What kind of person was Aristotle?
waveletter
My apologies for the delay in posts, but I've been busy with vacations,
family in town, a new job, a new dog, and a new construction project
off the back of the house. Of course, my first love is Aristotle, and
all of that is secondary, so I want to comment on another question that
came to me offline from MJ, to wit: What kind of person was Aristotle?
Now, bear in mind that this is the guy that discovered Logic.
I did not know him [Aristotle] personally, so I'm going to have to rely
on remote-hand reports and deductions from remote-hand accounts.
There's a nice little book by Jonathan Barnes, "Aristotle: A Very Short
Introduction," Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000, that explains some of
what we know of The Philosopher's personality.
Here is what Prof. Barnes says: "Of Aristotle's character and
personality little is known. He came from a rich family [his father was
a physician in the court of King Amyntas of Macedonia, to the north of
Athens] He was alledgedly a dandy, wearing rings on his fingers and
cutting his hair fashionably short. He suffered from poor digestion,
and is said to have been spindle-shanked. He was a good speaker, lucid
in his lectures, persuasive in coversation; and he had a mordant wit.
His enemies, who were numerous, accused him of arrogance. His will,
which has survived, is a generous document. His philosophical writings
are impersonal; but hey suggest that he prized both friendship and
self-sufficiency, and that, while conscious of his place in an
honorable tradition, he was properly proud of his own attainments. As a
man, he was, perhaps, admirable rather than amiable."
I'll try to toss in some more remarks about Aristotle's personality in
the next few days. We'll get back to cold, hard logic soon enough....
Hope you've had a pleasant summer! At least, those of you in the
northern hemisphere!
--Ron
P.S. If you are interested in presocratic philosophy, there's a new
group over on Yahoo:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/presocratic-philosophy/
A lot of what we cover relies on reports by Aristotle, and--in any
case, if I had to--I would probably place Aristotle within one of the
traditions of presocratic philosophy...actually the one we are covering
right now on presocratic-philosophy. There is a lot more concern for
historical and literary context in this new group than there is in the
better-documented Aristotelian logic discussions. Just a teaser, in
case you are a bit tired or overwhelmed by the technical aspects on
aristotle-logic. Thanks!
waveletter
There is some excellent biographical material on Aristotle in Guthrie's
"A History of Greek Philosophy," vol. VI, "Aristotle: An Encounter,"
Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1981.
Aristotle was born in Stagira, on the eastern Chalkidike (Chalcidice,
other spellings too!) peninsula, in Thrace, in 384 BCE.
1. Here's a satellite image of the peninsula:
http://www.navis.gr/space/greece/05b.htm
2. Here's a map of the region from Bernard Suzanne's excellent website
on Plato: http://plato-dialogues.org/tools/gk_wrld.htm
Stagira was founded in 655 BCE by Ionian settlers from the island of
Andros. Andros is one of the larger (if not the largest, I'm not sure)
of the Cyclades islands.
3. Here's another map from Bernard Suzanne's website that shows Andros:
http://plato-dialogues.org/tools/greece.htm
His father was Nicomachus, the physician to King Amyntas of Macedonia,
who was the father of Philip and the grandfather of Alexander the
Great. Nicomachus came from a long and proud tradition of Greek
doctors, and it was in medicine that the best traditions of Greek
empirical science were practiced.
Apparently, Nicomachus died young, and Aristotle was an orphan at an
early age. His guardian and step-father was Proxenus, from the city of
Atarneus in Asia Minor. Atarneus is on the coast, just to the east of
the southern tip of the island of Lesbos.
4. Here's a map of Aristotle's wanderings,
http://research.haifa.ac.il/~mluz/Access/arist.da/maparist.JPG
showing the location of Atarneus.
After Plato died, as a matter of fact, Aristotle and Xenocrates left
Athens for Assos, at the invitation of the ruler of Atarneus, Hermeias.
So, anyway, Aristotle was a 17-year-old orphan when he showed up at the
door of Plato's academy in Athens in 367 BCE. Plato was gone at the
time--off to Sicily again to try to teach the tyrant of the island,
Dionysius II, how to be a philosopher-king. It is possible and
intriguing, then, that Aristotle's first mentor at the Academy was none
other than Eudoxus of Cnidus (in Asia Minor, on the tip of the
peninsula just north of the island of Rhodes), perhaps the greatest
mathematician of antiquity.
5. Here's the MacTutor page on Eudoxus:
http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Biographies/Eudoxus.html
So Aristotle seems to have been brought up in an environment of medical
science. It could be that he was a prodigy, but he might have been
somewhat lonely, accompanied by adults and his guardian Proxenus. As a
teenage boy, he left his home to study with older philosophers around
the Academy, but not exclusively with Plato himself. It must have been
a stimulating, but trying early life.
Thanks!
--Ron
waveletter
Last time I reflected on Aristotle's early life in the academy, his
being orphaned at a tender age of 10, and then at 17 years travelling
so far south as Athens to study at Plato's Academy with men twice his
age or older. But, I guess he was fairly precocious.
At age 24 he dared to enter a polemic with Isocrates--perhaps the most
prominent Athenian rhetorician, lawyer, and literary wit at the
time--the leader of a rival school of philosophy to Plato's. Aristotle
did this in the form a philosophical dialogue, the "Gryllus", named
after Xenophon's son, who had died in battle at Mantinea (362 BCE).
Jonathan Barnes ["Aristotle: A Very Short Introduction," Oxford: Oxford
Univ. Press, 2000] describes Aristotle as contending that one should
not try to excite passions with fine language but with precise logic.
Cephisodorus, Isocrates's student and roommate, replied, lampooning
Aristotle as a simple collector of proverbs. Later, Aristotle wrote
another dialogue, the "Protrepticus", and Isocrates himself deigned to
reply in the "Antidosis". Amidst all the debate, though, Aristotle was
still fair enough to credit Isocrates with having a fine literary style
[Barnes, op. cit., pp. 33-34].
All of Aristotle's dialogues are lost.
There's a fragment about the Isocrates-Aristotle debate coming from
Numenius, a Greek philosopher from Apamea, Syria (ca. 200 CE).
"Cephisodorus, when he saw his master Isocrates being attacked by
Aristotle, was ignorant of and unversed in Aristotle himself; but,
seeing the repute which Plato's views enjoyed, he thought that
Aristotle was following Plato. So he waged war on Aristotle, but was
really attacking Plato. His criticism began with the Ideas and finished
with the other doctrines--things which he himself did not know; he was
only guessing at the meaning of the opinions held about them. This
Cephisodorus was not attacking the person he was at war with, but was
attacking the person he did not wish to make war upon." [J. Barnes,
ed., "The Complete Works of Aristotle," vol. 2, Princeton, NJ:
Princeton Univ. Press, 1984, p. 2389]
So it must have been an amusing debate.
Next posts, I suppose I'll go back to syllogistic.
Thanks!
--Ron
