Aristotle
Founder of Modern Philosophy
Education
Although much is often made of his connections to Socrates and Plato, much like Gorgias believed, this fact notwithstanding no one could blame these teachers for the actions of their students. Because although he did in fact study under Plato at the Platonic Academy between 366 BCE - 348 BCE, his own teaching own teaching did not in any way reflect his masters as much as they did reflect a building on the work of Gorgias of Leontini.
Conspiracy to kill Alexander The Great
After leaving the Platonic Academy at age 36 in 348 BCE, Aristotle would work as tutor to a young Alexander the Great, in Macedonia where his father had worked as a physician to to King Amyntas of Macedon.
Although it is rejected by many scholars in academia today, it was alleged by the renowned biographer Plutarch in a section titled Alexander of his The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans , that Aristotle successfully conspired to have Alexander the Great assassinated.
The biography features a man named Hagnothemis who claimed to have overheard King Antigonus speaking of a Macedonian general, and eventual regent to Alexanders empire named Antipater, poisoning Alexander the Great, and that poison and the plot were created and sponsored by Aristotle.
Death
Following the death of Alexander, Aristotle was not implicated in connection with Alexander’s death, he was charged by Demophilus and Eurymedon the Hierophant in 322 BCE with impiety. He escaped the charges and fled to Chalcis where he died a year later.
significant works
After serving several years as the head of the royal academy of Macedon, he returned to Athens and founding his Lyceum in 334.
Over the next several years he would produce many significant works. The scope of his works included, works on logic, several dozen on physic, including five on animal and biology, and metaphysics.
However it is his writings on rhetoric, ethics and politics that have been most influential. Although his influence on rhetoric cannot be escaped by any English speaking college student in North America, his writing on ethics and politics were in fact even more significant.
His most significant works, with respect to its influence on society generally, were most certainly his Nicomachean Ethics and De Anima.
influence
Many phrases that are today cliche originated in these works. No political campaign would be complete without reference to the necessity, especially in voting for candidates, of choosing the lesser of two evils, a phrase that takes its origin in the Nicomachean Ethics.
There is a section called The Proud Man where he lays out his model the virtuous man. Every orator since has been knowingly or unknowingly doing there best impersonation of Aristotle’s The Proud Man.
All the qualities that we have grown to love about all our favorite YouTube debaters, things like, not being triggered by anything, or “destroying” your enemies.
““He speaks no evil of others, unless by way of a deliberate insult to an enemy””
Aristotle reflecting Gorgias
Significant Quotes
Very much like his predecessor Gorgias, Aristotle was uninspired by the creative powers of humanity to make discoveries and to transmit them. As Gorgias argues in On Non Being that, anything you might mention is nothing, if it were something it would be unknowable, and if it were knowable it could not be made evident to others. Aristotle reiterates the same belief when he states that:
““We must be content with a rough approximation of the truth. For when we are dealing and starting out form what holds good only as a general rule, the conclusions that we reach will have the same character, let each of the views put forward be accepted in the spirit. for it is the mark of an educated mind to seek only as much exactness as may be allowed by the nature of the subject matter.””
““Plato is clearly wanting his world soul to be of the kind as that which is ordinarily called the intellect. But the intellect is a single and continuous things as is thinking, and thinking just consists of thoughts. But these are one by being in sequence, as is the case with numbers, and it is not in the way that a quantity is one thing, thus it cannot be in this ladder way that the mind is continuous, rather it must either have no parts, or be continuous but not in the way that a quantity is. In any case how is it to think if it is a quantity? Perhaps we would say that it is by each of its own parts. But will it have parts in the quantitative sense or as parts or only as points? To assume that we can talk about parts in the latter sense. But if it is by the parts in the sense of points, and if there is an infinity of these, then the mind will never complete its thought. If on the other hand we mean parts in the quantitative sense, then the mind will think the same thoughts many times, perhaps an infinite number of times. Yet it would seem possible for the mind also to think something only once. In any case, if it is enough that the mind make contact with some one of its parts, what need is there for it to be moved in a circle, or in general have quantity? If, on the other hand, thinking requires contact with the whole circle, to what does contact by the parts correspond? There is a further puzzle as to how, if the mind is without parts, it will think that which has parts and vice versa.””
A thorough examination of Aristotle’s most influential works expose the author as a flatterer in philosophers clothes. His published works can be viewed as a defense of Gorgias. The domain formerly defined by Gorgias as pertaining to the jurisdiction of orator would, thanks to Aristotle would become exalted above all else.
“““A love of pleasure has been fostered in each of us since birth and this has become so thoroughly ingrained in our lives that it can hardly be irradicated. And even in the judging of actions we all of us tend to a greater or lesser degree to make pleasure and pain our standard. For if a man applies these good he will be good, if badly bad.” ”
But Aristotle was much more clever than his predecessor. Where Gorgias, because of an “excess of courage,” as Aristotle would call it, tried to debate Socrates honestly and was defeated, Aristotle was more ruthless in his willingness to be unjust.
Unlike his teacher Plato, none of his works were dialogues, and very much like Gorgias the form of his presentation was a monologue. Imagine Plato’s dialogue of Gorgias without Socrates being there to defend the good.
Aristotle didn’t believe that the good needed any defending, nor did he believe that there was anything other than futility involved in tending our actions toward it. Not only that, he reject the idea of human beings discovering anything creatively that wasn’t immediately apparent to the senses. In fact, in De Anima he warns against human beings making any connections at all.
“““The thinking then of indivisibles is to be counted among those thing with which falsity has no connection. In things however where falsity and truth apply, there is already some synthesis of thoughts, which are considered as if they are one. Things are first separate and then conjoined. ”
Also, like Gorgias, on the topic of teachers of rhetoric, Aristotle did not believe you could blame the teacher for the failing of the student. For this reason, he fled from his charges of impiety to save his own neck rather then have to face the music for the sake of a principle like Socrates.
Ironically the last thing he is quoted as saying before leave Athens, was an attempt to associate himself with the legacy of Socrates when he said that:
““ I will not allow the Athenians to sin twice against philosophy”