Reading & the Good Life
Join the conversation! Every Friday at Noon EST, Perennial Meditations readers are welcome to gather for Reading & the Good Life (Register here), a casual space for connection, contemplation, and conversations on the art of living!
Who is Aristotle?
Aristotle (384–322 B.C.E.) is among the most significant philosophers ever. Judged solely in terms of his philosophical influence, only Plato is his peer: Aristotle’s works shaped centuries of philosophy from Late Antiquity through the Renaissance and, even today, continue to be studied with keen, non-antiquarian interest. A prodigious researcher and writer, Aristotle left a significant body of work, perhaps numbering as many as two hundred treatises, from which approximately thirty-one survive. His extant writings span a wide range of disciplines, from logic, metaphysics, and philosophy of mind through ethics, political theory, aesthetics, and rhetoric, and into such primarily non-philosophical fields as empirical biology, where he excelled at detailed plant and animal observation and description. In all these areas, Aristotle’s theories have provided illumination, met with resistance, sparked debate, and generally stimulated the sustained interest of an abiding readership. …
Aristotle’s philosophy defies easy encapsulation because of its wide range and its remoteness in time. The long history of interpretation and appropriation of Aristotelian texts and themes—spanning over two millennia and comprising philosophers working within various religious and secular traditions—has rendered even basic points of interpretation controversial. […]
Source: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Dear Readers,
This month, we search for lessons on the good life in Mortimer Adler’s classic book Aristotle for Everybody. I’ll share a few selected passages to discuss each week at our Friday meetup (Register here). As you read the passages below, consider reflecting on these questions:
(1) How can you begin to embody these lessons in daily life?
(2) What might stand in the way of implementing these ideas?
(3) How can the following insights help you to live the good life?
Why Aristotle? Why for everybody? And why is an exposition of Aristotle for everybody an introduction to common sense?
I can answer these three questions better after I have answered one other. Why philosophy? Why should everyone learn how to think philosophically—how to ask the kind of searching questions that children and philosophers ask and that philosophers sometimes answer?
I have long been of the opinion that philosophy is everybody’s business—but not in order to get more information about the world, our society, and ourselves. For that purpose, it would be better to turn to the natural and the social sciences and to history. It is in another way that philosophy is useful—to help us to understand things we already know, understand them better than we now understand them. That is why I think everyone should learn how to think philosophically.
For that purpose, there is no better teacher than Aristotle. I do not hesitate to recommend him as the teacher to begin with. The only other teacher that I might have chosen is Plato, but in my judgment, he is second best. Plato raised almost all the questions that everyone should face; Aristotle raised them too and, in addition, gave us clearer answers to them. […]
— Mortimer Adler, Aristotle for Everybody
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Human beings have learned a great deal since Aristotle’s day, mainly through the discoveries of modern science. Applied science has created a world and a way of life that is very different from his world and his way of life. …
But Aristotle had the same common experiences in his day that we have in ours. The kind of thinking he did about them enabled him to understand them better than most of us do. That and that alone is the reason he can help us to understand these common experiences better and help us to understand ourselves and our lives, as well as the world and the society in which we live, even though our way of life, our world, and our society are different from his.
Aristotle’s thinking began with common sense, but it did not end there. It went much further. It added to and surrounded common sense with insights and understandings that are not common at all. His understanding of things goes deeper than ours and sometimes soars higher. It is, in a word, uncommon common sense. […]
— Mortimer Adler, Aristotle for Everybody
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Classifying was one of the skills in which Aristotle excelled. Another was his skill in asking questions. Philosophical thought began with the asking of questions—questions that can be answered on the basis of our ordinary, everyday experience and with some reflection about that experience that results in a sharpening and refinement of our common sense. …
Each distinct kind of thing, Aristotle thought, has a nature that distinguishes it from all the others. What differentiates one class of things from everything else defines the nature possessed by every individual thing that belongs to that class. When we speak of human nature, for example, we are simply saying that all human beings have certain characteristics and that these characteristics differentiate them from other animals, plants, and inanimate things. …
But the special kind of thinking that gives rise to asking and answering philosophical questions distinguishes humans from other animals. No other animal plays philosophical games. […]
— Mortimer Adler, Aristotle for Everybody (Ch. 1)
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Thank you for reading; I hope you found something useful.
Until next time, be wise and be well,
J.W.
P.S. As always, feel free to comment, ask questions, or suggest future reads!
I'm to also read The Philosophy of Aristotle, along with Aristotle for everybody 😁