume 2 : The Revised Oxford Translation by Aristotle

“Have you ever heard of Plato, Aristotle, Socrates? Morons.”

With due respect to Vizzini’s dizzying intellect, I must demur: Aristotle might be more intimidating even than the Cliffs of Insanity, but a moron he was not. For myself, after powering through 1200 pages of the first volume of his complete works, I think it’s arguable that no single figure is more responsible for our world today than Aristotle.

I mean this specifically with respect to the physical sciences, since the first show more of this two-volume set comprises his work on logic, the heavens, the animal kingdom, and so forth. That’s not to say his theories still prevail: I don’t know anyone who thinks insects generate spontaneously from putrefying garbage, and only online cranks preach that Earth is the stationary center of the universe.

Further, Aristotle is not that different from his contemporaries and predecessors in terms of theorizing about nature from abstract starting principles. In truth, some of the theories he dismissed were closer to what we would recognize as reality. For their own esoteric reasons, Pythagoreans taught that Earth circles a sacred fire at the heart of the universe. Atomists envisioned a world built from indivisible, infinitesimal units. Aristotle rejected these in favor of theories that today sound quaint and antiquated.

What distinguished Aristotle was less the content of his thought and more his starting point: that nature does nothing superfluous or in vain. He hammers this so often that I would call it his first and greatest commandment. While others debated mental models of the universe, Aristotle began with careful observation of a natural order that works in reliably predictable ways. From this he drew the principle that everything nature does tends toward the best possible ends in the best possible ways, and he sought by abundant observation and rigorous logic to describe universal physical laws on that basis.

Aristotle also urged a self-correcting science that tests theory against fact, rather than carving up fact to fit theory. For example, in an excursus on the habits of bees, he wrote, “Credit must be given rather to observation than to theories, and to theories only if what they affirm agree with the observed facts.” He argued that theories which claim to be comprehensive must account for all phenomena, criticizing Democritus for “speaking generally without examining what happens in all cases” and asserting that “any one who makes any general statement must speak of all the particular cases.”

These principles, including the assumption common to Greek thinkers that existence lies within the grasp of the properly-trained human intellect, is easy to overlook because it’s so baked into the way we think today. One example, I think, illustrates how far ahead of his time he ran. Within Aristotle’s lifetime, the temple at Ephesus burned. One would expect a Greek of his time to wrestle with the meaning of such a desecration. Aristotle, by contrast, found it useful merely as an example of how wind, smoke, and fire interact with each other. This is so modern that it’s easy to miss how strange it is for a man steeped in a culture of gods to ignore the gods so utterly in his investigation of physical law.

I’m not an expert on the history of Aristotle’s transmission through the hands of Greek monks, Arabic scholars, the medieval Roman Church, and Renaissance Europeans. But having read his works on logic and the laws of nature, I see that his method of thinking about nature laid the foundations for the modern world. The blossoming of science and the scientific method left his natural theories far in the dust, but the way billions of us conceptualize the world — orderly, rational, mechanistic, deterministic, predictable, and knowable — is thoroughly Aristotelian. If he was a moron, he is unparalleled as one of the most influential morons in history. show less

May 23, 20261 other review

ezratillman 163 reviews

Politics (Dover Thrift Editions: Philosophy) by Aristotle

The beginning of Politics is abominable (not unlike the Snowman), but it gets better, eventually, sort of.

The Absolute Garbage Part:

The beginning talks about how some people are naturally born to be slaves, while others are natural born masters. Of course, only men can be masters. All women are naturally meant to be subservient. That is terrible garbage of course, but one might contend that he is merely giving the unquestioned opinion of his time, BUT that AIN’T THE CASE! Ol’ Aristotle show more (“Ari” to his friends) talks about different opinions about whether men are equal or not. So Aristotle (“Stotle” to his enemies) was aware of conflicting opinions and still chose the worse view upon careful reflection.

And since Aristotle became THE AUTHORITY for people in western Europe, and later America, until the last hundred or so years, his arguments for slavery and the inequality of women have had horrifying impacts.

The Good Stuff:

That being said, Aristotle systematically lays out the many different ways governments and societies can work and the potential pros and cons of each. Looking at how much say most citizens in ancient Greece had in their governments than citizens have today made me question why that is. Because I am living in the present, I assume that how things are is the obvious and correct way for things to be.

Now, in ancient Greece, the number of citizens was very small, and were supported by slaves, women, and foreigners who had no say in government. But learning about these ancient governments gave me perspective on our governments today, and makes me think that our much expanded citizenry in modern times should have at least as much of a role in our governments as the citizens in ancient Greece had in theirs.

If you look at what Aristotle said about citizens (and discount anything he said about slaves or women) and then apply that to all people, often he has a lot of good things to say. He argued that citizens (both rich and poor) should work for the good of all, rather than looking out for themselves, and lots of other stuff.

In Conclusion:

The length of this review is unconscionable, its quality unforgivable, and I believe that I should be banished as punishment like the Athenians used to do to anyone who got too uppity. show less

Apr 18, 202548 other reviews

dypaloh 129 reviews

Politics (Oxford World's Classics) by Aristotle

Private property. Private property protection. And Plato. That commie Plato.

Decades ago, I was invited to some free private lectures given by a Mr. M_____ (hereafter M.) These evening lectures were given in M.’s living room, the guests all young. To this day I think it remarkable that he gave these talks and could interest young people in listening.

M.’s lectures were inspired by the teaching of a mysterious (to me) figure named “Galambos.” The few lectures I heard ranged widely: show more Aristotle, Plato, Occam’s razor, John Stuart Mill, Mill’s wife, the original meaning of “liberalism,” patents, woman’s role, Jews, cigarette smoking, surfing, even credit card use for identification instead of state-issued IDs. Most important was Galambos’s vision of three categories of Private Property—primordial (one’s life); primary (one’s thoughts); and secondary (one’s money and material possessions). Private Property provided for Galambos the sole avenue to fulfilling the ethical injunction against coercion of any “volitional being.”

Galambos, you can surmise, was not a communist.

Plato, M. asserted, was a communist, definitely an accusation in those days. Having read The Republic, I understood that this opinion is an easy one to form because Plato seems well disposed toward such an ideology. I also thought it a false conclusion. Marx’s communism made abolition of private property a pre-requisite. Plato, in an effort to sever political power from the motive of personal economic advantage, denied private property to the rulers of his ideal state, and he goes on and on about that, but the vital point is he denied private property only to the rulers, not to the private citizens.

Aristotle was for M. a philosophical forebear of private property rights. I wonder, now, if M.’s view of Plato was influenced by the Politics, which criticizes Plato for his views on private property—his alleged communism—but not always accurately. Aristotle had been a student and then a colleague of Plato’s for years. He admired his character. Even so, he may just have had as much as he could tolerate of Plato’s sympathies on certain points. One imagines arguments in which the debate becomes less and less reasoned, more and more emotional. Easy for anyone to misrepresent matters when that happens. Aristotle did.

In the Politics, however, one discovers Aristotle’s own views are not wholly in accord with what private property advocates seek. For example, Galambos’s concept of primordial property (one’s life) is abrogated by Aristotle’s defense of slavery and by his disquieting justification of offensive war: “hunting ought to be practiced—not only against animals, but also against human beings who are intended by nature to be ruled by others and refuse to obey that intention—because war of this order is naturally just.” Nor are other forms of property immune. The Politics describes situations in which, it is asserted, common use of property provides a superior benefit. For democracies, he recommends an element of welfare, writing “the proper policy is to accumulate any surplus revenue in a fund, and then distribute this fund in block grants to the poor” and insists “This is in the interest of all classes, including the prosperous themselves.”

Not least, Aristotle was an opponent of great wealth and the making of money from purely financial transaction. He claimed that “there has been a vulgar decline into the cultivation of qualities supposed to be useful and of a more profitable character” and issued warnings against having a constitution congenial to an oligarchical or even aristocratic bias because such constitutions lead the favored to become even more grasping and covetous, adding that “The weaker are always anxious for equality and justice. The strong pay no heed to either.”

As for slavery, an apologist may wish to excuse Aristotle’s defense of it by attributing his views to the times he lived in. This excuse won’t do. Aristotle admits it: “There are some…who regard the control of slaves by a master as contrary to nature. In their view the distinction of master and slave is due to law or convention; there is no natural difference between them: the relation of master and slave is based on force, and being so based has no warrant in justice.”

But Aristotle owned slaves, so . . .

Aside from self-benefit, why did he believe in slavery? The soul, man, the soul.

Aristotle’s notion was that “The soul has naturally two elements, a ruling and a ruled; and each has its different goodness, one belonging to the rational and ruling element, and the other to the irrational and ruled. What is true of the soul is evidently true of other cases; and we may thus conclude that it is a general law that there should be naturally ruling elements and elements naturally ruled.”

To which element do you guess Aristotle assigned slaves?

In his will, Aristotle left instructions to emancipate some of his slaves. This can be represented as generosity and humane behavior. But one who is impertinent might ask whether Aristotle, in contemplating his own passing, perhaps discovered doubts that any in his family were rational enough to “naturally” rule all those whom Aristotle had ruled. That’s unfair to propose and likely nonsensical. Even so, it raises questions. How decide that an individual possesses a naturally ruling soul? Or a naturally ruled soul? And over whom is a ruler eligible to exercise his natural endowment? Aristotle’s answer is that superiority in goodness makes a master. I think a standard more liable to contention would be hard to invent and it is no surprise that he must concede, “not all those who are actually slaves…are natural slaves.” In the Politics, no practical standards exist by which to decide these questions except those of military power and social/economic status. How convenient.

So, yes, if you read the Politics you will discover Aristotle expressing some sentiment or other that’s disagreeable or even outrageous to most any modern citizen of a “free” country no matter where those citizens settle themselves in a political spectrum. Some of Aristotle’s opinions fit easily with general sympathies common today. He was a champion of the middle class and of state-supported public education rather than education as a private enterprise, and his concerns with air and water quality are those of an environmentalist. Second Amendment defenders will feel their convictions bolstered by his statement that tyranny’s distrust of the masses leads to a policy depriving them of arms. Others of his opinions may provoke you so much that you’ll want to slam the book shut. That incitement to book slamming might also be one thing that could keep you reading despite Aristotle’s less than dynamic argumentative style—what will he say next?

It need be noted that Aristotle was not a man rabidly inclined to avoid factual blunders by reliance on observation, despite his considerable devotion to reporting observations (the Politics opens with “Observation shows us…”). Some examples from his other writings:
On Animals. (In The History of Animals)
Aristotle argues that stinging bees must be male, since nature would not provide weaponry to females of any species [from James T. Costa’s notes to Darwin’s On the Origin of Species]. Quite an argument. Directly contradicting Aristotle is the fact that not only can female bees sting, only the females can. 100% off the mark!
On Motion. (From principles expressed in On the Heavens)
Imagine dropping two stones simultaneously from the top of a 10-meter-high tower. One stone is heavy, 20 kilograms say, and the other is ten times lighter at just 2 kg. Aristotle held that when the 20-kg stone impacts mother earth, the 2-kg stone still will be up there in the air, 9 meters above ground—an error of fully 9 meters. 90% off the mark!

Why, he even thought that females have blacker blood and fewer teeth than males, or so reports Bertrand Russell in his essay on “intellectual rubbish.” Aristotle’s faith in his own reasoning apparently made all these false conclusions so obvious that the mildly strenuous endeavor of watching what happens when stones fall out of his own hands, or bees sting, or wounds in women bleed, or teeth are displayed, becomes a superfluity of verification only a slave to doubt would undertake.

I think I’ll listen to that doubting slave if someone is dropping stones from a tower I’m standing beside. Unless I happen to be the slave’s owner (his motivations about my safety might change). Or unless my name is Aristotle.

While mindful of the insights to be found in Aristotle’s Politics, in conclusion I say: Approach skeptically and with critical vigor. show less

Apr 6, 201848 other reviews

Don_Music 355 reviews

The Organon by Aristotle

My original plan with this collection of books (i.e., Categories, On Interpretation, Prior Analytics, Posterior Analytics, Topics, and Sophistical Refutations), collectively known as the Organon, was to read the Topics in preparation for reading On Rhetoric. However, jumping in at Topics proved very difficult because of its reliance on the previous books.

Categories deals with classifying the world as it is experienced. It is rooted in language (i.e., how we talk about or can talk about the show more world) and it is essentially taxonomic. Things are:
- “Predicated of” = something that is true of a particular entity but is not part of that entity (e.g., tree is predicated of the tree in my yard)
- “Not predicated of” = something that is specific and unique, a specific instances (e.g., the tree in my yard)
- “Present in” = a quality that is “accidental” or in a thing but it not essential, it could be removed and it would still be that thing (e.g., “leafed” is present in the tree in my yard, but is accidental to its designation as the tree in my yard)
- “Not present in” = a quality that is “not accidental” meaning that it must be there for the thing to be what it is (e.g., “tree-ness” has to be in the tree in my yard for it to be a tree)

The terminology is very confusing and I was starting to regret not having started with Metaphysics. However, once these terms are clear, they form the basis of all that is to follow.

Prior Analytics is all about understanding demonstration (creation of knowledge) through the use of propositions (assertions of truth or falsity) that are made up of premises and terms (p.45). Here we are introduced to the idea of a “syllogism," which is "a sentence in which certain things being laid down, something else different from the premises necessarily results, in consequence of their existence” (p.45). Surely you have heard the one about all men being mortal, Socrates being a man, making Socrates mortal. This is the book where that comes from. There is a whole taxonomy of syllogistic forms from the basis to the advanced. We can thank some medieval logicians for developing a systems of mnemonic devices for remembering the forms that is (to me) of no help whatsoever. Regardless, the careful and systematic examination of syllogistic forms is enlightening in that it shows exactly how these logical form to interlock and create solid logical foundations, even if just for simple/categorical propositions.

Posterior Analytics describes syllogism resulting in demonstration (i.e., understanding) that follow from certain premises. This is different from rhetoric, which builds from uncertain claims and argues through examples (p.133)

Syllogisms build on prior knowledge (p.133) and although our senses only allow us to develop information singularly, one instance at a time, we seek to know what is universal, the “first principles” (p.134) upon which all knowledge is based and that serves as the common link between individual instances.

Syllogisms allow first principles to result, logically and necessarily, in the individual instances. And in this way, you can recognize some of the problems and arguments about inductive scientific reasoning that were present in discussions of scientific method.

This book is famously concerned with arguments “that a thing is, why it is, if it is, what it is” (p.171).

Topics are about arguments from the common places (topoi). The focus of the treatise is on how to work on enthymemes (arguments from uncertain or probably propositions) (p.192). Whereas in previous books we had first principles from which to orient other propositions, the topics concern arguments from examples and from what is probable but not certain. It is the basis of rhetoric -- rhetoric of all fields, which works toward understanding or discovering their own topoi that replace the axiomatic knowledge derivable from first principles.

Unlike demonstrative claims, those argued through enthymeme do not obtain truth value from their own rights but must be achieved through persuasion (p.192). They proceed inductively, through examples, which is better for persuasion (p.200)

Four common places (p.200):
- Identifying propositions about a thing
- Defining terms
- Identifying how things differ
- Identifying how things are similar

The books in Topics proceed through various ways of constructing and interrogating propositions, terms, similarities and differences, and conclusions. The provide strategies for arguing as convincingly as possible (achievable with clear and precise language, above all).

Finally, and briefly, the Sophistical Refutations is a very critical look at argumentative strategies taken up by sophists. Aristotle calls out some by name and finds fault with their arguments in terms of the system that he has belabored over the course of the book so far. You will recognize in this discussion the foundation of many of the logical fallacies that are still learned today.

I can't honestly say that I enjoyed the book. It was, in a word, tedious. And it is only out of sheer stubbornness that I continued plodding through at times. Nevertheless, I can offer a tentative recommendation on the following conditions:
- you want to understand the basics of categorical logic
- you have the time and patience to map out the various forms, steps, and missteps of logical argumentation
- you don't mind puzzling through the scant examples given and the supplying some of your own to solidify your understanding of the terms
- you don't mind a fair bit of repetition.

It's a lot of conditions but the payoff is pretty big. To readers who are familiar with scientific method, elementary logic, syllogisms, logical fallacies, enthymemes, and arguments from uncertainty and probability, you will find that the books in this collection are the very origins of those ideas and practices. If you ever had any doubt that Aristotle was a big influence on modern thought, you won't after this collection. show less

Jan 18, 2026

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