Somehow, number 9 is right after number 6.
Aristotle quotes on virtue, knowledge, and happiness
91–100 of 104 posts
Re: Aristotle quotes on virtue, knowledge, and happiness
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
He thought some humans were slaves by nature and women were naturally inferior to men. edit: whoa, I didn't realize how racist this guy was. He could be classified as a eugenicist I suppose. He also believed in spontaneous generation (fair, without technology we have now it would be really confusing to understand where all kinds of things come from). Seemed to believe infinity was impossible yet also that the heavens…
>He thought some humans were slaves by nature and women were naturally inferior to men. These are unfortunately still all too common beliefs. The latter has mostly been folded into racial essentialism and racial realist beliefs, because slavery is no longer legal (13th amendment loophole notwithstanding) and you can still find people arguing women are intellectually inferior and incapable of rational thought. The who…
A bit off topic, but I'm guessing Aristotle himself would say that chasing "status in the workforce" (as opposed to leisure, riches, wisdom, power etc) is itself a good example of slavish disposition. Status in the bosses' eyes, amirite?
Re: Aristotle quotes on virtue, knowledge, and happiness
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
> he has some pretty messed up and weird views What’s an example?
He thought some humans were slaves by nature and women were naturally inferior to men. edit: whoa, I didn't realize how racist this guy was. He could be classified as a eugenicist I suppose. He also believed in spontaneous generation (fair, without technology we have now it would be really confusing to understand where all kinds of things come from). Seemed to believe infinity was impossible yet also that the heavens…
> He thought some humans were slaves by nature and women were naturally inferior to men.
The notion that all human individual are of equal worth isn't exactly common. You may think it's weird, but it was fairly standard worldview for a lot of humanity for a lot of history. Your outlook may simply be shaped by living in a Christian-based culture:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominion_(Holland_book)
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_WEIRDest_People_in_the_Wor...
While I think curiosity is a natural human trait, doing "science" is not 'as natural', as certain metaphysical assumptions need to be in place before it can really be done, and not all worldviews/cultures accepted them:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalism_(philosophy)#Provid...
Re: Aristotle quotes on virtue, knowledge, and happiness
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
He stated, in a separate work, that women had fewer teeth as an example of his views on their inferiority. Makes you want to take everything he said with a grain of salt. In his defense (sorry if defending him offends here), women probably did, at the time, often have fewer teeth due to worse dental care.
Sorry for defending Aristotle? Have we lost the plot as a society?
I think they are just signaling their political/religious affiliation.
Re: Aristotle quotes on virtue, knowledge, and happiness
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://sourcelibrary.org/book/problemata-text-beginning-omn... An original source for this. I wonder if wisdom teeth affected this count? It’s so odd of a claim
The thing I always come back to is Aristotle's belief that if you release an object being circled about your head by rope, it will move perpendicular to the tangent line of the circle. This is trivial to disconfirm by experiment. It moves parallel to the tangent. It's just that science of his school of thought was rationalist. They believed in the power of thought more than the power of experiment. You can surely obs…
It's hard to square this with my impression of Aristotle as a kind of early empiricist, cataloging and dissecting animals.
Re: Aristotle quotes on virtue, knowledge, and happiness
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have no idea what you're trying to say here. Those two sentences seem disconnected. One very common error people make is to believe that ethics - at least epistemically and for the most part - is sectarian. This view seems to stem from an ultimately nihilistic presupposition that morality is a fiction supplied by the fiction of religion. But that is not the natural law view and thus a view alien to both Aristotle a…
>One very common error people make is to believe that ethics - at least epistemically and for the most part - is sectarian. This view seems to stem from an ultimately nihilistic presupposition that morality is a fiction supplied by the fiction of religion. But that is not the natural law view and thus a view alien to both Aristotle and to Christianity. I didn’t make that claim in any implied way, I asserted, correctl…
Thanks for your response.
> I didn’t make that claim in any implied way, I asserted, correctly, that Aristotle is not an Abrahamic thinker.
I was trying to make sense of what your two disconnected sentences were saying and used this as an opportunity to address what I suspected may be the underlying presuppositions.
> The Nichomachean Ethics doesn’t discuss ethics within any context of absolute free will even
Aristotle does, in fact, discuss "choice" (προαίρεσις) and the "voluntary" (τὸ ἑκούσιον) to lay the ground for moral responsibility. I grant you it is not identical to the view of, say, Aquinas who goes further than Aristotle - indeed, he takes Augustine's account of the will and integrates it with the Aristotelian - but it isn't a wholesale departure from the Aristotelian either. Aquinas calls the will "rational appetite" (voluntas ut ratio) which is a very Aristotelian take. A notable and immediately relevant Neoplatonic refinement he makes here - consistent with Aristotle - is the supplementation with voluntas ut natura.
Furthermore, I didn't write "absolute free will", by which I can only assume you mean "sheer will"? Rather, I intentionally wrote "freedom to choose between alternatives apprehended by the intellect". Absolute free will is more of a modern, secular notion, not a classical or Christian one (we do see its origins in the "sheer will" of Ockham), hence why we obsessively speak of "sovereignty" and "autonomy" today.
> Most Christian theologies would vehemently disagree precisely because having the supra-knowledge of the Mystery imparted upon one necessarily brings one's being into the dimension of revealed universality.
Whatever the Abrahamic influence on the course of Aristotelian thought, there is no reason to believe that Abrahamic influence was absolutely necessary to "universalize ethics" (take the early Stoics, for instance). This is expected and returns to my original point, that much of ethics is knowable in principle through unaided reason alone.
People have casually dismissed Aristotle in total merely because his physics is obsolete, even though it is separable from and in no way necessarily implied by his metaphysics. Similarly, his views about slaves and so on do not follow from these core principles and are rather auxiliary rationalizations of prevailing cultural practices. It was very much a failure on Aristotle's part to be consistent with his own natural law views.
> All three of the Abrahamic theologies were infected by Neoplatonism
"Infected" here is a needlessly tendentious and loaded term. I don't consider this influence as somehow undermining the essential core of Aristotelian thought. I do not think Aristotle was condemned to hold the aforementioned views on slaves, etc.
> Aristotle was describing in Metaphysics a cosmology concerned with unpacking the notion of motion as the actualization of potentiality, hence, "First Mover", which is not at all an Abrahamic idea.
Under a strict understanding faithful to Aristotle's complete views, yes, the Prime Mover is not "Abrahamic". But that doesn't mean the essential characteristics of the Prime Mover are in contradiction with, say, a traditionally Christian account, even if they are incomplete. At the very least, the Prime Mover establishes that there is a first actualizer along with some properties this actualizer must have.
> An aside, but the Muslims called Aristotle “The Philosopher” (Ibn Rashud, Ibn Sina), and that tradition was received through the Muslims by their European readers.
Yes, but this doesn't contradict what I wrote.
Re: Aristotle quotes on virtue, knowledge, and happiness
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
'meant' was a wrong choice of word which i stated above. you come across as a child by being snarky - you definitely need to spend some time learning how to behave like an adult.
You literally posted that some people are effectively born slaves, that's beneath contempt and if you said it to my face I would certainly have been far, far less kind. Also you definitely need to spend a while researching what comprises being an adult.
don't kid yourself -- learn to read and comprehend the totality of what has been said. also, stop acting tough on internet forums, iow, grow up.
Re: Aristotle quotes on virtue, knowledge, and happiness
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
>One very common error people make is to believe that ethics - at least epistemically and for the most part - is sectarian. This view seems to stem from an ultimately nihilistic presupposition that morality is a fiction supplied by the fiction of religion. But that is not the natural law view and thus a view alien to both Aristotle and to Christianity. I didn’t make that claim in any implied way, I asserted, correctl…
Thanks for your response. > I didn’t make that claim in any implied way, I asserted, correctly, that Aristotle is not an Abrahamic thinker. I was trying to make sense of what your two disconnected sentences were saying and used this as an opportunity to address what I suspected may be the underlying presuppositions. > The Nichomachean Ethics doesn’t discuss ethics within any context of absolute free will even Aristot…
>Whatever the Abrahamic influence on the course of Aristotelian thought, there is no reason to believe that Abrahamic influence was absolutely necessary to "universalize ethics" (take the early Stoics, for instance). This is expected and returns to my original point, that much of ethics is knowable in principle through unaided reason alone.
Aristotle directly refutes this in Nichomachean Ethics, this is why I wrote that it is “a very qualified doing”. He asserts that you can’t simply “get good” at committing virtuous acts because they require the correct upbringing firstly (“it makes a very great difference; or rather all the difference”); a good amount of that text reads like a parenting book; you can’t turn the skip later in life. So when you say:
> freedom to choose between alternatives apprehended by the intellect
I don’t think this is exhaustive in describing what’s going on in Nichomachean Ethics to any degree to render all else negligible. Given the way he talks about “soul” (a word which also conveys the worst interpretation of what he’s talking about in De Anima), it becomes clearer to me why conditioning is so important to him.
Re: Aristotle quotes on virtue, knowledge, and happiness
#99Quote lists are kinda hit or miss.
Half the time
Re: Aristotle quotes on virtue, knowledge, and happiness
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
He thought some humans were slaves by nature and women were naturally inferior to men. edit: whoa, I didn't realize how racist this guy was. He could be classified as a eugenicist I suppose. He also believed in spontaneous generation (fair, without technology we have now it would be really confusing to understand where all kinds of things come from). Seemed to believe infinity was impossible yet also that the heavens…
> He thought some humans were slaves by nature and women were naturally inferior to men. The notion that all human individual are of equal worth isn't exactly common. You may think it's weird, but it was fairly standard worldview for a lot of humanity for a lot of history. Your outlook may simply be shaped by living in a Christian-based culture: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominion_(Holland_book) * https://en.wik…
That's worth pointing out, definitely. I'm aware that perhaps most people on earth wouldn't think this is a weird position to hold; it's largely my critique of him from a subjective point of view. There are massive populations in the world practicing explicit, intentional social stratification. Inegalitarianism might be the mean, whether people realize it or not.
I just don't think it should be.