Quotes About Aristotle

Anger certainly seems to have an evolutionary basis. It serves a social purpose: displays of anger encourage others to change their behaviour and thus work to stop people transgressing societal rules that keep us cohabiting comfortably. If we neither felt nor exhibited annoyance, we would become 'slavish', in Aristotle's words, and an easy target for exploitation

In the words of the great twentieth-century philosopher-historian R. G. Collingwood: 'Deep in the mind of every Roman, as in the mind of every Greek, was the unquestioned conviction which Aristotle put into words: that what raised man above the level of barbarism … to live well instead of merely living, was his membership of an actual, physical city.

Right down to the seventeenth century, Christian debate about faith and the world involved a debate between two Greek ghosts, Plato and Aristotle, who had never heard the name of Jesus Christ.

When couples have children in excess, let abortion be procured before sense and life have begun; what may or may not be lawfully done in these cases depends on the question of life and sensation.

We must no more ask whether the soul and body are one than ask whether the wax and the figure impressed on it are one.

Whether if soul did not exist time would exist or not, is a question that may fairly be asked; for if there cannot be someone to count there cannot be anything that can be counted, so that evidently there cannot be number; for number is either what has been, or what can be, counted.

That metre itself forms an essential part of all true poetry is a principle which not even the assertions of an Aristotle or the pronouncements of a Plato can disestablish.

For Aristotle, it is not within our power to seek anything else, and thus /all/ acts have for their basic purpose the attainment of happiness or that which is good in itself and not merely as a means to something else.

But things are not what they seem. The normal Arabic word for "philosophy" was and is falasifa and a "philosopher" is a faylasuf. Plato was a faylasuf and so were Aristotle, Avicenna, Averroes, and al-Farabi. But the word that Rosenthal has translated as "philosophy" in the passage quoted above is hikma, and hikma has a subtly different range of meaning.

Aristotle, around 350 BCE, raised the possibility of machines replacing humans: For if every instrument could accomplish its own work, obeying or anticipating the will of others, like the statues of Daedalus, or the tripods of Hephaestus, which, says the poet, "of their own accord entered the assembly of the Gods"; if, in like manner, the shuttle would weave and the plectrum touch the lyre without a hand to guide them, chief workmen would not want servants, nor masters slaves.

polity with extremes of wealth and poverty is a city not of free persons but of slaves and masters, the ones consumed by envy, the others by contempt. — ARISTOTLE

As Aristotle tells us: "For the purposes of [story] a convincing impossibility is preferable to an unconvincing possibility.

Aristotle wrote The Poetics, the "secrets" of story have been as public as the library down the street. Nothing in the craft of storytelling is abstruse. In fact, at first glance telling story for the screen looks deceptively easy. But moving closer and closer to the center, trying scene by scene to make the story work, the task becomes increasingly difficult, as we realize that on the screen there's no place to hide.

For those who like to quote Aristotle's wisdom when appealing to his "Prime Mover" argument for the existence of God, let us remember that he also claimed that women had a different number of teeth than men, presumably without bothering to check.) Everything

Let all the disciples of Aristotle…," he would write, "recognize that experiment is the true master who must be followed in Physics."6

Man, Aristotle held, must first grasp the appropriate facts of reality; on this basis, he can then set the goals and course of his action. Pragmatism represents a total reversal of this progression. For the pragmatist, the order is: man acts; he invents forms of thought to satisfy the needs of his action; reality adapts itself accordingly (except when, inexplicably, it resists). First, action—second, thought—third, reality.

three major philosophers who, above all others, are responsible for generating the disease of collectivism and transmitting it to the dictators of our century. The three are: Plato—Kant—Hegel. (The antidote to them is: Aristotle.)

Aristotle is the champion of this world, the champion of nature, as against the supematuralism of Plato.

Aristotle maintains that there is only one reality: the world of particulars in which we live, the world men perceive by means of their physical senses.

Plato appeals to soaring idealism scornful of the practical. Aristotle appeals to joyful realism on earth. Kant appeals to rage.

Intuition is the source of scientific knowledge.

For Kant one can be both good and stupid; but for Aristotle stupidity of a certain kind precludes goodness.

The three things Aristotle couldn't understand: the work of the bees, the coming and going of the tide, and the mind of a woman. —Irish Triad

It is the mark of an educated mind to rest satisfied with the degree of precision which the nature of the subject admits and not to seek exactness where only an approximation is possible. —Aristotle (384 b.c.–322 b.c.)