And Now, part 2.
I suppose alot of philosophy is a matter of personal taste as much as anything else. If you find a philosopher speaks to you, you will value him (or her), if not, not.
Personaly I find that Aristotle’s ethics provide a decent guide to living in this world. They are alot more workable than more rigorous faith based ethics, IMHO. I find his discussions of causality interesting, and even valid in today’s world. I’ve gotta give him props for discovering the laws of logic, although you’re clearly better off reading them in a logic textbook, than trying to plow through the Organon. (Then again, you are also beeter off reading a textbook on Newtonian Mechanics rather than plowing through the Principia.)
Historically, however, Aristotle’s place in the history of thought is unassailable. He started the ball rolling on world based philosophy. In Biology he even took a stab towards empiricsm. It is doubtful if the early scientists like Gallileo or Vesalius would have gotten as far as they did without Aristotle to attack. Whatever you think of logic, I don’t think you would want to do without it. Flawed as he was, Aristotle opened the door to rational science, law, political science, and even literary criticsm.
Sure there are many things wrong, even repugnant, about Aristotle. His gender biases ruined some decent empirical biology.
His justification of slavery is almost painful to read. His overreliance on deductive logic would never have given rise to the scientific method. And, lets face it, he was just plain wrong about a lot of things.
However most of Aristotle’s shortcomings were the result of the society he lived in. Greece was a patriarchal society which devalued women, and a slave holding society to boot. The Greek upper class scorned manual labor, which in turn led to a devaluing of the sensory world, and a sabotaging of any real science. All these biases found there way into Aristotle. However, while Aristotle’s shortcomings were the result of his mileu, his strengths were his own.
A lot of the problems Aristotle caused in the history of thought were more the fault of later mediocre minds taking him as gospel truth, rather than a human philosopher. Just as Christ would have been appalled at the Inquisition, so Aristotle would have been appalled at the Scholastics. This is the point David was making, I think.
Also, to briefly address the points in doobieus’ post, remember that the Greeks, particularly the Athenians, had just won an incredible victory over the Persians at Marathon and Salamis. I think they were justified in feeling a little pride. Futhermore, Herodotus was writing as Greek culture was about to self destruct in a horrible war. Part of his history was an attempt to say “Come on guys, we’re better than this.” Finally I think Herodotus take on the Persians was a bit more subtle than this.
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Larry, excellent points in Aristotle’s defense. This isn’t exactly going where I had hoped though. I don’t want to diminish Aristotle’s accomplishments or say that he wasn’t valuble to where we have arrived so far as a society. I guess my anger stems from the fact that, as you mentioned, his word has been taken as truth; his methods are now institutions. It seems the method we use to question reality is based on his method and so, how are we supposed to see beyond his concept of reality if we are using his lens to look at it?