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 week, we continue searching for lessons on the good life from Mortimer Adler’s classic book Aristotle for Everybody. We’ll spend three more weeks discussing Aristotle before moving on to The Art of Happiness, a collection of writing by the Greek philosopher Epicurus.
We'll discuss the passage below at this Friday’s meetup (Register here). As you read these passages, 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?
Socrates, who was Plato’s teacher as Plato was Aristotle’s, said that an unexamined life is not worth living. Aristotle went further and said that an unplanned life is not worth examining, for an unplanned life is one in which we do not know what we are trying to do or why, and one in which we do not know where we are trying to get or how to get there. …
In addition to not being worth examining, an unplanned life is not worth living because it cannot be lived well. To plan one’s life is to be thoughtful about it, and that means thinking about ends to be pursued and the means for achieving them. Living thoughtlessly is like acting aimlessly. It gets you nowhere.
But Aristotle does not think it is enough to persuade you that you must have a plan for living in order to live well. […]
— Mortimer Adler, Aristotle for Everybody (Ch. 10)
