Can someone help me understand the philosophy of Aristotle in a simple and summarized explanation?

The only things i know about his philosophy are the ff:

1. Body and soul are inseparable
2. Three types of soul
3. Humans are rational animals because we can think
4. Happiness is the ultimate goal of human life

Please tell me if this is right or wrong. I seriously don't know and need help.

States of Character (External Observable)

1. virtue, vice
2. continence, incontinence
3. heroic, brutality

Excellence or Virtue (Internal States)

1. Courage
2. Generosity
3. Justice

When I read Nicomachean ethics, I felt like there was some naivety that the golden mean is the correct choice.

I can idealize this person, and they are not ready for a rare event like Hitler invading Czechoslovakia.

I suppose this is my criticism of Nicomachean ethics, it prioritizes happiness over pain/risk avoidance. I think there are choices in life where you need to decide between the two, potentially bordering on paranoia for security.

When I choose my virtues I like that added security.

I’m working my way through the Nicomachean Ethics for the first time. I’m reading the Ross translation. I’m almost at the end of book one, and I must say that I find it hard going. I feel like I am only picking up bits and pieces, but am struggling to really grasp what Aristotle is saying. I certainly cannot explain or summarize his ethical system or most of his arguments at the moment.

Part of me wonders if I am not as smart as I thought I was.

Another part of me thinks that I’m just undisciplined and impatient due to having far superior reading abilities as a child for my age and mostly coasting all the way to a college degree, and this is probably a text that is inherently difficult and requires multiple readings and slow chewing on the text to grasp.

Yet another part of me wonders if the difficulty is in the translation I am reading.

Yesterday I was discussing Genesis with my wife and we thought we should look at it through the lens of man discovering logos. We also mentioned a Promethean comparison and arrived at the same conclusions

I wanna hear some

This is something new I'm working on and relates to the idea of The Word (The Logos) being associated with creation and with Christ.
https://substack.com/@geminizadkiel/p-149112477
If you have any thoughts or feedback, things I may have missed in terms of philosophy or anything I might want to cite relating to the Logos, please let me know!

Although I enjoy political philsophy, is politics necessary for political philosophy or does its ideas hold up today?

*Word*

I was reading Nicomachean Ethics, and when Aristotle was talking about virtues of the soul, he said that wisdom is a combination of 'scientific knowledge' and practical thinking. 'scientific knowledge' which is about things that cannot be different, and practical thinking which is of things that can be different.

In the world "Reasonable", the 'reason' seems to be the thing that is constant, that cannot be different, and -able the part that can be different. Something cannot be more or less reason, but something can be more or less -able.

I just found that interesting.

Edit:

Don't know how the 'L' got there. It is on the other side of the keyboard than 'r' and 'd', maybe muscle memory.

Any expert in Aristotle interested in an interview for a little puppet show?

I’m a college student for Audiovisual Direction and am doing a pilot for a show about Love, Puppets and philosophy and am looking for different outlooks on the topic, would any expert be interested?

Hello, I am looking to purchase second-hand copies of any of the Clarendon Aristotle Series or any of the Oxford Aristotle Studies. Please PM if you are interested in selling your copies of either series. Thank you!

I recently came across an paper defending/affirming this claim. I want to read more on this, see some replies, but there were none as far as i can tell. for the aristotelians and to anyone who is familiar with aristotle ideas and his followers/disciples/tradition, what do you say?

Anyone else that living by the Nicomachean Ethics and all things Aristotle also secretly(or not so secretly) into Nietzsche. Is this like a yin-yang thing or is there a good reason for this?

So I have taught US Govt and Texas Govt in high schools and college. And I try to instill a seed to Aristotelean thinking whenever I teach. I recently took a position in Middle School (to give me a robust academic foundation to prepare for moving into Administration).

Does anyone know of good resources that allow putting Aristotle into digestible mediums suitable for middle schoolers?

TIA. (FWIW, I will be teaching Texas History primarily this year.)

Hi! I know that there have been several posts on where to start reading Aristotle, but I think this one would be a little different approach than usual so I think I should ask.

My aim to study Aristotle and other philosophers is to gain an understanding on living a better life. This would mean that I would like to study the texts focused on topics like ethics etc. So I wish to spend less time on reading about, say, metaphysics, unless it is necessary to understand the philosopher and also since I know that there are better models of reality now (in physics etc).

How I plan to study Aristotle is that I will first properly read the articles on https://plato.stanford.edu/ . This includes (in order) :

1. Aristotle
2. Aristotle's Logic
3. Aristotle's Categories
4. Aristotle's Ethics

I think that these articles might give me the necessary understanding of Aristotle's works and so I can directly study his Nicomachean Ethics, Poetry and Rhetoric without getting too deep in the rabbit hole, since Aristotle can be obscure to beginner readers.

What do you guys think? Is this approach fine?

crosspost from r/askphilosophy

I've always wanted to have more words to interpret and comprehend this section in the Lysis [218d-221d], and it kind of clicked with me just now. Hoping for some other ancient heads to confirm this or point out what I might be missing.

When Plato investigates the idea of the neither-good-nor-bad having philia towards the good, as the only possible outcome of his preceding investigation, he delves into this question of cause and sake. He says that the neither-good-nor-bad (ngnb) must be friends with the good out of some cause, and for the sake of something further. He first finds that it must be because of the (mere) presence of some bad, and for the sake of another friend. He then finds the chain of further friends to end at the "first friend". And then he worries that since the bad is the cause, the first friend is really for the sake of the bad, the argument being "take away the bad, and the good is no longer a friend." Finally, he saves the good by finding that there are ngnb desires, desires which are not because of anything bad, but because of something ngnb. So take away the bad, and the first friend now still remains.

It seems like "sake" and "cause" of friendship here can be mapped easily to Aristotle's efficient and final causes, respectively, despite Plato's deliberate conflation towards the end. When Plato mentions "cause", he is mentioning some presence of bad, a bad which is distinct from the ngnb thing it is present in, since it has not fully corrupted its ngnb host. This seems clear to be efficient cause, since it is something distinct from the thing itself which causes some thing to take place (that is, friendship). For "sake" of friendship however, Plato in that passage also explicitly mentions the object of sake as being distinct from the friend in question, so that whether it is also a friend is then up for inquiry. Common notion of the word "sake" (Plato uses "διά," but its translation to "sake" seems unanimous) tells us that it is simply whatever the end of a certain purpose is intended to be. This, again, seems to clearly be final cause, which details the cause of purpose.

Plato does then conflate the two when saying the first friend is for the sake of the bad, but it seems he is rather genuinely disproving any potential false dichotomy between the categories of cause. For what he shows is that when something is done (like gaining friendship) for the purpose of achieving good, that purpose can many times be seen as the purpose of eliminating a bad (even though Plato shows this interchangeability isn't always true). And from there, this purpose of friendship to eliminate a bad (which is a final cause) can be seen to necessarily have a further cause (an efficient cause), that being the presence of bad -- the purpose could not exist if it did not have a present bad to refer to. And through that, the final cause seems to only be a product of specific efficient causes, these being the presence of bads or ngnbs. At least, this is by the Platonic arguments put forth, and of course the definitions of sake and cause here do not necessarily apply across the rest of the dialogues in the same way.

So, is this BS or does it make sense? Is there anything between these two pairs of terms that don't map as well on to each other?

disclaimer: sorry for any grammar errors, English is not my first language.

QUESTION:

For Aristotle and the stoics, does the concept of arete meant “to live in the activity of reason in accordance with the moral virtues” Or “to live virtuously (moral virtues)”, where reason is a second element, out of the concept of arete?

EXPLANATION FOR THE QUESTION:

Let’s talk about the concept of arete and eudaimonia later in Greek history, for Aristotle and the stoics.

Arete means excellence of any kind, for a thing to have arete, this thing has to excel in its particular function.

A knife that posses arete is knife that cuts well. The virtues (virtue in the modern sense of the word) of something is what enables something to perform its function well, so, for a knife to posses arete a knife must be able to cut well and the virtues of knife that enables it to have arete, would be, for example, sharpness and resistance.

Both Aristotle and the stoics had reach a consensus (even using different theories) that the particular function of a human being is their ability to reason.

The good use of reason would lead to the development of a good character, thus the development of the moral virtues, here we can quote the 4 cardinal ones.

Eudaimonia, is the highest of the goods, the only good that is preferable for its on sake, “a life well lived”, “the flourishing life” “a life of fulfilment”. Eudaimonia is not a state, it’s an activity, both Aristotle and the stoics (excluding the factor of the external goods) agreed that:

“To reach Eudaimonia one has to be virtuous and live in accordance with reason” or, if you please, vice-versa.

Now, here is where my question begins.

Translating my last sentence, would it translate to:

“To reach Eudaimonia one has to have arete” Where arete encompasses the ideia of “to live virtuously, in accordance with reason” so, it encompasses both the concept of the moral virtues and reasoning.

OR

“To reach Eudaimonia one has to have arete guided by logos” (With “logos” I’m trying to say reason) Where arete encompasses only the concept of the moral virtues and reason is a separated element.

Thank you for reading, I hope you can help me with this question :)

In this article I discuss the problems that have arisen, for modern discourse in English, from the fact that Aristotle’s legacy has largely come down to us via the intermediation of Roman writers and their infelicitous rendering of Greek terms like politeia into Latin ones like res publica.

https://medium.com/@evansd66/the-distorted-mirror-of-rome-c69d18361d2b

Hello. I have just finished reading Rhetoric. Do you have any tips to digest the book? Because it seems to be a long way to fully comprehend the content and ideas, and apply them.

I've just written an overview of the whole series of articles that I'm currently writing about Lacan and free speech, so you can get an idea of where I'm going with all this. Feedback welcome!

https://medium.com/@evansd66/lacan-and-free-speech-4d3ba38de20a