Quotes About Aristotle

Two subsequent Franciscans would use Aristotle to push secular knowledge to new intellectual altitudes Thomas Aquinas never imagined. The first was Roger Bacon. He was born around 1215, the same date as the Magna Carta.

Bacon's curiosity makes him sound amazingly modern, and in many ways he was. But his writings look back as much as they look forward, and the figure to whom he owes his greatest debt is without doubt Aristotle, whom he discovered through his admiration for Grosseteste.5 Aristotle's works unlocked for Bacon a world of scientific investigation, above all a method of exploring the wonders of nature and understanding its underlying principles

In some ways, Bacon also looked beyond Aristotle. First, he believed that no natural or physical science could get anywhere without a firm foundation in mathematics. He called it the "gate and key" to all science.

Epicurus even defined pleasure as the absence of pain: not exactly a formula for a life of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Still, the underlying principle of his philosophy—that the one thing all nature seeks to avoid is pain, and the one thing it seeks to gain is pleasure, and men should do the same—was only an extreme version of Aristotle's theory of knowledge based on our senses.

Even with the eclipse of conciliarism, the fact remained that by 1400, Aristotle reigned supreme in Europe's universities and its intellectual life.

Aristotle may have been dull to read, but he was easy to memorize.

By 1400, the authority of Aristotle closed virtually every argument. Once a student learned his view on a subject, whether it was a fine point in logic or the number of planets or the functions of body organs, there was no point in going any further. Someone wanting to know how many udders a cow had would be pointed to the relevant passage in Aristotle instead of being sent out to a field to count for himself.

I cannot avoid believing," Luther mused, "that it was Satan himself who introduced the study of Aristotle.

The evidence of the senses further corroborates the fact that the earth is round. How else would eclipses of the moon show segments shaped as we see them? In eclipses the outline is always curved; and since it is the interposition of the earth that makes the eclipse, the form of this line will be caused by the form of the earth's surface, which is therefore spherical.… The text was in Arabic, but the author was a Greek.2 The man's name, Gerard noted, was Aristotle.

If any single factor really doomed Aristotle as the Middle Ages had known him, and helped reformers like Martin Luther shove him to the sidelines, it was the invention of printing.

All around him were stacks of books in Arabic on mathematics, astronomy, astrology, physics, and philosophy by various Greek and Arabic authorities. They included many works by Aristotle that no one in western Europe had opened in six hundred years.

Aristotle's overriding conviction that philosophy must necessarily be an open book, with everything as clear, organized, and straightforward as possible even for the slowest student.

The printed book doomed the Aristotle of the medieval schoolmen. It ended his intellectual monopoly first of all because now authors appeared in print almost with the same relative ease as they appear online today. These included not only Plato but intriguing and hitherto remote figures like the poet Lucian; dramatists Terence and Sophocles; historians Plutarch and Tacitus and Josephus; and philosophers such as the Stoic Seneca and the Skeptic Sextus Empiricus.

In the long term, the print revolution turned out to be a boon for Aristotle. His works could be studied by more readers than ever, in cleaned-up versions.

For almost a century the Christian and Islamic worldviews overlapped, especially their view of nature. The seam along that overlap was Aristotle, whom Arab scholars dubbed the Master of Those Who Know and whom Christian scholars would come to know as the Philosopher, as if there were no others of any lasting value.

Now in the privacy of your own home, you had the text correct, complete, and whole—pure and uncorrupted, as Renaissance scholars liked to say. The era of having to rely on untrustworthy handwritten manuscripts, or some medieval glossator who spent a lifetime trying to make sense of an often muddled or even counterfeit manuscript of Aristotle, was over.

The highest form of life, Aristotle said, was that of the householder, who "as a citizen shared in the civic life of ruling and being ruled in turn."5 That certainly sounded a lot like life in 1402 Florence as well as fifth-century BCE Athens.

So the basis of Aristotle's secure and stable order is not the Philosopher Ruler, but the good citizen who participates actively in the political, social, and economic life of his community.

More than any previous work, Galileo's Dialogue showed that if Copernicus wasn't right on every detail of the working of the solar system, Aristotle and Ptolemy were both very clearly wrong. The first printing sold out almost at once.

Politics on Plato's terms becomes prescriptive, a series of formulae for shaping man and society into what they should be rather than accepting things as they are. Politics on Aristotle's terms will be largely descriptive, in which the more we discover about human nature, the more we recognize our powerlessness to effect real change.

All this creative outflow—the product of a post-1402 generation of Florentines eager to celebrate their political liberty and its unleashing of human potential—we call the Renaissance. Thanks to the Florentines' reading of Aristotle, a new way of seeing the world had been born, and with it a new appreciation of civic freedom.

Now, thanks to Erasmus's In Praise of Folly, a contempt for universities and their Aristotle-centered curriculum acquired intellectual chic.

In 1210, it issued its first condemnation of Averroës and his disciples in the West; for good measure, it extended the ban to the works of Aristotle. It was already too late. Just fifteen years after the ban was issued, Aristotle's greatest medieval expositor was born. To his family and neighbors, he was Tommaso D'Aquino. To history, he is Saint Thomas Aquinas, the single greatest creative mind of the Middle Ages.

it was believed, liberty opens the door to a standard of excellence in both public and private affairs unknown to those living in servitude or unfree societies. In short, a republic built on Aristotle's model will allow men to achieve their highest potential not only as political animals, but as complete moral beings.