That we can gain useful knowledge is by carefully observing the world around us. His thinking was the first step on the road to science. He got the process right, even if many of the conclusions he drew from applying the process were wrong.
Is that from the Nicomachean ethics? My favorite phrasing of it is:
I love that work. It also has:
Other than general potshots, is anyone here actually critiquing the Ethics?
Fo’ shizzle.
The Nichomachean Ethics is a pretty big work, with a lot of ideas. It’s hard to respond to it in a single post. If you wanted to start a thread where people critique it section by section, I might be down with that, but such threads rarely last long here. FWIW, I found his idea of the ethical mean to be actually useful in real life, which is rare in philosophy.
Fair enough, I asked for reactions to just one snippet. But of course Aristotle has his methods for generating conclusions, from which he builds his overall arguments. It isn’t science, it’s ancient philosophy. They may boil down to assertions, but they aren’t really bare assertions.
Maybe if he had, he wouldn’t have wept once there were no more worlds to conquer. That ought’ve learned him!
But seriously, I didn’t know that. Not that I doubt you. If its true, I guess Alexander got more out of his meeting with Diogenes than from Aristotle.
It’s certain that Alexander did not act as if he had internalized the calm, detached, rationalistic world-view of a Greek philosopher. He was prone to destructive rages (really destructive when you have your own army) and susceptible to barbarian ideas (like making a near-god of the king), and he seemed to think he was living in the Iliad.
Cite?
Just ask Callisthenes.
Me, I’d tell him to get a barrel.
It adds up to a further question: is Aristotle one of Jesus’ fathers?
I hope my synthesis makes sense.
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Care to reply to Aristotle? There are some people ready to dig into the Nicomachean Ethics, but let’s face it: this thread isn’t a blockbuster. Aristotle could be completely right, but he is also difficult and dated and kinda dry. A lot of people don’t seem to have an instinctual, gut reaction to this material. Especially the specific content.
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It’s not just kids today. The son of the brilliant King Phillip didn’t pay attention to the guy in person, when he was kinda famous, after winning the King’s contest for philosophers to tutor his son. Nope, the ruling class did everything they could to raise Alexander to be a class act. He was as good a kid as could be had from a certain perspective, and Aristotle’s teachings were respected. So… the problem must have been in an insufficiently compelling presentation.
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The stakes were very high for characters like Alexander to grow up to be sensible fellows who would be happy to take the time to cement a prize like Persia into the empire rather than embarking on a one-way adventure across the world. Later, places like the Roman Empire were obsessed with the idea that moral decay was undermining their power. Whoever dreamed up this Jesus character (assuming He’s fictional) was probably couching Aristotle’s and others’ philosophy into a more compelling voice: the Messiah Himself!, in an attempt to persuade people to behave better. Consider Luke 10:35: “He answered: ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’; and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’” Doesn’t that sound like a refinement of Aristotle’s definition of the human good as being a lover of the most excellent thing, like you know, nobility or justice… After a few centuries I think people argued that it would be more excellent to love God instead to create the happiest motions of the soul, whether or not they were directing their actions toward a veridical object notwithstanding.
So, is that the case or am I seeing things? Is Jesus a fictional character who sometimes presents worked-over Aristotelian philosophy?
I think you need to get a life too.
I take it by that you mean “stop reading”?
There is very little common ground between Jesus’ teachings and Aristotelian philosophy. Jesus was all about getting the individual soul right for the next world. There’s nothing like that in Aristotle.
Nor, come to think of it, is there anything in Jesus about the virtue of moderation. It was always all-or-nothing with Jesus.
I think it is strange that they use the same mechanism to achieve the same results. Aristotle suggests that loving the most excellent thing will result in happiness-‘an action of the soul’. A few hundred years later, almost as if the method had applied to the argument, God had replaced Aristotle’s ideals, the reward was eternal, and you had to try really really hard. They are similar enough that it seems plausible that one could evolve into the other over 300 years. By making each part excellent-er.