Quotes About Aristotle

In page after page of the Summa, Aquinas will calmly and tentatively assert a position. Then he looks around at all the counterpositions and objections. He examines whether they hold up under scrutiny; if not, he quietly refutes them and moves on to the next question. At one stroke, a Christian dialectic was born, more sophisticated than Abelard's and more all-embracing than Anselm's, because it stands on a reading of Aristotle's entire corpus.

saw logic as the buttress of theology and his faith, not a substitute for them. If this earns him impatience from later skeptics and freethinkers, it does fit him into his own time and place. Peter Abelard's Aristotle points down the road to Thomas Aquinas, not the Enlightenment.

The overriding issue for Aquinas is, "Is it true?" His Averroist colleague Siger of Brabant had asserted that if it was in Aristotle, then it must be true. Not necessarily, Aquinas says. He cites the Philosopher (as he calls Aristotle in both Summas) more often than any other non-Christian thinker. But he also finds powerful insights in Plato, in Saint Augustine, and in Dionysius the Areopagite.? Citations from the Bible always clinch the argument.

All the same, Abelard opened the mind of the Middle Ages in new and startling ways. He gave the name of Aristotle and Aristotle's logic an edgy glamour it never entirely lost. Aristotle had said: All men desire to know. Abelard now added: All men need to question and doubt in order to know. These were important signposts for the future. For now, medieval civilization was about to swing down another path, one emblazoned by the Neoplatonist imagination.

For Aquinas as for Aristotle, human freedom boils down to the power to make choices. In the end, the morality of our actions must always be judged by the active will and the intentions behind them. It also implies the freedom to choose good over evil and the mental capacity to know the one from the other (which is why dogs and infants can't commit mortal sins).

For Aristotle, it was man's nature to know things. For Aquinas, to know is to be in an existential sense; to know the world is to be part of the world ourselves. God has put us into the world for a purpose, His purpose. We need to use and understand that world to catch a glimpse of that purpose, and thus a glimpse of God Himself.

All the same, Aquinas had achieved what no one had before or since: a fusion of Platonized Christianity with Aristotle's science of man. It is one of the great achievements of Western civilization. But it didn't last. Even before Aquinas's death, the old opposition would reassert itself. He would be forced to leave the University of Paris and die in his former home of Naples while the intellectual battle raged around him.

It was Aristotle who first made private property the basis of the good life and the independent householder the basis of the free polis.18 The world of the Enlightenment took him firmly at his word.

Why use two (or more) when one (or fewer) will do, is the principle that William of Ockham introduced into the medieval thought process. It grew out of his refinement of Aristotle's logic and set off a revolution not only in philosophy, but in politics and religion. Before he died, Ockham's razor would undercut the foundations of the medieval Church.

The Enlightenment, however, saw in middle-class man an up-to-date reflection of Aristotle's political animal: a being designed by nature to work peaceably and constructively with others on the basis of free will—and to make a little money while he did it.

The job of ethics, Aristotle asserts, "is not that we may know what virtue is, but that we may become virtuous," especially in our daily dealings with others.

for Aristotle ethics is not a science. We aren't looking for moral perfection. "In fact, such a life is not possible for man," Aristotle states. "If it were, he would be a God."23 Instead, we look for advantage and improvement. From that point of view, Aristotle assures us, learning to be virtuous is not that hard. It's all a matter of practice and learning the habits that go with it.

As much as London or Paris, and certainly more than Berlin or Madrid, Edinburgh was the epicenter of Aristotle's Enlightenment. Small wonder, then, that it dubbed itself the Athens of the North.

Aristotle's Politics, like his Metaphysics, turns Plato's system upside down.

For Plato, we find our true freedom only when we find our proper place within the political community. Aristotle, by contrast, concludes that community exists to serve the individuals who make it up, not the other way around.

If Aristotle had been right and it was man's destiny to be free, if our nature as human beings makes us fit to govern our lives as we see fit, then why is it that everywhere we look human beings are unfree and submit to various forms of tyranny and slavery, including now in Florence? Why did freedom fail, not only in Florence but throughout history—even ancient Greece and Rome?

Aristotle's philosopher is always an observer of reality, not the creator of it. Instead of laying out the perfect blueprint, then turning reluctantly to the real world, Aristotle starts with the real world itself.

The Prince. Some would insist that the book was inspired by the devil.25 But Machiavelli was only a close student of Aristotle's version of civic liberty, which led him in the wake of Savonarola's fall to ask some uncomfortable questions. What if God really didn't care whether Florence survived as a republic or not? What if God didn't really care whether men lived as free men or slaves? And what if human nature suits us as much for servitude as it does for liberty?

But that community still exists, Aristotle argues, in order to make the householder happy, rather than the other way around.

two-thousand-year struggle for the soul of Western civilization, which today extends to all civilizations: a struggle born from an act of rebellion. It came around 360 BCE, when the young Aristotle, son of the court doctor of the Macedonian kings, turned against the ideas of his famous teacher, Plato of Athens, and set out to create a school of his own.

For Aristotle, diversity is the keynote of the free society, and free exchange lies at its heart. In the true (as opposed to the ideal) political community there must be a diversity of social roles

Aristotle's free society is one in which the citizens participate in their government rather than submit to it. All will be rulers in one way or another, at one time or another. "This means some rule, and others are ruled, in turn, as if they had become, for the time being, different persons.

Ficino offered the age a new intellectual master. "Aristotle's genius is purely human," he wrote, while "Plato's is both human and divine.

The wisdom Socrates had brought to the Greeks, Clement asserted, Jesus had brought to the Jews and other barbarians. In fact, Socrates and Jesus were spiritual brothers. Just as Plato and Aristotle founded schools to teach disciples, so now Christ was the new "schoolmaster" of the human race.