plato and aristotle the genesis of western thought aryeh kosman

Professor Aryeh KosmanHAVERFORD COLLEGE

PLATO AND

ARISTOTLE:THE GENESIS OF

WESTERN THOUGHT

COURSE GUIDE

Plato and Aristotle:The Genesis of Western Thought

Professor Aryeh KosmanHaverford College

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Course Syllabus


About Your Professor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .4

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .5

Lecture 1 Plato (with Nods to Socrates) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .6

Lecture 2 The Euthyphro: The Virtue of Holiness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .9

Lecture 3 The Charmides: The Virtue of Quiet Self-Control . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .14

Lecture 4 The Republic: Justice and the Virtue of Justice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .17

Lecture 5 The Republic: Justice and the Philosopher King . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .21

Lecture 6 The Symposium: Is the Philosopher Capable of Love? . . . . . . . . . . . . .25

Lecture 7 The Phaedo: Death and the Philosopher . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .29

Lecture 8 Aristotle: Patience with Complexity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .33

Lecture 9 The Organon: Substance as the PrimaryMode of Being . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .36

Lecture 10 The Metaphysics: What Is Philosophy? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .40

Lecture 11 Biology and On the Soul: Life and Consciousness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .46

Lecture 12 The Nicomachean Ethics: Ethics and the Good Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .52

Lecture 13 Plato and Aristotle:The Politics and the Poetics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .58

Lecture 14 Plato and Aristotle: A Final Review and Summation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .64

Course Materials . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .68

Aryeh Kosman is the John Whitehead Professor of Philosophy at HaverfordCollege in Haverford, Pennsylvania. Professor Kosman began his studies atthe University of California at Berkeley and completed his doctoral work atHarvard University, with study between at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.He joined the Haverford faculty in 1962 and has taught there since, exceptduring visiting appointments at Princeton University, the University ofCalifornia at Los Angeles, the University of California at Berkeley, theUniversity of Washington, and the University of Pittsburgh. He has been a fel-low at Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies and at the Woodrow WilsonInternational Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. Professor Kosman haslectured and written extensively on ancient, medieval, and early modern phi-losophy. His main areas of interest in the history of philosophy include meta-physics, ethics, philosophical psychology, and the philosophy of languageand literature. His teaching interests also include contemporary issues in aes-thetics and the philosophy of literature. Professor Kosman is the recipient ofseveral teaching awards. He is also the father of three grown and successfulsons. He presently lives in Haverford with his wife, Deborah Roberts, a clas-sicist and translator, and their young daughter Hannah.

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About Your Professor

Aryeh Kosman

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IntroductionThis course is an introduction to the philosophical thought of the two most

important philosophical figures of ancient Greece. By working through partsof their central texts and thoughts, we will gain an understanding of Plato andAristotle’s relevance in the past and today as well.

Plato and Aristotle offered theories and philosophies distinctive of their indi-vidual world views. Plato, sometimes remarked on for his “otherworldliness,”and Aristotle, characterized more by “this worldliness,” approached theirexploration of the human condition in different ways. But in this examinationof the minds and works of two of our first philosophers, it is their similaritiesthat shine through: their commitment to reason as critical to moral, political,and spiritual lives; their unending desire to understand the world; and aboveall, their mutual love of wisdom, the fruits of which have inspired and enrichedthe lives of inquisitive men and women to this very day.

School of Athens

Detail of Plato and AristotleStanza della Segnatura, Stanze di Raffaello, Vatican

by Raphael (1483-1520)

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In order to comprehend who we are as people we must begin to understand thephilosophical giants who have shaped our thinking. We will think through thephilosophical texts of Plato and Aristotle and not simply make a list of their ideas.In reading the texts we will strive to understand what the philosophers wereattempting to articulate. Remember two primary concerns as you consider theseworks: (1) Be concerned always with philosophical relevance, and (2) Be con-cerned with truth and historical accuracy.

I. Plato and Aristotle (with Nods to Socrates)

A. No discussion of Plato and Aristotle would be complete without first men-tioning Socrates.

1. Socrates was an immensely important figure in Athenian life. As ateacher and thinker he had an enormous, though controversial, influ-ence. He was a close friend of Plato’s family.

2. Socrates was, in effect, the founder of moral philosophy and a master ofphilosophical interrogation. He characteristically asked questions ofmeaning, such as, “What is …?” What is justice? What is courage?

B. Plato was born in Athens in 428 BCE to a wealthy and aristocratic family.He aspired to follow in his family’s footsteps and become an aristocraticpolitician, but Socrates inspired him to follow a course of philosophy.

1. Socrates was condemned to death for “corrupting the youth.” It was theinfluence that Socrates’ life, trial, and death had upon Plato that turnedhim toward a life of studying philosophy.

2. After Socrates’ death Plato left Athens to travel through Italy. On hisreturn he founded the Academy. This institution was devoted to researchand instruction in philosophy and the sciences. Plato’s life became thatof, in essence, the first accredited philosophy professor. He devoted hislife to teaching and guiding the Academy.

C. Aristotle was a student of Plato and eventually the tutor for Alexanderthe Great.

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LECTUREONE

The Suggested Reading for this lecture is Xenophon’s Conversationsof Socrates.

Consider this . . .

1. Did Aristotle pay homage to Plato to the same degree that Plato paidto Socrates?

2. Why did Socrates feature so prominently in Plato’s writings?

Lecture 1:Plato (with Nods to Socrates)

1. He lost his father at an early age andwas brought, at the age of 17, toPlato’s Academy, where he remainedfor approximately twenty years.

2. Later in life, he founded his ownschool in Athens called the Lyceum.

3. Although a student of Plato, he dis-agreed with several of Plato’s fun-damental ideas, like those of theIdeal Forms.

D. Plato and Aristotle were extraordinari-ly prolific. Both had a wide range ofinterests and wrote on subjectsincluding (among others) meta-physics, epistemology, ethics, biologyand politics. Our lectures will, at dif-ferent times, touch on all these sub-jects. In beginning our discussion, wewill look first at the works of Plato.

II. An Introduction to Plato’s Work

A. Plato wrote 26 dramatic texts—hisDialogues—that have become thefoundations of the history ofWestern philosophy.

B. Plato’s Dialogues are written in a dra-matic or poetic style that is mimetic(see sidebar on page 8). His actualvoice never appears directly in thesedialogues; all of his words and ideasare expressed through the charactershe creates in these works. Dialogue is an instrument in Plato’s hands.As with Shakespeare, it is for the reader to determine, within the contextof an overall understanding of the work and of the characters, what mayhave been Plato’s actual views.

Summary:

In order to comprehend who we are as human beings, it may help us tounderstand the work and thought of Plato and Socrates. Plato may havebeen an early philosopher, but he was not a primitive philosopher. In his dia-logues Socrates “plays” the main character, and as this character, encour-ages us to consider two important points:

1. True wisdom is the recognition that one is not wise.

2. A devotion to philosophy may take the form of joyful, almost eroticplay; the word philosophy means love of wisdom.

SOCRATES’ DEATH

Socrates himself carried out thesentence of death when hedrank the prescribed hemlockpotion. It was a death that couldwell have been avoided. Prior totrial, the prosecutors fullyexpected Socrates to leave thejurisdiction. Indeed, his friendsoffered an opportunity for him toescape to Thessaly, a sugges-tion that Socrates rejected,insisting instead that such acourse of action would be wrongand would deny respect for dueprocess of the law. At the trialitself, Socrates showed his con-tempt for the process by onlydefending himself through a nar-ration of the facts of his liferather than addressing theissues at hand. His death hassometimes been characterizedas a suicide considering thecircumstances surroundingthe event.

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1. How is reading Plato always an interpretive endeavor?

2. For what reasons is reading Plato a difficult and complex task?

3. As Socrates plays such a vital character in the Dialogues, is it possible toassume that Plato intended the “character” of Socrates to be hisspokesperson?

4. Would Plato’s writing be as rich if he used his own voice instead of thatof Socrates?

5. What is the point of the proposition that “true wisdom” is the recognitionthat one is not wise?

Xenophon. Conversations of Socrates. New York: Penguin, 1990.

Bodeus, Richard. Aristotle and the Theology of the Living Immortals. Albany,NY: State University of New York Press, 2000.

Brickhouse, Thomas C., and Nicholas D. Smith. Plato’s Socrates. Oxford:Oxford University Press, Inc., 1996.

�Questions

FOR GREATER UNDERSTANDING

Suggested Reading

Other Books of Interest

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LECTUREONE

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The Euthyphro is an early dialogue of Plato’s that concerns itself with thevirtue of “holiness.” Like all the dialogues it is presented as a dramatic scenewith characters. In this case the characters represented are Socrates andEuthyphro. The dialogue takes place on the steps of the courthouse whereSocrates is about to be tried. Euthyphro is present at the court to prosecutehis father, who he believes is responsible for the death of one of his laborers.

I. The Subject Matter of the Euthyphro

A. The Euthyphro portrays Socrates and Euthyphro attempting to under-stand the nature of piety or holiness.

B. The conversation between Socrates and Euthyphro occurs becauseEuthyphro claims to have an expert knowledge concerning piety, that is, anunderstanding of what the gods would require of someone in his position.

C. It’s that knowledge that Socrates, himself on trial for being unholy, asksEuthyphro to teach him (us) about.

II. Some Features of the Euthyphro Characteristic of EarlyPlatonic Dialogue

A. The dialogue is devoted to the search for the definition or meaning of aconcept or entity such as holiness or piety.

B. Euthyphro offers a series of definitions designed to articulate the definition.

C. Socrates, on the other hand, questions Euthyphro’s suggestions andcross-examines his claims to knowledge. None of his definitions seemsatisfying to Socrates. So none works in the sense of withstanding thequestions that Socrates poses.

D. The conversations in these dialogues ends aporetically; that is, theyend with no apparent solution to the question raised.

III. Some Further Thoughts About These Features

A. We might wonder how Socrates can criticize Euthyphro’s suggesteddefinitions if he doesn’t already know the nature of piety. This sug-gests that they’re not looking for definition in an ordinary sense of the

The Suggested Reading for this lecture is Plato’s The Dialogues ofPlato, Volume 1: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Meno, Gorgias, Menexenus(translated by R.E. Allen).

Consider this . . .

1. What does “Euthyphro” mean in Greek?

2. Why does Socrates object to Euthyphro’s accounts of holiness?

Lecture 2:The Euthyphro:

The Virtue of Holiness

word; they’re not looking for what could be found in a dictionary, butfor some deeper understanding of a concept that they recognize.

B. We might say that they’re looking for the form of the holy. The form isthat by virtue of which the things that are said to be holy are holy; itis holiness itself. The form is thus the essential nature of some col-lection of things, the X-ness itself by virtue of which the X’s are allsaid to be X. This notion of form, important in both Plato andAristotle, is a rich but complex andproblematic notion in Plato’s writing.

C. But how could a single definition capturethe exact nature of the form? And howcan any particular piece of languagegive us this understanding? Could therebe any one particular definition, there-fore, that’s the right one? These aresome of the questions that lie behindthe argument of the dialogue.

IV. The Argument of the Euthyphro

A. In the course of the dialogue,Euthyphro offers several definitionsof holiness.

1. At first he says that holy is what he’snow doing (prosecuting the wrong-doer, as he says). Then he says thatit is what is pleasing to the gods,and then that it is what all the godslove. He goes on to say that it is thepart of justice having to do with ser-vice to the gods and that it is the sci-ence of prayer and sacrifice—knowing, that is, what is right to say toand do for the gods.

2. This kind of series of definitions is offered in many of Plato’s earlyand middle dialogues. A central question about how to read Platois the question of whether any or all of these definitions are helpful,and if so how.

B. Socrates presents problems with Euthyphro’s accounts of holiness.

1. Socrates objects to Euthyphro’s first definition because it gives anexample or instance of holiness rather than a definition.

a. An example doesn’t tell us enough, because it doesn’t tell uswhich features constitute the essence in question.

b. Or we could say that it gives too much; an example is ontologicallyoverloaded, and we can’t tell which of its many features count asdetermining its essential nature. To ask after the form is to try tonarrow the being to those features that capture the specific naturein question.

VIRTUES

Many of Plato’s dialogues, par-ticularly those that scholars thinkwere composed early in hiscareer, represent Socrates insearch of the definition andunderstanding of a particularvirtue. In this dialogue the virtuein question is that of holiness;the dialogue called the Laches isabout courage, the Charmidesabout temperance, and theRepublic is about justice. Otherearly dialogues consider thenature of friendship (Lysis), orcourage (Laches), of virtue ingeneral (Meno), or of love andrhetoric (Phaedrus).

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LECTURETWO

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c. But consider when an example might be useful: if someoneknows how to read an example, it might be very helpful as aforceful illustration of the nature being defined. We might thinkabout this more generally: what’s wrong with a definition in aparticular case may not be about the definition itself, but withour inability to read it properly.

2. Socrates offers a more complex argument to show that the nextdefinition—the pious is what the gods approve of—isn’t a good def-inition. Here’s the argument that Socrates gives.

a. He first introduces a distinction between the state of being carriedand the activity of being carried. We can express this as the dis-tinction between being carried and getting carried. This is a lessobvious distinction in English than in Greek; to understand it, thinkof the difference between Miriam being an employee and Miriambeing employed.

b. Socrates then establishes two relationships, each of which couldbe expressed by two sen-tences, one of which is trueand one of which is false.

SENTENCE 1A: TRUE:

Something is beingapproved because it getsapproved. (That’s likesaying Miriam is anemployee becauseshe’s employed.)

SENTENCE 1B: FALSE:

Something getsapproved because it isbeing approved. (Thatwould be like sayingMiriam is employedbecause she’s anemployee.)

SENTENCE 2A: TRUE:

Something getsapproved becauseit’s holy.

SENTENCE 2B: FALSE:

Something is holybecause itgets approved.

c. The fact that 2A is true and 2Bis false is the fact that Euthyphro agrees to at the beginning of thediscussion; the gods approve of the holy because it’s holy.

ACTIONS AND PASSIONS

An interesting philosophical dis-tinction helps in understandingthis argument. The activity ofbeing carried is the passion ofbeing carried, which is the pas-sive correlate of the action ofcarrying. If John carries abaguette, his carrying thebaguette is an action, and thebaguette’s being carried by himis a passion. The action and thepassion are one and the samething, but they are conceptuallydistinct. To further confuse mat-ters, if John loves Miriam, thenMiriam being loved by John is apassion in this technical sense,though his loving her is anaction. Don’t confuse passion inthis technical sense with thepassion that is John’s love!

d. Socrates shows that if it were the case that being approvedby the gods were the same thing as being holy, then the two truestatements would turn out to be false, and the two false state-ments would turn out to be true.

e. Central to this argument is the claim that the gods approve of theholy because it’s holy. It’s not because the Gods love the holy thatit’s holy; it’s the other way around—they love the holy because it’sholy. This is what Plato shows us needs to be thought about.

f. What has emerged from this encounter? Consider this possibility:the right account emerges. We’ll talk about this in thenext lecture.

V. Conclusions from the Euthyphro

A. Euthyphro is unable to articulate differences between essential natures.By the end of the dialogue it appears that no definition has been agreedupon and that Euthyphro has been unmasked as not knowing what hethought he knew.

B. Perhaps, however, an understanding has emerged from the dialogue,but not in the form of any one single definition. Perhaps Plato hasoffered us the true account of holiness, but only if we are able to under-stand it for what it is, to read the account properly.

Summary:

The Socratic method presented in the Dialogues is simply to question andexamine someone’s understanding of an idea. However, we should be lookingfor more than a definition. We should search for a clearer and more definiteunderstanding of the concept in question. Socrates is always looking for theessential nature of a concept—Plato later calls this the form of something.

LECTURETWO

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1. How do you think the virtue of holiness that Socrates and Euthyphro dis-cuss is understood today? Does a person have to be “religious” in orderto be holy?

2. What, if anything, do you think this dialogue reveals about Plato’s under-standing of the relationship between holiness and a more general notionof moral virtue? How do you think the notion of what is good might berelated to the notion of divine approval?

3. Well, what do you think? Is a runner out because the umpire calls him out,or does the umpire call him out because he’s out? What issues do youthink depend on how we answer this question, and how could we goabout deciding it?

4. At the end of the dialogue, Socrates and Euthyphro have not managed toagree on a proper definition of piety. Is the dialogue in this respect a failure,or do you think that something positive has emerged, and if so, what?

5. What are the ways in which a dialogue could help us understand themeaning or force of a concept?

Plato. The Dialogues of Plato, Volume 1: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Meno,Gorgias, Menexenus. Trans. R.E. Allen. New Haven: Yale UniversityPress, 1989.

�Questions


Suggested Reading

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In the last lecture, we suggested thinking of a dialogue as offering a model ofunderstanding that we might think of as “dialectic.” On this model, understandingemerges not from a privileged definition, but from a body of discourse thatenables us to read or know our way around a concept. In this lecture, we’ll seethis same model applied to Plato’s dialogue, the Charmides.

I. The Subject Matter of the Charmides

A. It’s not immediately clear what this virtue, temperance, is; several defini-tions are offered, but it’s difficult to see what they all have in common.

II. Further Thoughts on the Nature of Platonic Forms andTheir Understanding

A. Forms are transcendent, but emergefrom the being of A. Forms explain thebeing of the things that they are theforms of. The form of X, in otherwords, is the principle of the thingsthat are X being X. They are principlesof integrity and unity of things that areX, and so of being X. Beautiful thingsare beautiful by virtue of the formof beauty.

B. The form of X is also the principle of theintelligibility of things that are X andtherefore of the integrity and unity of thedefinitions or accounts of being X. Justas any particular X expresses its formbut doesn’t fully capture it, so any pieceof language expresses the definition ofthe form, but can’t fully capture it.Dialectic (dialogue) teaches us to learnto read the accounts.

VIRTUES

As the Euthyphro is about holi-ness, and the Republic, whichwe’ll discuss in the next lecture, isabout justice, the Charmides isabout a virtue called in Greeksophrosyne: temperance or self-control. Other early dialogues, aswe noted in the previous lecture,consider the nature of friendship(Lysis), of courage (Laches), ofvirtue in general (Meno), or oflove and rhetoric (Phaedrus).

Of these, temperance and jus-tice, which we’ll discuss in thisand succeeding lectures, are twoof the so-called “cardinal virtues”introduced by Plato in theRepublic. These four “cardinalvirtues” are wisdom, courage,temperance, and justice.

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LECTURETHREE

The Suggested Reading for this lecture is Rosamond Kent Sprague’sPlato’s Laches and Charmides.

Consider this . . .

1. According to the Charmides, what is the definition of temperance?

2. What are the four cardinal virtues?

Lecture 3:The Charmides:

The Virtue of Quiet Self-Control

C. Dialogues often show us people who can articulate accounts thatexpress but without understanding why they do. We encounter charac-ters who have the right thing to say but don’t say it properly, or don’tunderstand what they’re saying; they are not fully in command of thewisdom they are able to speak. The dialogues (and philosophy in gen-eral) are attempts to aid us in the recovery of the wisdom that we pos-sess but do not possess in a fully understood way. Think of them asexercises in the redemptive appropriation of a common wisdom.

III. The First Definition of Temperance or Self-control Given inthe Charmides

A. Charmides says that being temperate is doing everything in an order-ly and quiet way, and that temperance or self-control is a “kind ofquietness.” Socrates offers a counter argument to show that is not anadequate definition.

B. In one sense Socrates’ argument is a good one. But for it to work, wehave to understand “quietness” as involving calm tranquility.

C. This understanding allows us to tell a story about the kind of temperanceor self-control that Plato wants his readers to think of. Think of controlthat is effortless and does not force what it controls, but masters it gentlyand with ease. Sophrosyne is that kind of control focused on the self; itis the kind of self-control that involves the subject’s effortless and tranquilperformance of what she truly wants to do.

D. Temperance is thus self-mastery of a quiet and tranquil mode. It isthe virtue of a person who is harmonious and at peace with himself.

Summary:

The first definition, although not capturing the nature of temperance or self-control, reveals something about the nature of the virtue once we learn toread it. Understanding this fact helps us to appreciate the dialogue in its larg-er project of understanding the general nature of sophrosyne. The under-standing that we do receive is indeed ideal, but Plato takes it to be importantthat we maintain that ideal for the successful conduct of our moral and intel-lectual lives.

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SOPHROSYNE

In the course of the dialogue, sophrosyne, or temperance, is said succes-sively to be a kind of quietness (159b), a form of modesty (160e), mindingone’s own business or doing the thing that is one’s own (161b), the doing ofgood things (163e), a science of self (165c), and a science that is of itself andother sciences (168a).

1. What English word do you think best captures the virtue or state of charac-ter that Socrates, Charmides, and Critias are talking about?

2. How do you think Plato understands the relationship between self-knowl-edge and self-control?

3. What do you think might be the relationship between any two other fea-tures of the virtue they’re talking about? Think, for example, of what mightbe the relationship between modesty and quietness.

4. What differences do you see between the parts of the dialogue inwhich Socrates is talking to Charmides and those in which he is talkingwith Critias?

5. In the lecture, I spoke of the difference between intermediate or higherforms of mastery or control in an art or craft, and gave one examplefrom my own life. Can you think of other skills or arts or crafts thatexemplify that distinction, or call it into question?

6. Does this work reveal any other features that could contribute to ourgrasp of how a dialogue might help us understand the meaning or forceof a concept?

Sprague, Rosamond Kent. Plato’s Laches and Charmides. HackettPublishing Co., 1992.

Friedländer, Paul. Plato: the Dialogues, First Period. Chapter 4. New York:Pantheon Books, 1964.

Hyland, Drew A. The Virtue of Philosophy: An Interpretation of Plato’sCharmides. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1981.

North, Helen. Sophrosyne: Self-Knowledge and Self-Restraint in GreekLiterature. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1966.

�Questions


Suggested Reading


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LECTURETHREE

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The Republic is considered to be Plato’s most successful and influential dia-logue. It opens with a conversation, similar to the other dialogues, this timeconcerning the subject of justice. Justice is approached in this case both as apersonal and moral virtue and as a general condition of a society. The under-standing of justice in terms of these will lead to a deeper understanding of jus-tice as being, additionally, a metaphysical concept. Before reaching this con-clusion, we will explore more carefully what it means to describe something asa virtue and then discuss a central question of the Republic.

I. Overview of the First Four Books of the Republic

A. Book 1 of the Republic may be thought of as a short dialogue on justiceof the same scope and format as the Euthyphro or Charmides.

1. Socrates and the dialogue’s other participants argue about andattempt to understand the nature of the virtue of justice.

2. A series of definitions and accounts of justice is considered, but eachof them is found somehow to be wanting.

B. In Book 2, a problem is posed concerning the nature of justice.

1. Is justice an intrinsic good, something good in and of itself?

2. Or is it good simply because of the rewards that a reputation for jus-tice brings in its wake?

C. Socrates claims that we need a clearer sense of what justice is in orderto answer that question.

1. In order to do this, he suggests the creation, in discourse, of an “idealcity” to see what justice looks like in that context.

2. Then we can apply what we have discovered about justice in the cityback to the individual.

D. By the end of Book 4, Socrates claims to have discovered the nature ofjustice, and then offers an answer as to whether it constitutes an intrin-sic human good.

1. Later we will look at that answer and think about what’s involved in it.

The Suggested Reading for this lecture is Plato’s Republic (translatedby C.D.C. Reeve).

Consider this …

1. What is the relationship between justice and virtue?

2. If justice is a virtue, what kind of virtue is it?

Lecture 4:The Republic:

Justice and the Virtue of Justice

2. But first it’s important to think about the relationship between justiceand virtue.

II. First Notions About the Relationship Between Justice and Virtue inPlato’s Republic

A. We might first suppose that justice is a central component of virtue.How, we might think, could a person be virtuous without being just?

1. This is what leads us to think sometimes of justice as in some sensethe primary virtue. We might think this for two reasons:

a. We might think of justice as the central mode of social and politicalvirtue, and think in turn of social and political virtue as central toone’s notion of morality.

b. We might be impressed with the fact that justice concerns itselfwith our relations to others, which we might also think as central toour notion of morality.

2. This is an attractive view if we read the Republic, as indeed it oftenhas been read as a text primarily concerned with justice as an aspectof social and political philosophy.

B. Perhaps, however, the City that is introduced by Socrates in theRepublic is designed more as a metaphor to allow us to see more clear-ly the nature of justice of the individual soul. In that case, we want tothink differently about the relationship between justice and virtue. It willhelp if we think further about the nature of virtue in the Republic.

III. More About Virtue in the Republic

A. When is the notion of virtue first introduced in the Republic?

1. The first mention is in Book 1 (335b), when we read of the virtue ofdogs and horses, which turns out to mean the qualities that make adog or horse a good dog or horse.

2. Shortly later (353b) virtue is connected to the notion of somethingfunctioning. A function here is the characteristic activity or work thatsomething engages in. A virtue is what enables something to performits function well. A virtue, then, is a quality something has that allowsit to be itself in a good fashion.

B. Here a virtue is a good quality; understood morally, a virtue is a goodstate of character, a dispositional capacity for proper action. It’s interest-ing to consider what it means to place this notion of virtue at the centerof moral philosophy. But for now, we need to think about implications forour original question.

IV. More About the Relationship Between Justice and Virtue in Plato’sRepublic

A. We can now say that justice is a virtue. It’s a quality of an entity thatallows the entity to do well what it characteristically does.

B. But what kind of virtue is it? Socrates proposes that the answer to thiswill be constant no matter whether it applies to a person or to a city or

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commonwealth, and so it might do to look for this quality in the city.Let’s begin then by inquiring into the nature of the city, which is to say,the “Republic.”

V. What Is the Republic?

A. To answer this question, Socrates asks us to imagine the origin ofsocial collectivity and suggests that this origin is to be found in the divi-sion of labor. “I think a city comes to be,” Socrates says (369b),“because none of us is self-sufficient, but we all need many things.”

B. If we furthermore assume that different people, being different, are ableto do different things, the central claim of the Republic emerges: A soci-ety will work best if different people do different jobs and, most impor-tantly, if they do the jobs for which they are best suited. This is the origi-nating principle of a good political organization; such an organization willwork best if people do the jobs for which they are best qualified.

VI. More on Justice and Virtue

A. Now we’re able to see the nature of justice and its connection to virtue.

B. Justice is the principle that each part of a complex organism like a cityshould perform the function for which it is best suited, that is, for which ithas the appropriate virtue.

1. About the city, Socrates says (433A): “Everyone must practice one ofthe occupations of the city for which he is naturally best suited,” andthis means, for which he or she has the appropriate virtues. Whenthat is true, the city is just.

2. And similarly, the person in whom each part performs that for which itis best suited will, by analogy, also be just.

3. In general, justice is present when each part of a functionally differen-tiated entity is given the function for which it has the appropriatevirtue. Justice then is the virtue that characterizes entities whose func-tionally differentiated parts reveal the principle: function should be inaccord with virtue.

Summary:

The city is constructed on the principle of a division of function as a funda-mental feature of social life. Justice is the differentiation of function based onvirtue. Socrates argues that it is good for a society for its citizens to do whatthey are good at. He further applies this argument to individuals; individualswill function best if their several faculties do what they are best qualified to do.This then raises the question, “What are the virtues of the separate parts of aperson?” The Republic asks as one of its most central questions: What wouldit be like to live a life ruled by reason, where reason is not a tyrant, and whereevery other element of a person’s being is contributing what is appropriate forit to contribute? Justice is the proper agreement between function and virtue,the proper relationship of being and acting. In this general sense we can cometo consider Justice not only as a political or social concept but also as meta-physical one.

1. If a group of people were to rob a bank, what separate functions would berequired, and what virtue for each function would be necessary?

2. How can the Universe as a whole be applied to Socrates’ idea of justiceand virtue?

3. It is commonly said that justice is the goal of the legal system. How doesthat compare to the concept of justice that Plato put forth?

4. In the Republic, how is one to discern the job best suited for himor herself?

5. How does the current system promote or inhibit a person to do, or not todo, what he or she is best suited to?

Plato. Republic. 3rd rev. ed. Trans. C.D.C. Reeve. Indianapolis, IN: HackettPublishing Company, 2004.

Friedländler, Paul. Plato: The Dialogues, Second and Third Period. NewYork: Pantheon Books, 1969.

Plato. Republic of Plato. 2nd ed. Trans. Allan Bloom. New York: BasicBooks, 1991.

Phillips, Christopher. Socrates Cafe: A Fresh Taste of Philosophy. New York:W.W. Norton & Co., 2002.

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The Suggested Reading for this lecture is Plato’s Republic (translatedby C.D.C. Reeve).

Justice in the Republic is, as we saw, a virtue both of individuals and of polit-ical societies. It is the virtue that allows people to live well by exhibiting theharmony of soul in which parts perform the functions for which they are bestsuited. What is the relationship between this idea of justice as a correspon-dence between function and virtue and the simpler sense of justice as a gen-eral mode of social morality? The two other principal characters of theRepublic, Glaucon and Adiemantus, ask Socrates to convince them that it isworth their while to be just by showing them that justice is something of intrin-sic worth. When they ask this question, they are interested in behaving justly,in just conduct; Socrates, however, answers in terms of a harmony of thesoul, of a just state of character. What are we to make of this shift?

I. Socrates’ Argument Regarding Justice

A. At the end of Book 4 (443c) Socrates characterizes justice in the fol-lowing terms: “Justice isn’t concerned with someone doing his ownexternally but with what is inside him. One who is just does not allowany part of himself to do work of another part or allow the variousclasses within him to meddle with each other.” How does this answeraddress the question of Glaucon and Adeimantus?

1. It does so if there is, as Socrates argues, a connection between:

a. The harmony of the soul (or “proper character”) that Socratesidentifies as justice.

b. The modes of proper conduct in society that Glaucon andAdeimantus are referring to when they speak of justice.

2. And for the argument to work, there must be a causal relationshipbetween conduct and character, preferably in both directions. In factwe can hear this in what Socrates says:

B. “When he does anything, whether acquiring wealth, taking care of hisbody, engaging in politics or private contract, in all of these he believes

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Consider this . . .

1. Will a person be happy merely by virtue of acting justly?

2. What’s the proper relationship between character and the conduct thatemanates from character?

3. How does Plato understand the relationship between the world of beingand the world of appearance?

Lecture 5:The Republic:

Justice and the Philosopher King

that the action is just and fine that preserves this inner harmony andhelps achieve it and calls it so and regards as wisdom the knowledgethat oversees such action.”

1. Healthy things produce health, and unhealthy things produce disease.

2. And in the same way, just action produces justice in the soul, andunjust action produces injustice in the soul.

II. The Philosopher King

A. Glaucon and Adiemantus are now led to ask how this ideal city can bebrought about.

B. Socrates answers: “Until philosophers rule as kings, or those who arenow called kings and leading men genuinely and adequately philoso-phize, that is, until political power and philosophy entirely coincide,while the many natures who at present pursue either one exclusivelyare forcibly prevented from doing so, cities will have no rest from evils,nor I think will the human race.”

C. In order to understand what Socrates means by this claim, we willneed to think what he understands a philosopher to be.

III. What Is a Philosopher?

A. A philosopher is someone whose eye is turned toward being. Thenotion of being here is the notion of the essential nature of things thatwe encountered earlier: not, for example, the many holy things, buttheir being holy. This is what we earlier called forms.

B. Forms are the principles of the being and therefore of the intelligibilityof things: the principles that enable us to understand what they are.Here’s how Socrates puts it (507b): “We say that there are many beau-tiful things and many good things and so on for each kind and in thisway we distinguish them in our discourse. But Beauty itself, and theGood itself and all such things we set down as a single form for each,believing that there is but one and calling it the being of each thing.”

C. The philosopher, as someone who is in love with being itself, is in lovenot simply with the several beings of this world, the world of appear-ance. The philosopher is in love with the forms, with the intelligibleprinciples of those things being what they are.

IV. The Relationship of Being to Appearance

A. It’s important to understand correctly the relationship between the thingsof what Socrates calls the visible world and the forms that are the princi-ples of their being and constitute what he calls the intelligible world.

B. Socrates offers a visual model by way of explanation. It is, he says, likea line divided into two unequal sections. The bottom section is the visi-ble, the top section is the intelligible. Each two sections of those linesare themselves divided in the same ratio. The bottom visible section isthus divided into images and the original things of which they are theimages; the top intelligible section is similarly divided.

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C. Think about the bottom section. In our perceptual dealings with theworld we are constantly given images of things: the look of things froma particular point of view, for example, or the way an object appears tous from some perspective. We cannot understand what these imagesare unless and until we understand the “original” of the image. To rec-ognize the look of a chair requires that we understand it to be the lookof a chair, and this involves seeing it in relation to the other appear-ances of the chair.

D. Similarly, to understand a chair is to understand it in relation to all theother chairs and to see the being of the chair which is manifested ineach and every chair and every individual chair that we see.

E. For Plato to see the forms is to understand the principles of being thatgovern and make intelligible the world of appearance that we live in.

Summary:

Plato represents the allegiance of particular things to their forms as a modeof justice. This justice is determined by an equality of individuals under theforms; all equal things are equally equal. The forms themselves, though, aredefined in their being, by their essential difference from one another. Insofaras it’s right for things to act out their nature, the very nature of things them-selves can be seen as a form of justice between essential nature (figuredhere as virtue) and proper action (figured here as function).

The Philosopher is someone who is in love with what is. The vertical dimen-sion of Plato’s divided line evokes the twin themes of justice and love thatproperly divide and hold together the City or Commonwealth of being.Socrates expresses the relationship between the philosopher, justice, andlove this way (490a): as the philosopher “moves on he neither loses norlessens his erotic love until he grasps the being of each nature itself with thepart of his soul that is fitted to grasp it, because of its kinship with it, and oncegetting near what really is and having intercourse with it, and having begottenunderstanding and truth, he knows, truly lives, is nourished and is relievedfrom the pains of giving birth. Then such a person will not have any part inthe love of falsehood, but will love being and what is.”

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1. How is Justice understood as a virtue of individual organization and as asocial and political virtue?

2. Is there a difference between social well being and individual well being?

3. Would people naturally act justly if their actions were completely anonymous?

4. What is the process necessary for one to see the forms?

Plato. Republic. 3rd rev. ed. Trans. C.D.C. Reeve. Indianapolis, IN: HackettPublishing Company, 2004.

Plato. Republic. Trans. Desmond Lee. New York: Penguin, 2003.

Schofield, Malcolm. Saving the City: Philosopher-Kings and Other ClassicalParadigms. New York: Routledge, 1999.

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LECTUREFIVE

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The Suggested Reading for this lecture is Plato’s Symposium (trans-lated by Christopher Gill).

The Symposium is perhaps the most elegant of Plato’s dialogues; it is widelythought to be his finest and most sophisticated literary work, and is surelyone of his most influential dialogues. The Symposium, unlike other dialogues,is primarily a series of speeches. The speeches are given by a group of menwho meet at a drinking party (a symposium) in celebration of the awarding ofa literary prize to one of their group. They propose to spend the eveningspeaking in praise of the God Eros, the God of Love. Plato masterfully cre-ates a set of characters, each of whom praise love in a different voice and ina different way.

I. Some Standard Mythological Depictions of Eros in theEarly Speeches

A. Eros is the oldest and most honorable of the gods.

B. He is presented as a god of great good to humankind.

C. He is spoken of in relation to Aphrodite.

D. He is the god of skills that depend on the understandingof the attraction of things to one another, arts like medicine, music,and astronomy.

II. Aristophanes’ Myth About Love: An Important Midpoint inthe Conversation

A. Originally human beings were “double” their present appearance. Theywere round with four hands and four feet, a head with two faces, point-ing in opposite directions, and double genitals.

B. The Gods became nervous at human abilities and Zeus had all humanscut in half so that they were forced to walk on two feet. The result of thishaving been cut in half has forced humans to continually search toreconnect with their other half.

C. Within this myth, love is the drive to reestablish the broken and originalnature of ourselves that the jealous gods have taken from us. Unionwith our original other half is what has the potential to bring us thegreatest happiness in life.

Consider this . . .

1. Remember that the Greek translation of “Symposium” is “Drinking Party.”What significance does this have?

2. How might we think, as in the last lecture, of appearance as in lovewith being?

Lecture 6:The Symposium:

Is the Philosopher Capable of Love?

D. Aristophanes says (193c): “We must praise the god Love . . . for bothleading us in this life back to our own nature and giving us high hopesfor the future, for he promises that if we are pious, he will restore us toour original state and heal us, make us happyand blessed.”

E. Aristophanes presents an extraordinary view of love, and it is one that fig-ures later in Socrates’ account. But as in all the early depictions, love isbeing lavishly praised as a good and beautiful God. In the speech givenby Agathon, for example, Eros is painted as temperate, young, beautiful,just, brave, and wise.

F. It is against this background that Socrates’ entry into the conversationrepresents a fundamental shift, both rhetorical and philosophical, in thenature of the discourse.

III. Socrates Questions Agathon

A. Socrates first changes the tone of the conversation by switching fromset speech to a dialectical, question and answer form of discussion; hequestions Agathon. In his questioning of Agathon, Socrates makesexplicit two things about love.

1. The intentional character of love: Love is always of some object oranother. There is no such thing as simply loving; when we love, welove something, and love is determined always by the fact that it isthe love of this or that.

2. The incompleteness of love: Love is always separated from its object.The object that defines and determines love is always something thatlove lacks.

IV. A Different Idea of Love in Socrates’ Speech

A. Socrates suggests that love is not a god but rather a daimon, a kind ofdivine being that is intermediate, poised, as though between being andnon-being, between fullness and lack. Love is therefore not somethingbeautiful and good, nor is it the proper object of praise. Love is ratherof the beautiful and good. And it is therefore that beautiful and goodobject love is the love of which is the appropriate object of praise.

B. Socrates has learned this from a description of love given by a priest-ess named Diotima. She teaches him that love is of the good andtherefore cannot be the good. Diotima presents a picture of love bornof poverty and need, because love looks toward that which it does nothave and which it is in love with.

V. Diotima’s Mysteries of Love

A. The true lover must ascend a ladder of love from object to object untillove culminates in the love of the beautiful itself (see 210d).

B. But love is not simply the longing for absolute beauty; it is the longingto bring forth in beauty, to procreate in beauty. Beauty is connectedwith being. The beauty of something is the beauty a thing has in so faras it is what it is. To talk about the love of beauty is always to talk

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about love in relationship to what the object is. To love something forits beauty is to love something for itself.

C. Love therefore becomes the procreation of virtue in beauty. It is the cre-ative recognition of what another might be, of how that person might bewhat they really are. Love is coming to recognize the beauty of anotherperson, and calling them to that beauty.

D. Finally, cosmically, love is that principle that draws the worldtoward itself.

VI. The Archaeology and Theology of Love

A. Love is finally recognized as a virtue and not merely a passion.

B. Remember that the majority of people we love (our parents, our chil-dren, ourselves) are not people we choose to love. We are fated tolove them and must learn therefore to love them, must learn to see andrecognize their beauty.

C. The philosophical nature begins with the love of what is, so our love is aspecial instance of the universal, erotic striving of the universe for itself.An authentic personal love is simply a particular special interest of thephilosophical love the philosopher has of the world in its true being.

VII. Alcibiades

The last moment of the dialogue concerns the beautiful young man,Alcibiades. He is the embodiment of self-love gone wrong, a pictureof the indulgence to the fair self.

Summary:

Plato shows us that to love the world allows us to engage in an authentic andtrue love of individuals. And in loving people we can help them to love them-selves. Love is the ladder to the state in which Eros is transcended in the modeof acceptance. This Platonic ascent, in the mysteries of love, is an ascent intothe world of forms, the intelligible world. It is an ascent into our world seen arightand thus seen as beautiful, recognized for what it is and consequently to beloved. The dialectic of philosophy makes being allow for the principle of theworld to shine through its appearances. The philosopher recognizes the worldas its own appearance, is capable of loving it and thus calls it to itself. In the finalanalysis, however, we constantly lose what we attain and must continually seekto replace our objects of love; we thus come to understand that love is framedby death, as we will see in our next lecture.

1. What does unconditional love mean in the light of the Symposium?

2. How do we love someone for themselves?

3. What is the discipline by which we might learn to love one another?

4. How can we develop the virtue of love?

Plato. Symposium. Trans. Christopher Gill. New York: Penguin, 2003.

Pressfield, Steven. Tides of War: A Novel of Alcibiades and thePeloponnesian War. New York: Random House, 2001.

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LECTURESIX

The Phaedo takes place in the jail cell of Socrates on his final day before he iscondemned to drink hemlock and die. The conversation turns to the topic ofdeath and more specifically to the soul and whether it may be immortal. Thedialogue is Plato’s mimetic narration of the last moments in the life of the dearlybeloved character and person of Socrates.

I. Socrates and the Phaedo

A. Socrates is presented in the Phaedo in a special light. Here, he is morethan simply a source of Platonic opinion; he is more clearly than everrepresented as an exemplar of the philosophical life.

B. There is an overriding sadness to the dialogue coupled with a fear ofdeath that makes this dialogue a moving and dramatic text.

C. In an analogy to Theseus and the saving of the Athenian youth, Socratespaints the fear of death as a monster, from which the youth must besaved. In saving these youth, Socrates is in a sense saving himself. Howdoes Socrates do this?

1. He argues that philosophers should embrace and welcome death.

“Ordinary people seem not to realize that those who really apply them-selves in the right way to philosophy, are directly and of their ownaccord preparing themselves for dying and death. If this is true andthey’ve actually been looking forward to death for all their lives, itwould of course be absurd to be troubled when the thing comes forwhich they have so long been preparing and looking forward.”

2. He offers a deeper understanding of something people believe aboutdeath and philosophy but don’t fully understand.

II. Death and the Philosopher

A. The conversation begins by asking and answering the question: What isdeath? Is death the release of the soul from the body? Socrates saysthat death consists of the release or separation of the soul from the body.

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Consider this . . .

1. Is Socrates’ portrayal in the dialogues an accurate picture of the historicalperson Socrates?

2. What role does Socrates play as a spokesperson of Plato’s own views?

3. Where would Plato stand on the question of whether animals have souls?

Lecture 7:The Phaedo:

Death and the Philosopher

The Suggested Reading for this lecture is Plato’s Phaedo (translatedby David Gallop).

What follows from this is that the Soul is simply the principle of life. It isthe explanatory principle (or The Form) by virtue of which things that arealive are alive.

B. Philosophers practice dying by practicing a “mock” separation of soulfrom body. This is identified by Socrates as a cathartic detachment andpurification. It is the philosopher’s primary purpose to continually purifyhimself by separating the soul as much as possible from the body. Truephilosophers make dying their profession. If philosophers are continuallypreparing themselves for death then it can’t be the case that they will beunhappy when death actually arrives.

In 69e Socrates said: “This is the defense of which I offer you Simmiasand Cebes, to show you that it is natural for me to leave you and myearthly rulers without any feeling of grief or bitterness, since I believe thatI should find there no less than here, good rulers and good friends.”

C. The philosopher, however, is not an ascetic; for that would meandefining oneself in terms of the body, by denying the body. Thephilosopher is someone who is detached in regard to bodily plea-sures and desires. He doesn’t define himself with reference to thebody but rather to the soul.

III. Immortality of the Soul

A. Philosophical discourse is presented as a weaving of a magical spell thatcan be used to cure people of their fear of death. Socrates presents atherapeutic understanding of dying as something to help people facedeath courageously and correctly.

B. If the soul is described as the principle of life, what does it mean to saythe soul is immortal? It can’t mean that the soul doesn’t die or that it liveson forever.

C. The sense in which the soul is immortal is a sense in which it constitutesin itself the very principle of life. To understand the soul to be immortal isto understand the soul to be what it is—The Principle of Life. Living inrespect to the Soul is living in such a way that one is fully alive.

D. The Phaedo then becomes a dialogue not so much about death butabout how to learn to live with death so that it does not undermine life.

IV. The Phaedo as a Conversation About How to Live

A. To understand Immortality as presented in the Phaedo is to understandthe concept of living fully in the moment, or to be fully alive.

B. Immortality is not living forever but living our lives in such a way thatdeath does not disqualify or make meaningless the actual force of ourlives. It means living each moment to its fullest, so that death cannot takeaway from life.

C. Plato’s view is that to live this way is to live philosophically.

D. Socrates asks of his students this very point, that in order to live fully onemust live philosophically and it is his final request of them. He says thatto flee from death or to have fantasies of immortality as a conquering of

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death is actually to flee into its arms. When we refuse to live through ourlives, refuse to die each day to our lives and be resurrected each dayinto the next moment of our lives we die in our lives.

Summary:

“Such was the end of our comrade who was, we may fairly say of allthose we knew in our time, the bravest and the wisest and the most just ofhuman beings.”

The importance of Socrates is his exemplary life that comes shining through inthe Phaedo. It is a portrait not just of someone who has lived well but also ofone who has died well. Socrates understands that his death cannot undo thelife that he has lived. There is a parable in the Republic in which human beingsare presented as living in a cave where all they see are the shadows on thewall. Socrates claims that a life of enlightenment is a turning from these shad-ows and an exiting from the cave into the full light of the world. At the end ofthe enlightenment, when the philosopher turns his eyes upon the principles ofthe forms, the philosopher finds himself in the world, and in the world seenclearly, seen as it is in the light of being and intelligibility.

THE SOUL AND DEATH

Consider the following two statements of Socrates on the subject of philoso-phers continually preparing for death:

“(T)he soul of the philosopher greatly despises the body and avoids it andstrives to be alone by itself.”

“Be of good cheer and say that you are burying my body only.”

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1. What makes Plato’s dialogues so powerful?

2. What permits a text to become canonical?

3. What has allowed Platonism to exist?

4. How does the Platonic concept of immortality differ from the generallyaccepted contemporary definition of the word? Is it possible to reconcilethe two?

5. If “to flee from death is to flee into its arms,” how would one do this in con-temporary society, and are there any good examples?

Plato. Phaedo. New ed. Trans. David Gallop. New York: Oxford UniversityPress, 1999.

Easterling, P.E. The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1997.

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Aristotle was born in Macedonia in Northern Greece to a moderately prosper-ous family. As a teenager he moved to Athens, where he studied under Plato atthe Academy. He stayed there for twenty years, until Plato’s death in 347 BCE.He then went to the Island of Lesbos, where he studied biology. After this heserved as the tutor to the son of the King of Macedon, who grew up to becomeAlexander the Great. Following this he returned to Athens, where he founded hisown school called the Lyceum. Here he taught and studied for the next fifteenyears. In this lecture we discuss the basics of studying Aristotle’s works.

I. Reading Aristotle

A. Reading Aristotle is different from reading Plato.

1. The body of Aristotle’s work is not as polished as the dialogues ofPlato; his writing reads more like notes for lectures.

2. His texts are dense, elliptical, and often quite difficult to understand.

3. Aristotle, unlike Plato, lacks literary irony or humor and this canmake much of his work seem dry.

B. The rewards, however, of reading Aristotle are enormous. He was animmensely prolific writer and thinker who worked in such diverse areasas logic, metaphysics, philosophical psychology, ethics, political theory,and literature. In all of these, his writings are engaging and rewarding.

C. Aristotle was also a biologist of great subtlety and scope. Almost aquarter of his surviving texts are devoted to his research and findingsin the biological sciences. He also wrote about chemistry, physics,and psychology. He was insatiably curious—from the intricacies ofchicken embryology to the study of being.

D. It is revealing to note that Aristotle is studied throughout the world; hewas introduced to Western Europe through the science and philoso-phy of Muslim civilization. Today he is studied not just by scholars inclassics and philosophy but also by thinkers in theology, history of sci-ence, literature, and politics.

Lecture 8:Aristotle: Patience with Complexity

Consider this . . .

1. What impact did Aristotle’s travels have on his writing?

2. How did his “attention to detail” help Aristotle’s investigations?

The Suggested Reading for this lecture is Aristotle’s The Basic Worksof Aristotle (edited by Richard McKeon).

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II. “The Master of Those Who Know”

A. Dante was to describe Aristotle as “The Master of Those Who Know,”and that is an accurate characterization. Aristotle established the veryways that we have of thinking of things. It is as though he were thediscoverer of the conceptual shape of our world.

B. Many of the conceptual terms that we take to be embedded in the struc-ture of our thinking were first Aristotle’s. We owe to him, for example,such notions as matter, form, substance, and essence. Of course,Aristotle didn’t invent these features of our world, but he was a masterin bringing to light those things that we already knew but didn’t see.

III. Aristotle’s Patience

A. Aristotle exhibits an unwavering patience for staying with the complexity ofintellectual problems, and this is something that we need to recognize andemulate if we are to read Aristotle with understanding. Recognizing hispatience will help us to understand the “rambling” nature of some ofAristotle’s thought. Ultimately this recognition of Aristotle’s insistence onstaying with a problem, regardless of the difficulty of reaching a solution,must be seen as a virtue.

B. Think of Aristotle in relation to John Keats’ notion of “NegativeCapability” with certain changes; Aristotle can be characterized as aperson, capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts with-out reaching after closure and the cessation of reason. Seeing this asan intellectual virtue is to understand that while it is often important tocome to closure and know when deliberation must end, it is equallyimportant to know when closure would be premature and whenthought must continue.

C. In addition, Aristotle is a reminder that there are some disciplines ofthought, and philosophy may be among them, where action and con-viction and closure are not necessarily the primary goal. To stay atten-tive to the complexities of thought and language or to the “shape” ofan area of our world is here of equal importance.

Summary:

Having shaped fundamentally the way we conceive the world in which welive, Aristotle remains important today; for to understand how we conceive ourworld today, it is important to understand how we have arrived at this concep-tion. If we think of philosophy as an enterprise of self-understanding, of howwe come to fashion our lives and our world, then the understanding of philoso-phy’s history is important to this very enterprise. Reading Aristotle, and strug-gling with his ideas, constitutes philosophy in one of its deepest forms.

1. Think of how you understand these basic notions that have entered our con-ceptual vocabulary through Aristotle: matter, form, substance, essence.

2. How do you think these conceptual terms are related to one another?

3. What major difference is there between the writings of Aristotle and Plato?

Aristotle. The Basic Works of Aristotle. Ed. Richard McKeon. New York:Random House, 2001.

Adler, Mortimer J. Aristotle for Everybody: Difficult Thought Made Easy. NewYork: Simon & Schuster, 1997.

Ross, Sir David, and J.L. Ackrill. Aristotle. 6th ed. New York: Routledge, 1995.

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The Suggested Reading for this lecture is Aristotle’s The Basic Worksof Aristotle (edited by Richard McKeon).

Aristotle’s works, collectively known as the Organon (instrument or tool),may be looked at in a general sense as Aristotle’s logical theory. Theseworks represent instruments for a number of theoretical activities Aristotlewants his readers to think about. Logic in this sense is a version of a theoryof thought. But of course these methodologies or tools of thought are not nec-essary in all the practical aims of one’s life.

I. The Analytics

There are two books that make up the Analytics: The Earlier or PriorAnalytics and the Later or Posterior Analytics. The two works have some-what different purposes:

A. The Posterior Analytics discusses the formal representation ofscientific understanding.

B. The Prior Analytics concerns the modes of inference and reasoningthat are required for such understanding to be worked out. In this work,Aristotle above all presents a theory of the syllogism.

II. The Prior Analytics and the Syllogism

A. At its simplest, a syllogism is a piece of reasoning in which, somethings being taken to be true, other things are thought to follow fromthose things being true.

B. The word for syllogism comes from the Greek logos, meaning statement.A syllogism brings together two statements in order to infer a third.

1. A is the case and B is the case, and so it follows that C is the case.

2. We are entitled to infer the truth of C from the truth of A and Bbecause of the fact that A and B together imply C.

C. The Prior Analytics is concerned then with the formal account of thesorts of relations that assertions must have to one another in order forus to be able to infer something else.

Consider this . . .

1. Do you have to be a master of physics before you can ride a bicycle?

2. What does it take for two sentences together to allow the inference of athird? What allows us to infer?

Lecture 9:The Organon:

Substance as the Primary Mode of Being

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III. On Interpretation

A. The short book called On Interpretation concerns itself with the ele-ments that go into making up this syllogistic reasoning. In Aristotle’sview these elements are either one of two things:

1. An affirmation of what is the case: Dogs are mammals affirms beinga mammal of dogs.

2. A denial of what is the case: Porpoises are not fish denies being afish of porpoises.

3. Within each of these are two important elements:

a. The subject about which something is being said, that is, affirmedor denied.

b. The predicate that is said of the subject, that is, what is affirmed ordenied of the subject.

B. Aristotle’s discussion in On Interpretation presents a logical grammar ofthought. He sees all thought and discourse as exhibiting that structureof subject and predicate. Predication can involve both the specific andthe general.

C. Consider which one of these sets of assertions gives a true syllogism.

1. Dobbin is a horse and horses are mammals, so Dobbin is a mammal.

2. Dobbin is not a horse and horses are mammals, so Dobbin is nota mammal.

D. What do assertions have to look like for an inference to follow? Whatmust be the “shape” among affirmations, denials, subjects, and predi-cates for them to allow for valid syllogisms from which we can inferother truths?

E. The Prior Analytics, in other words, is concerned with the patterns ofinferential reasoning.

IV. The Posterior Analytics

A. In this book Aristotle is concerned with demonstration. A demonstrationis something that gives us scientific understanding, that is, understand-ing of phenomena in the world. Aristotle argues that we take ourselvesto understand something when we know its cause, that is, when weknow what’s responsible for it being the case.

B. Scientific understanding is occasioned by causal explanation of whicha paradigm form is a certain kind of syllogism. This understanding isfound in discovering what features of the phenomenon in question aregoing to serve to explain what one is trying to understand. Scientificunderstanding then is an explanatory art and is brought about by thevery phenomenon of explanation itself.

C. The ability to grasp these modes of understanding is made possible byour possession of mind or intellect. Mind, as the faculty by which wecome to understand principles of explanation, is the capacity to see theintelligibility and coherence of the world and therefore to explain theworld scientifically.

V. The Categories

A. Aristotle’s book, the Categories, is relevant to our idea of Aristotle asan inventor or author of the basic features of our conceptual schemes.For the very word category enters our language because of the title ofthis book. The word kategorein in Greek means to predicate. The “cat-egories” are kinds (and hence categories) of predication. They are thedifferent modes of what we say about some subject when we assertwhat is the case. In addition, then, the categories can be seen as dif-ferent modes of being.

B. Aristotle goes on to claim that the primary mode of being is substance.Substance is the first of the categories and is said to be that which isneither predicable of a subject nor present in a subject. Substance isable to take on different attributes while remaining one and the sameindividual. It can, in other words, while remaining exactly what it is, beopen to further incidental determination. Because substances are pre-cisely what they are, they are capable of constituting the ultimate sub-jects of predication.

Summary:

Substance is an important category in Aristotle’s thinking. It is central pre-cisely because it constitutes the ultimate subject of predication, and it is ableto constitute this ultimate subject because it has the kind of determinateessential nature that it has. Being a subject, having an essential nature andthe consequent primacy of substance as the basic category of being andpredication here come together. From them emerges the fundamental claimof Aristotle’s ontology—that having a definite nature is a necessary conditionfor the possibility of serving as the ultimate subject of all predication.

ARISTOTELIAN LOGIC

The history of logic in Western philosophical thought began with Aristotle.Aristotle first developed the syllogism, the core logical argument form consistingof two premises and a conclusion. His purpose was to establish the conditionsunder which a deductive inference is valid or invalid. A valid conclusion canonly come from premises that are logically connected to one another.

In modern times, Immanuel Kant thought that Aristotle had discoveredeverything there was to know about logic. Subsequently, adherents ofAristotelian logic and those of the new mathematical concepts were at oddsand considered their respective efforts incompatible. More recently, therehas been a recognition that there are a number of similarities of approachand interest between Aristotle and modern logicians.

Aristotle sought a coherent common methodology that would serve anyscientific or discursive discipline. Thus, logic was an instrument, “theorganon,” by which mankind might be enabled to come toknow anything.

Source: Stanford University Encyclopedia of Philosophy

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LECTURENINE

1. What Greek word does Aristotle use to describe our terms of mindand intellect?

2. Is there a relation between predication and being? How are they differentsides of the same coin?

Aristotle. Aristotle: Categories and De Interpretatione. Trans. J.L. Ackrill. NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1975.

Baron, Jonathan. Thinking and Deciding. 3rd ed. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2001.

Rubenstein, Richard E. Aristotle’s Children: How Christians, Muslims, andJews Rediscovered Ancient Wisdom and Illuminated the Dark Ages.Dubuque, IA: Harcourt Brace & Co., 2003.

�Questions


Suggested Reading


39

The Suggested Reading for this lecture is Aristotle’s The Metaphysics(translated by Hugh Lawson-Tancred), Books 4, 7, 8, 9, and 12.

40

LECTURETEN

Our word metaphysics comes directly from the title of Aristotle’s book, theMetaphysics. The book was given this title because in ancient editions ofAristotle it followed works referred to as the Physics and so is, in effect, “TheBook That Comes After the Physics.” Aristotle himself describes the subjectmatter of the Metaphysics as “first philosophy.”

I. What Is First Philosophy?

A. Aristotle at the beginning of Book 4 of the Metaphysics describes “firstphilosophy” as a science that investigates being. There are a numberof features involved in this description:

1. In investigating being, Aristotle is investigating something quite ordi-nary and ubiquitous. He is studying the features of the universeinvoked when we remark upon such ordinary facts as the following:The window is open or is closed; I am seated and I am in this room.

2. The science that he envisions in the Metaphysics is a general one; itis concerned with ontology on the whole and the universal structureof what is.

3. The investigation is concerned not with understanding some specificinstance or type of being—being a mammal, for example—but isfocused on being itself. Aristotle wants to understand, as he puts it,being as being, what is also sometimes translated being qua being.

B. The study of being is not linguistic. Being isn’t dependent on the exis-tence of the verb “to be.” For example, in “I cut the grass,” being isreferred to; we can think of the assertion as equivalent to “I am being agrass cutter.” Even in languages without a verb “to be,” being is inher-ent in the very predicative structure of assertion.

C. Aristotle’s study of being cuts across the categories of being. Beinghas no single one sense because there are so many different kinds ofbeing. Aristotle says that being is equivocal; being, as he puts it, is“said in many senses.”

Consider this . . .

1. What are the different senses of being healthy?

2. What is the relation of weights and their weights?

3. How is it that substances can have a determinate nature and still be thebasic fundamental subjects of predication?

Lecture 10:The Metaphysics:What Is Philosophy?

D. If being is equivocal and “said in manysenses,” how could there then be ascience of being as such?

E. Aristotle argues that indeed being issaid in many senses, but that one ofthese senses, that of substance, isprimary. Because of this the studyof being can be conducted byattending to the nature and structureof substance. All the different sens-es of being are related back to, andare to be understood in relation tothis primary sense of being, thesense that is reflected in substance.

II. The Nature of Substance

A. In doing ontology, therefore, we musttalk about substance. At the begin-ning of Book 7 of the Metaphysics,Aristotle describes the situation thisway: “And indeed the question thatwas raised of old, and is raised nowand always, and is always the subject of doubt, namely the question,‘What is being?,’ is just the question, ‘What is substance?’”

B. According to Aristotle there are two criteria in virtue of which we identi-fy something as substance:

1. A substance is something not said of a subject but that of whichother things are said. Substance represents a kind of “Subjectness.”

2. A substance is something that has a determinate nature. Substance isconnected with the what, as in the question of identity: “What is it?”

C. In addition to these criteria Aristotle draws a distinction between thingsthat are substances and that about them by virtue of which we say thatthey are substances. We may think of this as a distinction betweensubstances and their substance.

III. Some Ontological Distinctions

A. In the course of his discussion, Aristotle draws several distinctionsrelated to the study of being.

1. There is a distinction between substance and the other categories ofbeing. This distinction underlies the argument that to understand sub-stance is to understand the nature of being in general.

2. There is a distinction between substances and their substance. Think ofthis on an analogy with the distinction between weights and their weight(see sidebar, p. 51), or more generally, between beings and their being.

3. There is a distinction between the two different criteria of substance.On the one hand substance is identified with being a this, with being

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DIFFERENTDIFFERENCES

One of the reasons that philoso-phy is so challenging is thatthere’s never one single way tocup up reality. When Aristotlethinks about being, he makesmany different distinctions. Thinkof the difference between being inrelation to the several categoriesand being in relation to the con-cepts of potentiality and actuality.One thinks in terms of categories,predication, definition, and thelike. The other thinks in terms ofchange, process, and the struc-ture of things in the world.Reading Aristotle demandspatience as he moves from onedistinction to another.

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LECTURETEN

capable of serving as a subject, and on the other hand with being awhat, in other words with having a determinate nature.

B. These distinctions are related to one another. Substance is the basickind of being because its being is determinate, and this enables it toserve as subject, that is, to be further determinable. In order to bedeterminable a subject has to be determinate. If something doesn’thave an essential nature, it will be overwhelmed by the accidental fea-tures that are true of it. Think how fractured life would be if every timewe played out a role we became a new individual instead of being thesame individual playing a new role. Without substance there would be“Ontological Schizophrenia.” Instead of subjects undergoing change,there would be only a constant replacement of one thing by another.

IV. Substance in Terms of Matter and Form

A. It’s easy to think of matter and form in terms of change or making: mat-ter is what something is made out of, form the shape into which it ismade. In the Metaphysics, however, matter and form are things thatare thought less of in terms of change and more in terms of the struc-ture of predication or being.

1. The matter of something is what the thing consists of, that which is,as it were, being the thing. A wooden beam which is a threshold, forexample, is the matter of the threshold.

2. Correspondingly, that which is something in this material sense isspecifically that thing. So if the wooden beam is the matter of whichthe threshold consists, then the form is that by virtue of which thebeam constitutes a threshold: in this case, being in a certain positionbeneath a door.

B. The application of these notions allows us to think through the struc-ture of substance. If we take a particular substance, a horse forinstance, we can distinguish the following:

1. the subject which is the horse: the matter of which the horse, so tospeak, consists.

2. the being by which it is a horse: the form or principle by virtue ofwhich the matter is a horse.

3. the combination of subject and being, or of matter and form in thissense: the thing that is a horse being that very thing by virtue ofwhich a horse is what it is.

C. Aristotle wants to understand how it is possible for us to recognize theunity of a subject and its being, how in the case of substance a sub-ject can be identical with what it is. He wants us to be free from whathe takes to be a Platonist theory, implied in the doctrine of forms,according to which everything is a relation between a subject and itsbeing. On this view, Socrates is a human being only by virtue of hisrelation to the form human being. Aristotle wants a theory in whichSocrates is human by virtue of himself, in his own right as a sub-stantial being.

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D. Aristotle wants us to understand thebasic structure of being on the modelof this human being being human.

V. The Notion of Activity

A. Aristotle goes on to develop, in Book9 of the Metaphysics, the notion ofactivity. This allows him to develop atheory in which beings are not justthings that stand in some relation totheir natures, but are instances ofactively being what they are.

B. Substances thus express theirnatures by being them and arethought by Aristotle as paradigmsof the general activity of being.Substance is said primarily to beassociated with the notion of activi-ty. The substance of a horse isnothing other than the horse busyat work being a horse.

VI. The Divine

A. In later books of the Metaphysics,Aristotle discusses the divine as theprinciple of being. God is shown to beessentially activity itself; the divine, inother words, is that being which isjust being what it is.

SUBSTANCES ANDTHEIR SUBSTANCE

Here’s an analogy to help youthink about the distinctionbetween substances and theirsubstance. Imagine that some-one (perhaps a new speaker ofEnglish) asked you the question,“What do we mean by weight?”You might answer that the termis used in two ways, and thatthere are two kinds of thingsto which the term applies.“Weights” are the objects usedas standards in weighingthings—the ounce weight, thehalf-pound weight, the poundweight. These weights are theweights that they are because oftheir weight. It is their weight inthe second sense that consti-tutes them as weights in the firstsense. The relation in youranswer reproduces the relationbetween our two senses of sub-stance: weights and their weight,substances and their substance.

First First actuality = Secondpotentiality second potentiality actuality Object

Analogyfromlanguage

A Venetian (includ-ing a newborn) isable to speak Italian(contrast a newborndog) even when hecan’t yet speak it.

Guido is speakingItalian while orderingla colazione. Italian

An adult Venetian isable to speak Italian(contrast most of thepopulation of Brule,Nebraska) evenwhen silent.

Global Body Soul Living A life

Nutrition Nutrive System Power of digestion Eating and digesting Food

Perception Perceptual organ Perceptual power Perceiving Object ofin General perception

Sight Eye Sight Seeing Sight

Hearing Ear Power of hearing Actual hearing Sound

Thought What goes here? Mind Thinking Thoughts

B. It is in exemplifying that mode of being involved in things being whatthey are that the divine represents the explanatory principle of sub-stance and thus of being.

C. Suppose, for example, that I ask, “What is it that constitutes the beingof a horse?” If we answer this by saying that the fundamental structureof the horse’s being is its being what it is, then we have invoked thenature of divine being. This explains how God could be thought to con-stitute the fundamental principle of all being in the world.

Summary:

It is for this reason that Aristotle appeared so attractive to the biblically root-ed religions of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. When, in Exodus, Mosesasks God to identify himself, God answers, “I AM WHAT I AM.” The basicthought of Aristotle’s Metaphysics is in keeping with this very answer. For thefundamental structure of Aristotelian being is exemplified in the fact that eachthing is exactly what it is.

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LECTURETEN

1. What is the sense in which someone who gives a thoroughly biochemicalexplanation of life could be said to be offering a theory of the soul?

2. How are the soul and body related according to Aristotle? How does thisrelation work with regard to the mind?

3. What are the different levels of potentiality and actuality, and how do theyhelp explain the soul?

Aristotle. The Metaphysics. New ed. Trans. Hugh Lawson-Tancred. NewYork: Penguin, 1999.

Gill, Mary Louise. Aristotle on Substance: The Paradox of Unity. Princeton:Princeton University Press, 1991.

Scaltsas, Theodore, David Charles, and Mary Louise Gill. Unity, Identity andExplanation in Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994.

Witt, Charlotte. Substance and Essence in Aristotle: An Interpretation ofMetaphysics VII–IX. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989.

�Questions


Suggested Reading


45

The Suggested Reading for this lecture are Aristotle’s De Anima(translated by R.D. Hicks) and On the Parts of Animals I–IV (translated byJames G. Lennox).

Aristotle did extensive work in the biological sciences. He was interested in ani-mal life from the standpoint of natural history, and did much work in classifyingand enumerating features of animal life and in discovering empirical evidenceamong those features. But he also placed great emphasis on the explanatoryrole of scientific theory. For Aristotle, a natural science like biology did not con-sist simply of the gathering of empirical evidence; natural history was always tobe coupled with demonstration and explanation, with the activity of theoreticalscience. In addition, biology for Aristotle referred back to the more theoreticaland ontological dimensions of the philosophy of life, as evidenced in his treatiseDe Anima or On the Soul.

I. Aristotle and Biology

A. Aristotle’s biological writings present a complex mix of observation andanalysis within the context of a theoretical account of animal life. Aboveall, his biological work is rich in its understanding of the relation oforganic structure to biological function.

B. This relation of structure to function is involved in the teleology ofAristotle’s biology.

1. Aristotle believed that the complex nature of biological phenomenacan best be explained by showing the “fit and join” of bodies andtheir organs to lives and their practices.

2. He understood functions to be explanatorily prior, which meantthat material structure was not as important an explanatory fact asformal structure.

C. An example from embryology will make this clear.

1. Aristotle argued against the view, common in antiquity, that theembryo and its parts are contained in miniature in the body of one oranother of the parents (usually the father).

2. He rejected this idea that the parts of the offspring must be in theseed of the parents. According to Aristotle the animal is contained inthe seed, but only formally. The seed has the power to produce the

Consider this . . .

1. If you could take a soul and put it in a coffee cup, would the coffee cupbe alive?

2. Why, or why not?

Lecture 11:Biology and On the Soul:Life and Consciousness

46

LECTUREELEVEN

animal by a process of formation in which the seed supplies informa-tion on how to produce another of its same kind. (This is in essencewhat we today think of as the role of DNA.)

II. The Treatise De Anima or On the Soul

A. Aristotle’s book On the Soul is an abstract, theoretical account ofanimal life. In thinking about Aristotle’s treatment of the soul in thiswork, it helps to think back to Plato’s Phaedo; having a soul meansbeing an animal.

B. We can understand this fact by imagining the following question: whydoes Aristotle begin his discussion of the soul by asking what a soul israther than by asking whether or not there is a soul?

1. That may seem wrongheaded; for what if we could explain thoroughlywhat it is to be alive based solely on chemical and natural principleswithout any reference to the soul?

2. But in such a case, those very principles would constitute the natureof the soul. For in asking what the nature of the soul is, Aristotle isasking simply what the distinction is between living and non-livingthings; the soul is whatever the principle is that explains living thingsbeing alive.

3. It may help understand this fact to note that a common word inGreek for being alive means having a soul. Imagine if instead of say-ing that someone were alive or dead or had just died we said thatthey were “besouled” or “unsouled” or “desouled;” it might then beclear to us that someone asking, “What is the soul,” is asking, “Whatis it to be alive?”

III. The Structure and Argument of the Treatise On the Soul

A. On the Soul is written in three books:

1. Book 1 considers the theoretical account of soul and life given byAristotle’s predecessors.

2. Book 2 offers a general account of the soul and its faculties in gener-al and a detailed discussion of the nature of perception.

3. Book 3 talks about the nature of soul to human beings and theessence of thought.

B. Aristotle agreed with his predecessors in their understanding of whatthe soul is meant to account for. The characteristic activities that markout things as alive are fundamentally two:

1. Self-motion. Things that are alive have self-initiated motion so thatthey can act in the world.

2. Perception. Living things exhibit some form of perceptual conscious-ness or awareness. They are able not merely to act in the world butto be affected by the world and be aware of that affection.

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LECTUREELEVEN

C. Aristotle disagreed with his predecessors, however, in other regards.

1. To account for the motion of a living thing, his predecessors thoughtthat the soul itself must be in motion. Aristotle says this misunder-stands exactly what it is for something to be a principle of the abilityto move.

2. Similarly, he disagrees that the soul, in order to be the principle of ananimal being alive, must itself be something that is alive, somethingthat when attached to a body brings life along with it.

3. Aristotle argues that if that were the case, the soul would be capableof bringing about life by its connection to any body whatsoever. Youcould add a soul to a coffee cup and the coffee cup would be alive.

4. For Aristotle, this is a fundamentally incorrect manner of looking atthe relation of body to soul. On his view there is a necessary relation-ship between body and soul that is clear only if we understand thesoul to be the form of the body.

a. An organism is not a simple combination of a body and a soul; it isan “ensouled” body.

b. The soul is the form of an animal of which the body is simply thematerial correlate. But in order for this to be true, the body mustbe highly organized and determinate. Aristotle makes this pointabout the body by using a word we encountered earlier. Hedescribes the body as “organicon,” an instrument. The body, wemight say, is the global organ for the carrying out of the functionsof life. The soul is the set of capacities that resides in that body.

IV. Aristotle’s Definition of the Soul

A. Early in Book 2 Aristotle offers a general definition of what the soul is;the soul, he writes, “is the first actuality of a natural body that has lifepotentially in it.” To understand what Aristotle means, we will need tounderstand the notion of a first actuality.

B. Every human being has the ability or potentiality to speak English.But there is a difference between the potentiality that a newborn hasto speak English and the potentiality of an adult English speaker.The adult’s ability is the “developed” potentiality of the newborn’s.This ability itself (as is made clear when one is silent) is distinct fromthe actuality of actually speaking, the activity that occurs when oneis engaged in talking English. So we can distinguish three levels ofpotentiality and actuality.

1. The potentiality of a newborn to speak English.

2. The realized ability of an adult to speak English, even if the speakeris momentarily silent.

3. The full actuality of speaking, realized in actual talk.

C. The second of these levels is what Aristotle means by a first actuality.Like the ability to speak English, it is at once the realization of a poten-tiality, and a potentiality for further realization.

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D. The soul is such a principle in which living is the analogy of speakingEnglish. Roughly, the analogy looks like this:

The body is analogous to the infant’s ability to speak.

The soul is analogous to the adult’s realized ability to speak.

The activity of living is analogous to the activity of actual speech.

E. This scheme of Body/Soul/Living is only the global version of a schemeAristotle employs throughout his work. With it he gives a generalaccount of the activities that distinguish living beings, the activities wemight call “psychic” (from the Greek psyche, soul): the activities of life.

V. Two Examples of “Psychic” Activities

A. One of the central capacities of animal life is the capacity for nutrition.Our ability to take in food and to make it into ourselves is analogous tothe capacity for perception, our ability to perceive or take the world inand transform it, as it were, into conscious awareness.

B. The scheme we outlined can be applied to the psychic capacity of thenutritive system:

1. The bodily nutritive system: the stomach, intestines, anddigestive structure.

2. The nutritive faculty: the power these things have to do something.

3. Eating and digesting: the activity of nutrition.

4. Aristotle then adds a fourth part to this structure, the object of theeating: food.

C. Now consider this scheme (now four-part) with respect to a psychicactivity of perception (seeing, for example).

1. The eye is the organ, (part of) the bodily system of the perception.

2. Sight is the faculty, the ability or power to see.

3. Seeing itself is the activity.

4. What is seen is the object of the activity.

D. The perceptual capacity is a power that an animal has by virtue of hav-ing an organ with the ability to take in the sensible form of that whichis perceived.

E. Thus the subject and the object are linked in a perceptual chain. Forthe object itself has its own power, in this case, the power of visibility,and that power is realized in “being seen.” In this sense “seeing” and“being seen” are the same activity.

F. It is because the eye is an organ designed to capture the look ofthings that the animal is able to see. In his discussion Aristotle con-strues “seeing” as passive and “being seen” as active. Seeing isthought of as being affected by the activity of a visible thing in itsappearing to a subject. The general account of sense perception isthat it is capacity to take on the sensible form of an object without thematter. Perception is the passive ability to be affected by the sensibleform of things.

G. Aristotle closes his discussion with an apparent difficulty. Suppose youleave an open onion next to some cream cheese overnight. In themorning the cream cheese smells like onion. This is because thecream cheese has taken on the sensible form of the onion without itsmatter. But does the cream cheese then smell the onion? Of coursenot; but what more is there to smelling than being affected by a smell?Aristotle replies to this by saying that smelling is not just being affect-ed; it is being affected consciously. Smelling, like seeing and hearingand like perception in general, is a form of conscious awareness.

Summary:

Aristotle’s theory of perception, elaborated through Book 2 and the openingchapters of Book 3 of On the Soul, is thus preparatory to a more generalquestion: What is the nature of awareness? In Book 3, Aristotle turns to atheory of mind. Mind appears here, not as a monitor that oversees perceptualactivity and allows sensation to become conscious perception, but rather asthe paradigm instance of consciousness pure and simple. Aristotle’s view isthat the mind is the ability to be aware of the world without the mediation ofany of the material elements required for perceptual capacity. Recall from theMetaphysics that mind is “that which is most divine about the universe.” ForAristotle the most divine activities are reproduction and thought—reproductionbecause it is the way that animals have to most emulate the eternity of thedivine and thought because it is the way that animals have to most emulatethe activity of the divine. It is thought that allows us as humans to experiencethe world as we do, and that allows us to think of ourselves as humans lead-ing our lives and not just living them.

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LECTUREELEVEN

1. In this lecture, it is suggested that the term “desouled” might be appropriatefor the dead. What precedent would Aristotle use to support such a claim?

2. According to Aristotle, how are the soul and the body related?

3. What is the difference between actuality and potentiality?

Aristotle. De Anima. New ed. Trans. R.D. Hicks. New York: PrometheusBooks, 1991.

———. On the Parts of Animals I–IV. Trans. James G. Lenox. New York:Oxford University Press, 2002.

Aquinas, Thomas. Commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Beloit, WI:Dumb Ox Press, 1995.

Gotthelf, Allan, and James G. Lennox, eds. Philosophical Issues in Aristotle’sBiology. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

�Questions


Suggested Reading


51

The Suggested Reading for this lecture is Aristotle’s NicomacheanEthics (translated by Roger Crisp).

In discussing Aristotle’s ethics, specifically the work known as theNicomachean Ethics, we will now be thinking not just about animal life ingeneral, but specifically about human life. In this work, Aristotle considersgeneral issues concerning the goals of human life and action, identified ashappiness, and specifically the role that virtue plays in a good human lifeand in the achievement of happiness. His account includes a discussion ofthe nature of deliberation, choice and moral action and the role that theyplay in a life of human virtue, a life devoted finally to achieving human well-being or happiness.

I. What Is Ethics?

A. To say that ethics is concerned with the question of how to lead ahuman life so as to achieve happiness is characteristically Aristotelian.It is to identify the subject of ethics not so much in terms of some exter-nal structure of obligation, but in terms of the flourishing and happinessof human beings. We may put it simply by saying that ethics is theunderstanding of what it means to lead a good human life.

B. Ethics for Aristotle is not concerned with thinking about obligations andduties we might be thought to have outside of our simply being goodhuman beings. In that sense Aristotle’s ethics is a general theory ofgood action in the sense of what we are to do, but conceived, as weshall see, in such a way as to focus upon the question of what kind ofperson we wish to become.

II. The Argument of the Nicomachean Ethics

A. At the beginning of the Ethics, Aristotle argues that all questions ofhuman activity involve a conception of the good at which we aim. Hemeans by this that we are not simply living our lives but are leading ourlives, purposefully aware of ourselves as acting: engaging in what theGreeks called praxis, the kind of action that is distinctively human.

B. Action in the sense of praxis involves choosing to do a certain thing inlight of our sense that our action will achieve an end that we take to be

Consider this . . .

1. What as human beings do we want out of our lives?

2. How might we go about achieving these things?

3. What is it that will make for a happy and well-functioning life?

Lecture 12:The Nicomachean Ethics:Ethics and the Good Life

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good, an end that we want to see realized. This end need not be inde-pendent of the action itself, or something that the action brings about;in some cases, cases important for Aristotle’s argument, the actionitself is the end.

C. Indeed, Aristotle argues, there must be some mode of acting that isdesired for itself and not for the sake of something else that it mightbring about. Otherwise if we imagined that everything we choose is forthe sake of some other thing that we choose, we would be involved inan infinite regress.

D. Then what is the highest good at which human action aims?

1. Note that in asking this question, Aristotle presupposes that what weaim at is the highest human good: human welfare and well-being.

2. His ethical theory is thus one that recognizes human well-being asthe primary normative parameter in terms of which we think aboutorganizing our lives.

3. Aristotle goes on to answer the question, what is the good of humanlife? He says that everyone agrees that the ultimate good of humanlife is happiness.

III. What Is the Nature of Happiness?

A. Happiness for Aristotle is a mode of well-being and not just a state offeeling good. The Greek word for happiness, eudaimonia, suggests sim-ply a life that is successful, that has been lived well. As Aristotle saysexplicitly, happiness is “the same as living well and doing well”; happi-ness is not about feeling good but about leading a life that is good.

1. The etymology of the English word “happiness,” cognate with wordslike “perhaps,” “happen,” and “happenstance,” suggest that still for ushappiness in its true sense signifies the condition of how things gofor you in your life.

2. Happiness really means a life in which things have worked out in theway we would like them to work out. It is for this reason that Aristotlesees a life well lived as a life characterized by happiness.

3. To point out, however, that happiness is the highest good of humanlife will seem trite if we don’t remind ourselves of what it is being con-trasted to. To say that happiness is the good of human life is to saythat there is no end outside of human being that our lives are direct-ed toward. Human being is not serving a purpose beyond itself, andthe good of human being therefore doesn’t lie in the fulfillment ofsuch an external purpose; it lies only in doing well.

B. Aristotle says we will be able to give an even clearer answer to what isthe meaning of happiness, understood as the good of human life, if weattend to the question of the function of human beings.

1. Could it be the case, Aristotle asks, that the various activities ofhuman life (professions, for example, like being a carpenter or beinga professor) could be said to have functions, and that the various

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organs of the body could be said to have functions, but that being ahuman being itself does not have a function?

2. There must, he argues, be a function of human being in general.

IV. Function

A. Remember (think back to Plato’s Republic) that function is not thenotion of an instrumental purpose outside of itself; a function is simplythe characteristic activity that a thing engages in. So Aristotle hopes toarticulate the meaning of happiness by attending to the characteristicactivity of what it is to be human.

B. Happiness on this account turns out to be activity of the soul in confor-mity with virtue, that is, living a characteristic human life in conformitywith the notions of what would make a life of that sort good.

V. Virtue

A. In Book 2 of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle introduces us to thesubject of virtue. Aristotle’s ethical theory, like that of Plato, is centeredon the notion of virtue.

1. For the Greeks in general, the idea of leading a good life was notsimply about the question is, What should I do, and how should Iact? but equally and perhaps more importantly, What kind of persondo I want to be, what kind of character do I aspire toward? Of course,the person I want to be is a person who acts well, but character isnonetheless central.

2. The focus here is on the development of states of character that willlead to certain actions, and those actions are understood to be virtu-ous only when they emanate from such states of character. Thesestates of character are the virtues.

B. Aristotle says that virtues are not natural, in that we are not born withthem, but they are not contrary to nature either.

1. We can think of virtues in terms of second nature; they are character-istic dispositions that are formed by habituation. Character is neces-sary in the structure of human life, but character itself is alwaysformed by the modes of action.

2. Virtue is an intermediate notion poised between a natural capacity,realized in the form of a virtue and realized by the very activities thatthe virtue is a dispositional capacity toward.

C. Aristotle puts it this way: “A virtue is a characteristic involving choice,consisting in observing the mean relative to us, a mean defined by arational principle, such as a person of practical wisdom would useto determine.”

Consider, as an instance of this analysis, the virtue of courage.

1. Courage is the capacity to act courageously in the right circumstancesand in the right way when we are called upon to do so. And beingcourageous is something we become habituated to by continuing

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modes of courageous action. Aristotle describes courage as “themean with regard to feelings of fear and confidence.”

2. A virtue in this way involves a mean between an excess and a deficien-cy. To live a good life involves a delicate balance between, in this case,recklessness and cowardice; it is, therefore, a matter of complex judg-ment. The task of living virtuously is finding the mean.

3. Notice that Aristotle describes courage as the mean with respectto feelings of fear and confidence. Aristotle thinks of virtues asmeans with respect to actions and passions, where by passion wemean feelings.

D. So a virtue is the capacity that a moral agent has to know not simplyhow to behave or act properly but also how to properly allow oneself tobe affected by the world.

E. The virtues further involve not simply the recognition of proper action orfeeling relative to our desire, but the cultivation of proper desire itself.The unity of action and feeling are emblematic of a deeper unity that isarticulated in the unity of action and desire. It’s not enough to have awill; the goal of human ethical cultivation is the cultivation of proper andappropriate desires themselves.

VI. The Voluntary, Choice and Deliberation

A. The voluntary: We are praised, blamed, and held responsible only forwhat we engage in as voluntary human agents, not for what we areforced to do or do by accident.

B. Choice and deliberation: The virtues, described as capacities for actionand feeling, are described as relative to choice. The theory of choicereveals the fact that these dispositions are really dispositional capaci-ties for deliberating well and choosing well. Choosing well here meanshow to act and how to behave and how to feel. Virtue is a capacity forthe deliberate choice of a good life.

C. Because moral life is so much involved in deliberation, Aristotle turns inBook 6 of the Ethics to the relation between virtues of thought andvirtues he thinks of as the moral virtues. In that book we are led to aconception of good thinking as an analogy of good acting. Finally, ourdispositions are involved globally in our ability to exercise reason in thedeliberative choice of how to act. Thus Aristotle marks off the chiefcognitive virtue as practical wisdom.

Summary:

In the Western tradition, practical wisdom came to be called prudence.Prudence now often refers simply to selfish interests or to interests in contrastto our moral obligations. But for Aristotle, the prudential is the arena of how tothink and act well. It is the notion of an ability that an agent has to know whatto do and how to act. A sensitivity to what it is situations demand of us consti-tutes the heart of a good human life. The chief ethical question becomes: howcan we become sensitive to what it is that the world requires of us, and how

can we become possessed of the practical wisdom—the know-how—that willenable us to work out what to do?

At the end of the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle points out that ethical scienceis merely a department of a much larger concern he calls political science. Thequestion of how we train ourselves and our children must always be under-stood within the context of what it is to live as human beings do, that is, aspolitical animals, as animals within a social context.

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LECTURETWELVE

1. How can an action be an end itself?

2. What is the difference between a mode of being and a state of being?

3. Can happiness as it is used in the vernacular be understood by Aristotle’sdefinition of the word?

4. How would an approach to life differ if one were to seek a good life by ask-ing, “What kind of person do I want to be?”

Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Trans. Roger Crisp. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2000.

Bodeus, Richard. The Political Dimensions of Aristotle’s Ethics. Trans. JanEdward Garrett. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1993.

Morris, Thomas V. If Aristotle Ran General Motors. New York: Henry Holt &Co., 1998.

Telford, Kenneth. Commentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics.Binghamton, NY: Institute of Global Cultural Studies, 1999.

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The Suggested Reading for this lecture are Aristotle’s Aristotle: ThePolitics and the Constitution of Athens (edited by Steven Everson) andAristotle’s Poetics: A Translation and Commentary for Students ofLiterature (translated by Leon Golden).

For Aristotle, social and political life—life in the city or polis—is the environmentin which human beings best flourish. The goal (the telos) of the polis is the real-ization of a good life. Human beings are by nature political; that is, it is ournature to live in the context of civilization or culture, to live social lives in com-mon with others with whom we are politically connected. The political in a gener-al sense is the extension of family, friendship, and all natural human associa-tions. It is a level of social organization that involves governing and being gov-erned; the Politics can be thought of as an account on the understanding of gov-ernance. One of the central institutions of political life, one of the central compo-nents of civilized human beings, is the creation of literary art. In this lecture, wewill first briefly consider some of Aristotle’s views on political life and then dis-cuss his account of the genre of literature called tragedy.

I. The Politics

A. The Politics concerns itself with several issues:

1. It gives an account of what the city (or as we would more generallycall it, the state) is, both genetically and formally.

2. It offers a discussion on the nature of citizenship—a citizen beingsomeone who has power to affect the polis.

3. It describes the various modes of constitution or government.Forms of government can be classified on the basis of answers tothese two questions:

a. Who rules?

b. More importantly, since this affects the questions of good and badforms of government: is the governing done for the sake of thegoverned or for the sake of the governing?

4. In Aristotle’s view, the best form of government is a constitutionalgovernment in which many govern for the sake of the governed.

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Consider this . . .

1. According to Aristotle, what are the possible forms of government?

2. Is there a linking between politics and a “moral life” in modern forms ofgovernment and the arts?

Lecture 13:Plato and Aristotle:

The Politics and the Poetics

LECTURETHIRTEEN

B. There are many interesting features to Aristotle’s discussion in thePolitics; but here I want to stress only two features I think salient in thetheory of the Politics:

1. Statesmanship or political science is a form of wisdom. It is the wis-dom that enables a statesman to know how best to rule and help oth-ers conduct themselves well within society.

2. Statesmanship is a natural human capacity. For Aristotle thinks thathuman beings are by nature social; man is, as he puts it, a politicalanimal by nature. This claim of Aristotle’s about human beings doesnot mean simply that people are gregarious. It means that only inthe context of the polis are human beings able to do their greatestnatural good.

C. The word “political” has a fruitful analogue in our word civilized. Wecan think of Aristotle as urging that human beings are civilized animals,animals capable of best flourishing in the civilized and cultured environ-ment of a social community in which people are capable of governingthemselves well.

D. Human beings are, as individuals, in a sense unfinished animals. It isonly in the social and cultural context of civilization that full determina-tion is given to them, and only there that happiness can flourish. ThePolitics is, for this reason, the “master science” that governs humanflourishing, well-being, and happiness.

II. The Poetics

A. Considering Aristotle’s Poetics together with his treatment of politicallife in the Politics should raise in your mind questions such as these:

1. How are the notions of tragedy, poetry, and art connected to notionsof ethics and politics?

2. More generally, how is poetry connected to the moral life?

3. In the beginning of the Poetics, Aristotle says that tragic poetry, likeall literature, is an imitation or mimesis. Specifically, he says, it isabout imitated or imagined action. Indeed, the Greek word “drama”is, as Aristotle points out, a dialect variation of the more standard

How many One Several Manypeople rule? person people people

rules rule rule

For the sake of Tyranny Oligarchy Democracythose whogovern

For the sake Monarchy Aristocracy Constitutionalof thegoverned

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For whosesake?

Greek word for action, praxis. Therefore, a tragedy or drama is animitation of an action. How is it possible then, that something that isconnected with the mimetic or fictional could be related to somethinglike ethics, which we consider to be part of the “real” world?

B. Some features of the Poetics

1. Some of the connections between tragedy and the moral will begin tobe revealed if we consider the complexity of acting.

a. We use the word act to refer both to people who are imitating or per-forming on a stage and to the actual activity or action of human life.

b. This ambiguity of meaning should remind us of the respect in whichall moral action is, in a sense, imitative or mimetic.

c. Recall that for Aristotle the assumption of virtue is achieved by actsof imitation, that is, by the instances of acting virtuously throughwhich we become habituated, become firm in our ability to chooseand act appropriately. It is only when the virtue is perfected within usthat we are able to act from virtue rather than in imitation of virtue.Virtue is shaped by our “acting” out the role of—we might say imper-sonating—the virtuous person.

2. Next we need to consider the nature of tragedy as a formof theatricality.

a. We don’t experience emotions in a theatrical context in the sameway that we might be expected to experience them in real life.Aristotle holds that the effect of witnessing tragedy (in a poem oron stage, for example) is pleasurable yet simultaneously associat-ed with the experience of fear and pity.

b. So we need to understand how an otherwise painful experience offear and pity is able to yield the kind of pleasure that is experi-enced in drama and poetry. How (with apologies to Coleridge) canpoetry raise a sunny dome of pleasure upon the icy caves of terrorand commiseration?

c. An important fact is that the theater—the principle site of dramaand tragedy—is an arena of imitated representation. Because ofthis, emotions get experienced in a context without connection toour practical lives. The events that occasion these emotions arenot happening in our real lives.

ii. In this sense, the institutions of theater, tragic poetry, and art ingeneral are like the institutions of ritual. Ritual, which serves afunction of intensifying and enforcing structures of communal life,provides as well contexts of sanctuary in which dangerous activi-ties, including such intensifications, can be carried out.

ii. By virtue of being imitative, art is similarly capable of marking offa sacred space in which we are allowed to experience emotionssafely. This is a place where we can confront terrible possibilitiesand the fears that they inspire without the pain that would beoccasioned if we were to experience these fears in our real lives.

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LECTURETHIRTEEN

d. What tragedy allows is our experience in an environment of safety, in aspace of sanctuary of the universal fear that we are subject to the terri-ble events that occur in tragedy. This is not the fear that we will undergothe specific events that are depicted in tragedy.

e. It is the general feature of tragically represented actions that they allderive from the universal possibility of mistake or mishap. Aristotlebelieves that tragedies point to the general liability of action to mishapand consequently the fragility of our happiness and moral character.

3. Behind all this is Aristotle’s deep interest in the ambiguity of action.This ambiguity can be thought of in two different ways:

a. Actions can be given many different descriptions. The same actiontherefore can be understood to be both good and bad, good underone description, bad under another. It is this multiplicity or ambiguityof action that is the phenomena of tragic conflict. In Sophocles’Antigone, for example, the fundamental conflict of action is whetheror not Antigone should bury her brother, a deed simultaneously com-manded and prohibited.

b. A more important ambiguity for Aristotle derives from the distinctionbetween two different modes of capturing and individuating actions:

i. An action is the object of the deliberation or choice of an act-ing agent. An action in this sense is an agent’s activity; it iswhat someone does.

ii. On the other hand, an action is what emerges as the result ofour activity. An action in this sense is an entity in the world, anentity that emanates out of an action but then subsequently hasa life of its own.

c. Aristotle sees in tragedy a revelation of the constant possibility offracture between these two aspects of action. What follows fromthis is the distinction of being responsible for an action and beingblamable for an action. Tragic poetry can help us to come to termswith the terrible weight of these distinctions.

d. Aristotle’s concern with moral action in the Poetics is thus with thepathology of such action, with where it breaks down or goes wrong.At our very best, when acting out of good character, with good delib-eration, we often will act in ways that bring about our downfall. This isa terrifying fact that tragedy helps us confront. Goodness of characterand excellence of deliberation cannot in fact guarantee our happi-ness; actions that are good from the point of view of an agent maynonetheless be revealed as bad, through no wickedness of theagent, in that very world in which they are enacted.

Summary:

Tragedy is a human institution that is designed to help us accept the fact that nomode of virtue can guarantee the efficacy of human action in bringing about thehappiness for which we strive. Aristotle is recognizing the fact that there is a fun-damental tragic rift in the world at this joint of human action. We are not gods andcannot guarantee that our actions will bring about our well-being. The Poetics can

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be seen as a sequel to the Ethics and the Politics in that it continues a vision ofcivic life as the source of our capacity to live satisfying and fulfilling lives. Intragedy, our gaze is directed upon the vulnerability of well being that is presentedin the Ethics and the Politics as brought about by civic life. We are invited in thePoetics to acknowledge the fears and vulnerabilities of our well-being, to recog-nize that our happiness is subject to an irrational control of destiny that may atany point sever the connection between political virtue and well-being. ThePoetics goes further by offering us the hope that by acknowledging these fearswe may be able to cleanse our lives of their corrosive effect. This cleansing is thecatharsis to which Aristotle briefly refers in his account of tragedy. It is for thesereasons that Aristotle believes tragic poetry to represent one of the most signifi-cant institutions and powers of political or civic life that we possess.

LECTURETHIRTEEN

1. How does the complexity of our notion of “acting” reveal itself indramatic art?

2. How does art allow us to go beyond what might be considered good?

3. In what different ways can actions be thought of as ambiguous?

Aristotle. Aristotle: The Politics and the Constitution of Athens. 2nd ed. Ed.Steven Everson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

———. Aristotle’s Poetics: A Translation and Commentary for Students ofLiterature. Trans. Leon Golden. Commentary O.B. Hardison. Tallahassee,FL: Florida State University Press, 1982.

Rorty, Amelie O. Essays on Aristotle’s Poetics of Athens. Princeton:Princeton University Press, 1992.

Simpson, Peter L. A Philosophical Commentary on the Politics of Aristotle.Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.

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In this final lecture we end our discussion by summarizing what we’ve dis-cussed throughout the course.

I. Virtue

A. For both Plato and Aristotle the notion of virtue is of critical importance inthe formation of our moral lives and in our understanding of what it is tolead a moral life. Most simply understood, a virtue is a good quality.

B. A moral virtue for Plato and Aristotle is a state of character. “Virtue” intheir vocabulary refers less to a general state of moral goodness thanto specific features of our character, to specific states of moral charac-ter. These states of character are thought of as dispositions, as readyand developed capacities that individuals have for choosing and actingproperly. Such a capacity can be looked upon as a skill, which meansthat an individual with a virtue is skilled at behaving morally in anappropriate way.

C. According to Plato and Aristotle alike, the question of moral philosophy isnot simply the question: how am I to conduct myself in my life, whatshould I do? Moral philosophy addresses more specifically the question:How am I to become a good person? What should I be? For boththinkers, a good life is a life of activity in which the states of character wecall virtues are actualized and not simply possessed; otherwise, one couldimagine good people simply sleep their lives away. But a good life is a lifein which actions are not only in accord with virtue but are the realizationsof those virtues. A good person is not someone who merely behaves in acertain way, but someone who behaves that way out of good character.

D. It is easy to think of moral philosophy as concerned with rules and regula-tions on how to behave properly, concerned, as it were, with moral law.But Plato and Aristotle present moral philosophy more in terms of thedevelopment of a skill, the skill of character.

E. In addition to virtue being a good quality, it is important to see thatvirtue enables a subject to do well what it does: it makes it possible

Consider this . . .

1. Which philosophical contributions by Plato and Aristotle are applicable tomodern life? Why?

2. Can philosophy help an individual overcome fear of the unknown?

Lecture 14:Plato and Aristotle:

A Final Review and Summation

LECTUREFOURTEEN

The Suggested Reading for this lecture is Kenneth J. Dover’s GreekPopular Morality in the Time of Plato and Aristotle.

for something to succeed atbeing what it is. We saw this factexpressed in the link between virtueand function; it follows from this thatvirtue is linked to being.

F. All instances of goodness—of virtue inthe broadest sense—are dependentupon and related to the kind of thingthat the virtue is said to be a virtue of.The notion of virtue is always associat-ed then with the predicative being ofthe subject to which virtue is attributed.

II. Being

A. Plato asks what the essential nature isthat is specified by some certain modeof being. His concern with explainingthis notion of being is fundamental to avariety of his philosophical enterprisesand projects.

B. Plato’s dialogue, the Theaetetus, offersa clear example of this link. He showsthat a series of accounts of what it is tounderstand is marred by the fact thatthe speakers of the dialogue all takethe object of understanding to be athing. Plato shows that you can nevergrasp the concept of understanding or knowing in that way, for the objectof understanding is always an instance of being. To understand is to com-prehend that and why something is the case. In other dialogues, includingthe Parmenides and the Sophist, this idea of the centrality of being is pur-sued. Throughout these discussions, Plato stresses his conviction that theworld is articulated in ontological structures, articulated in terms of being.

C. The word ontological here refers simply to the science of being. Butif we think of the distinction we noted in Aristotle between a thingand its being, we may come to think of ontology as being as a theo-ry of the being of beings.

D. What is striking, perhaps more particularly in Aristotle than in Plato, is thefact that the theory of being places the notion of activity, in its full gerun-dive and verbal sense, at the center of the analysis. The world, and thisview, is not presented to us as a series of inert objects that have qualitiesstuck to them, but as a dynamic and complex nexus of modes of being—of substances—which express their nature and are what they are.

III. Soul

A. For Aristotle animals are the paradigmatic modes of substance. An animalis a being characterized by the fact that it is alive; this fact of being alive,

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VIRTUE AND BEING

Here’s a question that mighthelp us understand the logicalrelation between virtue as good-ness and being. Is it a virtue,that is, is it a good thing, forsomething to be made of cop-per? The incompleteness of thisquestion becomes evident if weimagine an electrician wonderingif she should use copper as thematerial for some of her instru-ments. If what she wants is aconductor of electricity, beingmade of copper is indeed avirtue. But if what she wants tohave is an insulator, then it’scertainly not true that beingmade of copper is a virtue; it’shighly dangerous. So the ques-tion of whether it’s good forsome specific thing to be madeof copper just depends on whatthat specific thing is. Virtue heredepends on being.

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as the fundamental being of such an entity, is made possible for Plato andAristotle by the fact an animal has a soul. The soul, however, is not a“something” that we have, a thing that makes us alive; it is simply the prin-ciple of our being alive. In Plato, such a principle is called an essentialform and in Aristotle, the formal cause of things that are alive being alive.For both philosophers the features that characterize human animals areawareness and the capacity for self-generated activity. These modalities,by which animals are capable of freely acting in the world, and of beingacted upon without being overtaken by the world, define what it is to bealive and consequently what it is to have a soul.

B. The care of the soul means attending to these features of ourselvesas rational animals. It thus means being attentive constantly to ourlives as conscious beings and to our lives as thinking, active, ratio-nal, and free animals.

IV. Final Thoughts

A. The deepest community in Plato and Aristotle is the vision of philosophyas the mode for caring for ourselves as thinking, aware, moral agents. It isoften said, and perhaps justly, that Plato seems to court a certain mysteri-ousness and seems willing to leave unsaid that which he thinks cannot besaid, while Aristotle attempts to explain everything as clearly as he can.But it would be a mistake on the basis of this fact to categorize Plato ashaving an overriding sense of “otherworldliness” and Aristotle of “thisworldliness.” We should avoid categorizing these philosophers into mutu-ally exclusive camps.

B. Above all these philosophers share a commitment to reason as critical toour moral, political, and spiritual lives and to reason as nourishing us inour innate desire to understand. “All human beings, “ Aristotle remarks atthe opening of the Metaphysics, “desire to understand.” This coupling ofthe striving of desire with the goal of seeing things as they truly are iswhat is perhaps most characteristic of the Greek philosophers we havehere discussed. Philosophy is understood by both as one of the funda-mental modalities of the desire to understand.

C. Philosophy is devoted to wisdom as a redemptive appropriation of ourself-understanding and our vision of the world, a vision possessed by usbut often forgotten. The pursuit of wisdom and thus the enterprise of phi-losophy is a project of coming to see ourselves as we are, and of theworld as we conceive it. Philosophy is not about new discovery but aboutthe recovery of our deepest intuitions and understandings of the world.

D. Finally, it is important to realize that Plato and Aristotle appeal so stronglynot so much because they attempt to offer us certainty and clarity in ourlives but perhaps because, on the contrary, they allow us to accept joyful-ly rather than fearfully our own uncertainty. They call us to live happily inthe acceptance of our finite and mortal selves, sustained by the eye wekeep trained on wisdom, the wisdom whose love Plato and Aristotle, asphilosophers, continually invite us to entertain.

LECTUREFOURTEEN

1. Corporations commonly have a corporate philosophy or morality oftencodified in a “Code of Ethics.” How does this approach differ from ourtwo philosophers’ approaches to moral philosophy?

2. What is the commonality of the two philosophers in their understanding ofthe soul?

3. How can the works of these two philosophers enhance lives of those livingin the twenty-first century?

Dover, Kenneth J. Greek Popular Morality in the Time of Plato and Aristotle.Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974.

Benardete, Seth, Michael Davis, and Ronna Burger, eds. Argument of theAction: Essays on Greek Poetry and Philosophy. Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 2000.

Gotshalk, Richard. Beginnings of Philosophy in Greece. Lanham, MD:University Press of America, 2000.

Madigan, Patrick. Aristotle and His Modern Critics: The Uses of Tragedy inthe Nontragic Vision. Scranton, PA: University of Scranton Press, 1992.

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Suggested Reading:

Aristotle. Aristotle: Categories and De Interpretatione. Trans. J.L. Ackrill. New York:Oxford University Press, 1975.

———. Aristotle’s Poetics: A Translation and Commentary for Students of Literature.Trans. Leon Golden. Commentary O.B. Hardison. Tallahassee, FL: Florida StateUniversity Press, 1982.

———. Aristotle: The Politics and the Constitution of Athens. 2nd ed. Ed. StevenEverson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

———. The Basic Works of Aristotle. Ed. Richard McKeon. New York: RandomHouse, 2001.

———. De Anima. New ed. Trans. R.D. Hicks. New York: Prometheus Books, 1991.

———. The Metaphysics. New ed. Trans. Hugh Lawson-Tancred. New York:Penguin, 1999.

———. Nicomachean Ethics. Trans. Roger Crisp. Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 2000.

———. On the Parts of Animals I–IV. Trans. James G. Lenox. New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 2002.

Dover, Kenneth J. Greek Popular Morality In the Time of Plato and Aristotle. Berkeley:University of California Press, 1974.

Plato. The Dialogues of Plato, Volume 1: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Meno, Gorgias,Menexenus. Trans. R.E. Allen. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989

———. Phaedo. New ed. Trans. David Gallop. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

———. Republic. 3rd rev. ed. Trans. C.D.C. Reeve. Indianapolis, IN: HackettPublishing Company, 2004

———. Symposium. Trans. Christopher Gill. New York: Penguin, 2003.

Sprague, Rosamond Kent, Plato’s Laches and Charmides. Hackett Publishing Co., 1992.

Xenophon. Conversations of Socrates. New York: Penguin, 1990.

Other Books of Interest:

Adler, Mortimer J. Aristotle for Everybody: Difficult Thought Made Easy. New York:Simon & Schuster, 1997.

Aquinas, Thomas. Commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Beloit, WI: Dumb OxPress, 1995.

Baron, Jonathan. Thinking and Deciding. 3rd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 2001.

Benardete, Seth, Michael Davis, and Ronna Burger, eds. Argument of the Action:Essays on Greek Poetry and Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.

Bodeus, Richard. Aristotle and the Theology of the Living Immortals. Albany, NY: StateUniversity of New York Press, 2000.

———. The Political Dimensions of Aristotle’s Ethics. Trans. Jan Edward Garrett.Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1993.

Brickhouse, Thomas C. and Nicholas D. Smith. Plato’s Socrates. Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, Inc., 1996.

COURSE MATERIALS

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COURSEMATERIALS

COURSE MATERIALS

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Other Books of Interest (continued):

Easterling, P.E. The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1997.

Friedländer, Paul, Plato: the Dialogues, First Period. New York: Pantheon Books, 1964.

———. Plato: the Dialogues, Second and Third Period. New York: PantheonBooks, 1969.

Gill, Mary Louise. Aristotle on Substance: The Paradox of Unity. Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1991.

Gotshalk, Richard. Beginnings of Philosophy in Greece. Lanham, MD: University Pressof America, 2000.

Gotthelf, Allan and James G. Lennox (eds.) Philosophical Issues in Aristotle’s Biology.Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

Hyland, Drew A. The Virtue of Philosophy: An Interpretation of Plato’s Charmides.Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1981.

Madigan, Patrick. Aristotle and His Modern Critics: The Uses of Tragedy in theNontragic Vision. Scranton, PA: University of Scranton Press, 1992.

Morris, Thomas V. If Aristotle Ran General Motors. New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1998.

North, Helen. Sophrosyne: Self-Knowledge and Self-Restraint in Greek Literature.Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1966.

Plato. Republic. Trans. Desmond Lee. New York: Penguin , 2003.

———. Republic of Plato. 2nd ed. Trans. Allan Bloom. New York: Basic Books, 1991.

Phillips, Christopher. Socrates Cafe: A Fresh Taste of Philosophy. New York: W.W.Norton & Co., 2002.

Pressfield, Steven. Tides of War: A Novel of Alcibiades and the Peloponnesian War.New York: Random House, 2001.

Rorty, Amelie O. Essays on Aristotle’s Poetics of Athens. Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1992.

Ross, Sir David and J.L. Ackrill. Aristotle. 6th ed. New York: Routledge, 1995.

Rubenstein, Richard E. Aristotle’s Children: How Christians, Muslims, and JewsRediscovered Ancient Wisdom and Illuminated the Dark Ages. Dubuque, IA:Harcourt Brace & Co., 2003.

Scaltsas, Theodore, David Charles, and Mary Louise Gill. Unity, Identity andExplanation in Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994.

Schofield, Malcolm. Saving the City: Philosopher-Kings and other Classical Paradigms.New York: Routledge, 1999.

Simpson, Peter L. A Philosophical Commentary on the Politics of Aristotle. Chapel Hill,NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.

Telford, Kenneth. Commentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics.Binghamton, NY: Institute of Global Cultural Studies, 1999.

Witt, Charlotte. Substance and Essence in Aristotle: An Interpretation ofMetaphysics VII–IX. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989.

These books are available online through www.modernscholar.comor by calling Recorded Books at 1-800-636-3399.

plato and aristotle the genesis of western thought aryeh kosman

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