Aristotle and His Philosophy

Abraham Edel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351315500
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Philosophy

In this stunning act of synthesis, Abraham Edel captures the entire range of Aristotle's thought in a manner that will prove attractive and convincing to a contemporary audience. Many philosophers approach Aristotle with their own, rather than his, questions. Some cast him as a partisan of a contemporary school. Even the neutral approach of classical scholarship often takes for granted questions that reflect our modern ways of dissecting the world.

Aristotle and His Philosophy shows him at work in asking and answering questions. Abraham Edel fashions a sound comparative way of using current analysis to deepen our understanding of Aristotle rather than argue with or simply appropriate him. Edel examines how Aristotle's basic ideas operated in his scientific and humanistic works, what they enabled him to do, what they kept him from doing, and what in turn we can learn from his philosophical experimentation.

The purpose of this volume is twofold: to provide a comprehensive introduction to Aristotle's thought, and to throw fresh light on its patterned and systematic character. First, tracing the pattern in Aristotle's metaphysical and physical writings, he then explores the psychology, epistemology, ethics and politics, rhetoric and poetics. In the process, Edel discusses the way interpretations of Aristotle are built up and how different philosophical outlooks Catholic, Hegelian, Marxian, linguistic, naturalistic, and pragmatic have affected the reading of Aristotelian texts and ideas.

The new introduction probes the general problem of interpreting a philosophy, and suggests how working through the different interpretations can contribute to a fuller understanding. This methodological self-consciousness makes Aristotle and His Philosophy markedly different from other studies of Aristotle. Martha C. Nussbaum of Brown University has described Edel as having "philosophical sensitivity and good sense throughout. His scholarship is comprehensive, but handled with grace and clarity."

Part 1
THE WORKS, THE MAN, THE THOUGHT

INTRODUCTION

Why is it that in the contemporary as in the ancient world, writing about Aristotle and commenting on him, and claiming him or attacking him, have assumed the proportions of a sizable intellectual industry? Why are there struggles over the interpretation of his philosophy? What do we know of the man? What patterns of thought are found in his works, what kind of a scientist and philosopher is he, and what are the broad attitudes embedded in his philosophical method?

1
ARISTOTLE’S WORKS AND THE PROBLEM OF INTERPRETATION

Aristotle was the systematic philosopher of ancient times. In the Middle Ages he was raised again to authoritative prominence. Dante’s famous characterization of him is often cited: he is the central “master of those who know,” with Socrates and Plato at his side. The break of the modern sciences with “arid scholasticism” from the seventeenth century on resulted in a long eclipse of Aristotelian philosophy. The revolt against authority in favor of appeal to experience, coupled with a genuine devotion to the novel elements in the growth of science, pushed Aristotle into what seemed at times merely a backwater in the history of philosophy. And the history of philosophy itself seemed to many an advanced thinker simply the history of human error before men got on the proper path. The more Aristotle’s writings on questions of physics remained unread, the more items that were cited tended to be curious scraps. Why should one take seriously a philosopher who believed that the sublunar elements are earth, air, fire, and water, when Democritus already had advanced an atomic theory; who reported that when a menstruating woman looks at a mirror, the mirror is tinged red; who attacked Empedocles because he offered an evolutionary-sounding idea; and who, when he approached something like a principle of inertia, declared it absurd?

Yet Aristotle’s eclipse was only partial. His social and humanistic side—his ethical, political, and aesthetic writings—continued to be influential. Was that because these were backward areas, or because they present perennial problems—the same for ancient and modern times—or because he had fashioned adequate solutions? Aristotle’s logic, his clearest claim to originality, remained the staple throughout the nineteenth century, though encased in later oversimplifications, and permeated college texts as late as the 1930s.

In the twentieth century a very surprising thing happened. Instead of remaining in “appropriate” relegation in the history of philosophy, Aristotle became once more a living philosopher. The more our contemporaries developed logic, the more they found Aristotle interesting to look at afresh. The more the philosophy of science advanced in its probing of contemporary problems, the more it asked itself what could have been the structure of a system that held men’s minds for two millennia, and what held it together conceptually. The more ethical and political theory diverged, the greater became the interest in a philosophy that had unified ethics and politics within a single comprehensive outlook. The more metaphysics was indicted in a positivist onslaught as “bad grammar,” the more attractive it found a philosophy that had attempted to combine linguistic and functional analysis. Contemporary philosophy itself, now more than ever questioning its own nature, discovered it could learn much from seeing how a systematic philosophy was built under different conditions of human knowledge, and how it held together. Of course, there are still some who look back with regressive longing for dogmatic philosophical truth—a strange status to assign to Aristotle, who in the thirteenth century represented science against mysticism. But on the whole it is fast becoming clear that what attracts in Aristotle is a great philosopher at work, and the way in which ideas are being forged, organized, and used. Our age is one in which there is a critical need in all fields for ideas—ideas that will make sense of rapidly accumulating data and break through older frameworks of thought. Thus the modern fascination with Aristotle is the fascination of mind with mind at work, sharply, profoundly, and systematically. Aristotle may yet come to be understood as he never was understood before. In the fashionable language of the moment, modern consciousness is involved in a philosophical dialogue with Aristotle.

In this dialogue, Aristotle is represented by his works, now long a traditional corpus with a life and career of its own. There are five volumes in the massive Berlin edition (the Bekker edition) of Aristotle’s works, and there are twenty-three volumes of the Greek commentators on Aristotle (also published in Berlin, between 1882 and 1909), not counting supplementary volumes. Both numbers are deceptive, but in opposite directions. Of the five volumes of Aristotle’s own works, only the first two contain the Greek texts; then come Latin versions, and then notes, fragmentary quotations, and index. On their side, the twenty-three volumes of ancient commentary give only a small picture of the vast historical enterprise of commenting on Aristotle.

The corpus of Aristotle’s own works covers almost every major area of human inquiry. The list of general topics dealt with is itself impressive: logic, philosophy of science, physics, astronomy, meteorology, biology, psychology, metaphysics, ethics, politics, rhetoric, theory of poetry. (A fuller outline of the works and their contents is given in appendix A.)

What are the works like? They are clearly technical products in science and philosophy, laying the foundations of field after field. They may have been texts for teaching or guidelines for research or both. Yet for all their systematic and encyclopedic character, they do not appear to be treatises that flowed continuously from the master’s pen. They have a put-together quality; in many cases treatments of separate topics are joined in a larger work with connecting threads. The parts of some of the works are even named separately in some of the ancient lists. The putting together may have been Aristotle’s own doing, or that of his disciples or editors. It has sometimes been suggested that we have here lecture notes taken by students; but without going into comparative reflection on the character of studentship in various eras, we may note the hypothesis that they are lecture notes prepared by the professor himself either for delivery or as topical treatments to be read for discussion. Different versions of the same subject, such as we find in the Eudemian and Nicomachean ethics, would thus represent such outline discussions as edited by Eudemus, Aristotle’s friend and colleague, and Nicomachus, his son. On the other hand, some scholars impressed by the fullness and subtlety of treatment do not rest content with any mere lecture-note or outline-discussion theory, and believe that Aristotle compiled many of the works, at least, rewriting and perhaps expanding them. But it has even been suggested that the works are the product of a whole school over several generations rather than one man’s massive accomplishment.¹

Whatever determined their form, the writings had an exciting history, both in ancient and in modern times. They were used as a basis for teaching, and were handed on; they were put into a definitive edition by Andronicus in the first century B.C. and were destined for endless commentary. One account has it that the works were left by Theophrastus, Aristotle’s successor, to a disciple who took them away to Asia Minor, where they were hidden in a cellar for protection and recovered in a dilapidated condition only shortly before the time of Andronicus, when they were returned to Athens and later carried off to Rome. Controversy has centered on whether Aristotle’s successors did have his technical works for the centuries that followed his and Theophrastus’ death. The preponderant view now seems to be that there was some access through other copies; the school did branch out to other centers in the Hellenistic world.² It does, however, appear as if the public at first received Aristotle in terms of his earlier dialogues; his technical works became the subject of commentary and gained a wider influence only after being taken up by the Neoplatonists in the third century A.D. By the early sixth century, when it is usually said—though apparently incorrectly³—that the Emperor Justinian closed the philosophical schools of Athens (529 A.D.), the works had already engaged the energies of important commentators of such different philosophical schools and religions as the Aristotelian (Alexander of Aphrodisias, 200 A.D.), the Neoplatonist (Porphyry, ca. 232-304 A.D., and Simplicius, early sixth century A.D.), and the Christian (Philoponus, ca. 490—530). It was Simplicius who carried the works to Persia shortly after 529. Constantinople already had an Aristotelian school, and from this source the works went into Syriac versions. In the ninth century they went from Syriac into Arabic, and so through the Arab world into Spain. The great Arabic commentators were Avicenna (980—1037) and Averroës (1126—98). In Hebraic philosophy during this period, Maimonides (1135—1204) is the outstanding Aristotelian.

The Christian world of the early Middle Ages knew very little of Aristotle’s works. Boethius (ca. 480—524) in the late Roman world had translated two of the introductory logical works (Categories and On Interpretation) together with Porphyry’s introduction to them. This was practically all that was directly known for a long while; even Abelard in the twelfth century knew only the Prior Analytics in addition.

From roughly the mid-twelfth century to the mid-thirteenth century the works came into the Christian world, translated from the Arabic along with Arabic commentaries. They rapidly became the basis of philosophical education in the universities as well as the inspiration for philosophical development in Christian thought. But troubles arose with conservative religious authorities, who feared the impact of the scientific elements in Aristotelian thought. For that matter, Arabic religious influence had led to the condemnation of Averroēs in the Arab world, and some material that the Arabic commentators had stressed came most into conflict with Christian dogmas. This situation was gradually ameliorated when the Greek texts became available after the capture of Constantinople by the Crusaders in 1204; then fresh commentary on the text, taking issue with the Arabic versions, became possible. Even those who knew little or no Greek, like Thomas Aquinas, could have Latin translations made for themselves from the Greek. In any case, Aristotle triumphed and his works remained the basis for university education into the sixteenth century, in spite of critical attacks by Renaissance thinkers. This was not, however, a dogmatic Aristotelianism, as recent researches have shown, but a use of the works for setting problems and engaging in alternative interpretations.⁴ A school of careful commentary existed in Padua, whose outstanding representative was Zabarella (d. 1589). It is ironic that just when the intellectual world was probably best prepared for appreciating the Aristotelian works critically, it lost interest in them.

Classical scholars, however, never stopped burrowing. The nineteenth-century Berlin edition became in turn the basis for further advance. Textual emendations eventually filled the gaps left by slips of the pen in transcriptions over the ages, by uncertain Latin, by Syriac and Arabic translations, and even—if we give momentary romantic credence to the cellar story—by the nibbles of mice. The twentieth-century texts are a collective scholarly achievement of insight, patience, and devotion. For example, Joachim, in the preface to his revised text and commentary on On Coming-to-be and Passing-away, tells us of the patient line-by-line discussions in the meetings of the Oxford Aristotelian Society that By-water had founded: “The study of Aristotle (we could not but feel) demanded our utmost efforts: no labor could be spared, no detail neglected, no difficulty slurred. We were engaged upon an enterprise arduous indeed and infinitely laborious, but emphatically and supremely worthwhile. It was as if we were privileged to spend those Monday evenings in close and intimate communion with the very spirit of original work.”⁵ He points out that when he worked on his book in the second decade of the twentieth century, there existed no modern English editions of the Physics, On the Heavens, or Meteorology. And, of course, there was a gap between textual edition and English translation. It was not, however, to remain so for long. Out of the same group came the Oxford translations of Aristotle’s works in twelve volumes. Later, in the United States, the Loeb Classical Library editions appeared, so that anyone in the English-speaking world today, with only a smattering of Greek, can correlate the original on the left-hand page with the English on the right. Even more, the last few decades have witnessed the novel phenomenon of a diversity of translations of some of the works. In the contemporary revival of Greek literature and philosophy in translation, Aristotle is not yet running second to Homer, but he is coming on apace.

Moreover, just as the ancient and medieval world heaped commentary on commentary, so the contemporary classical and philosophical scene is the setting for an almost exponential outpouring of articles and books. The diversity, often the conflict, of interpretation is striking. From small-scale disagreements over a passage or middle-sized variations in interpreting a chapter or even a whole work, to large-scale conflicts over the philosophy in its total pattern, it is as if the corpus were functioning as a Rorschach test to focus and bring out the beliefs and intellectual aspirations of the writers.

The reader may be tempted to ask whether all this expenditure of energy is worthwhile. Indeed, if the scene is so crowded and so variegated, why are we interposing another book between the reader and the corpus? For that matter, why does not philosophy simply tackle its problems afresh, using the latest available techniques, as science seems to do, rather than try to develop itself by studying its history? The answer involves two more questions. One is why there exists such an intense interest in the history of philosophy and in the analysis of individual, particularly central, figures. The second is how we are to explain the diversity of interpretation and assess the effects of different philosophical approaches on our current understanding of Aristotle.

The intense interest centers of course not only on Aristotle, but on Plato, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Wittgenstein, among others. No doubt there are different grounds for interest in the different figures. Plato was the first philosopher in the western tradition to articulate the full range of philosophic problems, and he did it with passion. (One can sympathize with Alfred North Whitehead’s remark that all the rest of western philosophy is a footnote to Plato.) Aristotle gives us the first explicitly systematic philosophy and fashions the shape of traditional problems. Descartes is a turning point of vast significance. Kant is a colossus standing at the crossroads: nearly all the fields of previous philosophy converge in him, and he refashions the directions that they all take thereafter. Hegel unifies philosophical thought in a historical synthesis. Marx overturns a world. Wittgenstein bewitches a generation. And so on. The phenomenon we are considering is not the property of philosophy alone. Giants of literature, music, and art invite the same interest and stimulate the same attention—witness the obvious cases of Shakespeare, Beethoven, and Michelangelo. Scientists are no exception, as the increasing work on Newton, Galileo, Darwin, and others makes clear.

So pervasive an interest must have a profound basis. Is it itself a historical phenomenon? The founders of our country read the ancients as if they were contemporaries to argue or agree with, and the Bible, especially the Old Testament, as history from which current lessons or solutions to current problems were easily gleaned. After Hegel it is more likely that the ancients were read to learn how problems originated than to find possible answers. A decade or two ago there was a strong tendency to look on the past as gone and transcended and the present as utterly new with its own utterly novel problems; it became almost a defiant commonplace of the young that we cannot learn from the past. But the very fact of rapid change has turned attention to the understanding of change itself and added a historical dimension to the traditional search for the perennial in human life and thought. Accordingly, today we see a resurgence of historical consciousness. We are beginning to accept the lesson that to neglect the past is to rob ourselves of the knowledge and the sense of growth, of the development, the dynamics of change, the alternatives that are posed in events and ideas particularly at critical and turning points, and to leave ourselves provincially bound to the presuppositions that for historical reasons happen to be the ones in our current patterns. Science itself is the most recent field to learn this lesson, and the scientific study of the history of science is its latest product. Whatever the explanation, in the case of philosophy at least, the revival of the history of philosophy as a way of philosophizing, rather than as an archaic interest, has been striking in its scope and its results.

As to the second question, the problem of explaining the diversity of interpretation is part of the general question of the possibilities of historical truth. On the one hand there are the sheer objectivists, who believe that the historian simply tells us what happened and that the Aristotelian scholar as a master of the corpus simply tells us what Aristotle thought. From their perspective, diversity of interp...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction to The Transaction Edition
• PREFACE
• ARISTOTLE’S WORKS: TITLES, ABBREVIATIONS, AND TRANSLATIONS
• Part 1: THE WORKS, THE MAN, THE THOUGHT
• Part 2: THE METAPHYSICAL NETWORK
• PART 3: MAN AND HIS POWERS
• Part 4: THE THEORY OF KNOWING: MIND AT WORK
• Part 5: THE THEORY OF PRACTICE
• Part 6: THE THEORY OF PRODUCTION
• Part 7: EPILOGUE
• Appendixes
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index