In his recommendations to lawgivers about the material conditions of the ideal city in the Politics, Aristotle suggests that the question of what should be the natural qualities of its citizens can be answered fairly easily by reference to existing ethnographical opinions (Pol VII 7, 1327b20-23): “One could… Read more
OK, I’ll strike a more sober note today. Recently, the upheaval of higher education funding and student fees in the UK (where I am employed) has caused a great deal of discomfort (even the potential for sore egos, although misery always loves company). The… Read more
Like Socrates, I’m absolutely passionate about pursuing friendship. Friendship (philia) is difficult to define in Plato’s writings, in part because the Lysis, the only dialogue that attempts a comprehensive understanding of it, is really not about friendship per se; rather, as has been noted by critics such as… Read more
For Aristotle, living beings are complex composites of matter and form, where form is to be understood functionally, and not merely as shape, as a specific combination of soul-capacities that characterizes the kind of living being in question. It is a commonplace in Aristotelian scholarship that both these forms of… Read more
In a post two weeks ago, I discussed an amusing if tendentious story about Aristotle and his crew usurping Plato’s turf in the garden of the Academy and suggested that this story helps us to imagine the ways in which partisans of various students of Plato (e.g. Read more
