Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 034 - Mr. Know It All - Aristotle's Life And Works.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Mr. Know-It-All, Aristotle's Life and Works. In 2005, the BBC had a competition in which people were invited to vote for the greatest philosopher of all time. About 30,000 people voted, and the eventual winner was Karl Marx. Yeah, I know. Anyway, while this competition was going on, I mentioned it to a colleague of mine who was also a historian of philosophy. He said, what a strange idea. I asked him why he thought it was strange, and after a moment's consideration, he said, well, to begin with, the answer is so obviously Aristotle. I laughed and said the competition wasn't to name the most influential philosopher of all time, but the greatest philosopher of all time. He said, oh, I see, but still, the answer is so obviously Aristotle. That conversation is a telling one, I think. It's not so much that my colleague was a partisan of Aristotle, who, in case you're wondering, only came ninth in the poll. It's more my initial reaction to his puzzlement. Greatest philosopher of all time? That's a matter of taste. But most influential philosopher of all time? At least in the Western tradition, there is a clear victor in the race for this title, Aristotle. Although his works did not dominate the philosophical scene in the centuries immediately following his death, once they caught on, they caught on in a big way. For well over a thousand years, Aristotle was not just the most influential and significant philosopher, he was philosophy. And the study of philosophy was often simply the study of Aristotle's works and the tradition of commentary on those works. In medieval times, it was possible simply to say, the philosopher, and everyone would know who you meant. Only after the Renaissance would Aristotle's total dominance of philosophy and science be questioned. And even since then, Aristotle has never gone away. Current views in contemporary metaphysics, and especially ethics, are explicitly presented as little more than expansions on Aristotle's ideas. Because Aristotle's works were seen as definitive of philosophy, the areas he saw fit to explore became the chief philosophical disciplines in Western thought. And he saw fit to explore an amazingly wide range of areas. Until quite recently, people used the word philosophy to cover a much broader range of disciplines and topics than we nowadays have in mind when we say philosophy. Study of the world we see around us could be called natural philosophy well into the modern period. So for Aristotle and his heirs, philosophy would include topics like cosmology, chemistry, and biology, just as much as it includes ethics, epistemology, and metaphysics. And here's the thing. Aristotle is more often than not the very first person to write a work explicitly dedicated to each of these areas. The Presocratics and Plato certainly touched on many of the topics taken up by Aristotle, but Aristotle dominated the Western tradition in part because he produced works that focused explicitly on separate, more or less well-defined disciplines. What Aristotle left to his successors was not just a bunch of ideas and arguments, but a curriculum of study. Even today, many departments at a typical university will have names which correspond to titles or topics of books by Aristotle. Physics, psychology, zoology, literature, politics. Now I know what you're thinking. In previous episodes, haven't I been saying that the history of philosophy is just a set of to Plato? Certainly Plato is the one thinker who could rival Aristotle for the claim of most influential philosopher. But Plato's claim would depend heavily on the indirect influence he exercised through his greatest student. Aristotle came to study at Plato's academy as a young man. Born in 384 BC, he hailed from a town called Stagira, which is situated in northeastern Greece in an area called Chalcidice. His father Nicomachus was a doctor at the royal court of Macedon. Although Aristotle is not thought of as a medical thinker, he certainly inherited his father's scientific turn of mind, and contributed greatly to the history of medicine as well as the history of philosophy. Aristotle eventually had a son, who was also named Nicomachus, hence the title of one of Aristotle's best-known works, the Nicomachean Ethics. He came to Athens at the age of 17, where he had the chance to study with Plato. I'll be talking a bit more about the academy in a later episode devoted to Plato's and Aristotle's students. For now, suffice to say that Aristotle would have had a rigorous training in dialectical analysis and argument at Plato's feet, training which he would, in due course, use against the master. Diogenes Laertius, as always a source of entertaining but presumably fallacious details, tells us that Plato said of Aristotle, he kicked us away the way ponies do to their mothers upon being born. In one of Aristotle's own works, he excuses himself for attacking Platonic theories with the famous remark that we must honor truth above our friends. But, as we'll be seeing in some detail, the relationship between Aristotelian and Platonic philosophy is a complicated and subtle one. Certainly Aristotle was no more a slavish follower of Plato than Plato had been a slavish follower of his own teacher, Socrates. But Aristotle was at the academy for some twenty years, so that there was more than enough opportunity for him to ingest and consider the ideas of Plato and other colleagues in Athens. It would be better to think of him as self-consciously and critically engaging with Plato rather than simply setting out to reject or attack him. After Plato's death in 347, Aristotle traveled with one of those colleagues, Xenocrates, to stay at the pleasure of a ruler in Asia Minor called Hermaeus. He later traveled to the island of Lesbos, where he encountered another philosopher and colleague Theophrastus. We'll be covering both Xenocrates and Theophrastus in that later episode on the students. But, with all due respect to Theophrastus, he was not Aristotle's greatest student. Any BBC poll would award that prize to a young man who was educated by Aristotle soon after the stay in Lesbos, a young man who would later be known as Alexander the Great. Alexander is to the history of conquering what Aristotle is to the history of philosophy. His armies not only swept through mainland Greece, but also eastwards through Persia and ultimately as far as India. Alexander conquered the entire known world and then just kept going. He was revered as a god and set the standard for imperial rulers of the future, so that no less a figure than Augustus Caesar was eager to invite comparison with Alexander. He managed all that despite living only until the age of 32. This just goes to show you what you can accomplish if you have the right philosophy teacher. Of course, I'm no Aristotle, so listening to this podcast will not necessarily enable you to conquer the known world and beyond, but if you stick with me for enough episodes, you might be ready to tackle a small town. In any case, Aristotle finally came back to Athens in 335 BC, at which point he set up a rival school, the Lyceum. Diogenes preserves an ancient account that Aristotle was annoyed to be passed over as head of the academy in favour of his old travelling companion, Sinocrates. But whatever his reasons, the Lyceum became a second centre of learning. Supposedly philosophical discussions would take place while walking back and forth, which gave rise to the nickname of Aristotle's school, the peripatetics, that is, those who walk around. If you read about the history of ancient and medieval thought, you'll come across this expression peripatetic. It simply means whatever has to do with Aristotle's teaching and the tradition of his followers. After all that walking around, Aristotle had a chance to do some running, when feelings of anger flared up against Macedon in Athens subsequent to Alexander's death in 323 BC. Another famous story claims that Aristotle said he was leaving to stop Athens from once again sinning against philosophy, referring of course to the execution of Socrates. After this flight from Athens, Aristotle relocated to the island of Uboia, where he died in 322 BC. Ancient sources fancifully suggest that he may have killed himself by poison, thus imitating Socrates's swan song after all. I quite like one wildly implausible variation on this found in the ancient sources, namely that his suicide was prompted by despair after he was unable to understand why the tide rises and falls. So much for Aristotle's life, now for his works. Diogenes and several other authors preserve lists of his books, and these show that a great deal has been lost to us. To give only one example, Aristotle and his students compiled no fewer than 158 political constitutions in order to study all the ways that cities can be run. Of these texts, only the constitution of Athens has survived. So Aristotle's surviving corpus, despite its considerable size, represents only a fraction of what he originally wrote. Indeed, it would seem that our remaining corpus is one-sided. Aristotle apparently wrote two kinds of works. On the one hand, there were so-called exoteric writings. Aristotle refers to these himself, so there is no doubt that they existed. Quite what they were like and what they contained is a bit more mysterious. Ancient authors remark that Aristotle wrote very stylishly, and this, as anyone who has studied some Aristotle can tell you, doesn't exactly seem an apt description of the existing writings. So these exoteric writings, which were for a wider circulation, may have imitated Plato by fusing literary art with philosophical insight. But, apart from some fragments, what remains to us are the so-called esoteric writings. These are not esoteric in the sense that they contain some kind of obscure or secret teaching. Aristotle can be obscure, but it's not because he's trying to hide the truth from the reader. Rather, the esoteric works were apparently intended to be read in a school setting rather than for public distribution. The obscurity of the text may be partially explained by this fact. If these works were for Aristotle's students, he may have been able to take a good deal for granted. It's frequently suggested that the works as we have them now are actually nothing more than lecture notes, which Aristotle would expand into proper discourses when he taught. Although this is a widespread assumption about Aristotle's writings, I don't find it very satisfactory. For all their density and elusiveness, Aristotle's writings are often carefully constructed. This is true not only of the structure of whole works or individual books within a work, but also at the level of individual paragraphs and sentences. Furthermore, some of Aristotle's writings are much more clipped and concise than others. Whereas parts of his metaphysics are so dense that they can scarcely be understood at all, a work like the Nicomachean Ethics is a comparatively good read. So, I find the lecture note theory insufficient to capture the variation and craft of Aristotle's extant writings, although the works must have been tied to some pedagogical setting. I've just mentioned two of Aristotle's more famous works, The Ethics and The Metaphysics. Alongside his treatise On the Soul, his Physics, his Politics, and his Logical Treatises, these would constitute Theoristotelian writings that are most commonly studied in philosophy courses around the world. They will form the main focus of the episodes I'll devote to Aristotle in these podcasts. But I will also be looking at some other treatises of Aristotle that aren't usually included in philosophical overviews. For instance, I'll tackle Aristotle's biological works, by which I mean the several texts he devoted to the subject of animals. I'll look beyond Aristotle's physics in considering his understanding of the natural world, and this will take us to treatises like On the Heavens. And, I'll even touch on Aristotle's literary theory, as expressed in another of his most influential writings, The Poetics. Again, it's worth emphasizing that most of the works I've just mentioned are the very first treatises devoted to whatever subject they take up. The exception is his Physics. The Presocratics tended to call their books On Nature, and this is what Physics means, because the Greek word for nature is phusis. But even here, Aristotle was the first to say explicitly what it means to do physics or natural philosophy. We can say the same about other disciplines. On the Soul is the first systematic discussion of the soul's nature, the politics the first systematic discussion of political philosophy, the animal works the first systematic discussion of zoology, and so on. Of course, Plato too had dealt with such topics. The Republic covers the soul, politics, and literature, for instance. But Plato wove those various themes together in his dialogues. The later tradition found Aristotle's explicitly thematic treatises, with the topic conveniently identified in the titles, a more useful basis for formulating a philosophical curriculum. Because Aristotle likes to identify his subject matter and deal with it systematically, it's easy to assume that reading him will be a straightforward matter. Whereas Plato gives us the interplay of characters, Aristotle speaks to us in his own voice. And in these esoteric works, literary flair seldom gets in the way of the relentless march of distinctions and arguments. In this sense, Aristotle can seem to be the first person to write philosophy as it is now frequently written, a methodical investigation into some topic, prizing clarity and precision. But as it turns out, Aristotle's works call for delicate exegesis no less than Plato's dialogues do. Part of the reason is that, as I have mentioned, his exposition can be compressed and dense. But there is a deeper and more interesting reason, which can be summed up in a single word, dialectic. As so often, this word comes to us from ancient Greek. Plato uses the term dialectikē as having a rather exalted meaning. In the Sophist, as mentioned in my interview with Fiona Lee, dialectic is the study of how the forms interrelate, and in the Republic, it is associated with the higher segments of the divided line. One might, without too much oversimplification, suggest that for Plato, dialectic is simply the process by which philosophers achieve knowledge. Aristotle gives the term dialectic a different sense. For him, dialectic is simply argument that proceeds from agreed premises. For instance, suppose you and I are arguing about who was the greatest silent film comedian. I ask you to agree that Buster Keaton's The General is the greatest ever silent comedy film. You concede the point, and on the strength of this, I lead you to see that as the maker of this film, Keaton must be the greatest silent comedian. But my argument is only as strong as its initial premise. If you disagree about The General, and insist that Charlie Chaplin's The Kid is even better, my argument will be ineffective. If you think about it, nearly all argumentative discussion works like this. A topic for debate is identified, and the parties to the discussion try to find some point of agreement as a basis for further argument. If no point of agreement is found, then no argument is possible. Arguing without agreed premises isn't rational disputation, it's just posturing and shouting. Here I refer you to the political debating shows one sees on television nowadays. Because he had a deep interest in the practice of rational debate, Aristotle tried to formalize the rules and strategies of such debate in a work we call the topics. He calls the practice dialectic. In the topics, Aristotle explains that dialectic can be of immense use in philosophy. Just like any other rational discussion, philosophical inquiry needs to proceed on the basis of some agreed initial premises. Aristotle suggests that the premises we should adopt as starting points in philosophy are the views that are either widely accepted or accepted by the wise, by which he means earlier philosophical thinkers, poets, and other authorities. He calls these the endoxa, which we might translate as reputable opinions. True to his word, Aristotle usually writes dialectically. Especially characteristic is his habit of starting out a work by appealing to a range of endoxa. For instance, the first book of his work On the Soul begins by surveying previous opinions about the soul. The first book of the physics begins by surveying previous opinions about nature and its principles. This is why, as I mentioned in the very first podcast, Aristotle is such a rich source of information about the pre-Socratics. It can be disconcerting sometimes to notice that Aristotle lumps Plato in together with the pre-Socratics, as if he was just one more earlier philosopher, without giving him due credit for making a quantum leap ahead in the history of philosophy. It's clear from these endoxic surveys that, for Aristotle, the history of Greek philosophy looks like this. First there are the pre-Aristotelians who include Plato, and then there is Aristotle. Aristotle presents himself as the man to sort out all the issues the pre-Aristotelians spoke about. Towards this end he finds it especially useful to find endoxa that clash with one another so that he can weigh up their relative merits and see in what sense they might be true. He doesn't necessarily assume that the endoxa are true. When he mentions Parmenides in the physics, he doesn't go on to say that in a sense Parmenides was right to deny the existence of motion. But usually he finds that reputable opinions are a good stab at the truth. They are true in a way, or from a certain point of view, but they don't capture the truth in a rigorous and perspicuous fashion. All this can make it a complex business to read Aristotle. He is usually contrasting various opinions and considering their merits, speaking first on one side of a question, then on another side, and sometimes on yet a third side. Aristotle's own answer to any question tends to be, in a way yes, in a way no. He loves to present his own ideas as compromises between more extreme views. Thus, Aristotle's works, despite their lack of literary style, do retain something of the flavour of Platonic dialogues. We are shown a clash of views, with Aristotle remaining tantalisingly out of sight, a referee who may get involved at any moment to decide the issue, but who wants to let each side have its chance to speak. Among the things Aristotle learned from Plato, then, was a fascination with philosophical method. But he went beyond Plato in one respect, by making philosophical argumentation an object of explicit study in its own right. I've just mentioned the topics where Aristotle does not just show us dialectical discussions, as Plato did, but actually explores the nature of dialectic. This is only one of numerous works that Aristotle devoted to the rules of engagement in philosophical and non-philosophical argument. It was in the context of these works that he made one of his many lasting contributions to the history of philosophy. To put it bluntly, Aristotle invented logic. We now take it for granted that philosophy involves, and even presupposes, logic. On the strength of this invention alone, Aristotle really deserves to finish higher than ninth place in the list of all-time greats. The inevitable conclusion is that you should join me for a discussion of Aristotle's logical works next time on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.