Quotes About Aristotle

La nueva era derrocó el modelo aristotélico y cristiano del cosmos, que proponía una estructura jerárquica de la realidad en la que las cosas existían orgánicamente a través de su relación con Dios, y lo sustituyó por el de un universo mecánico regido por las leyes de la naturaleza, no necesariamente basado en lo trascendente.

solidariedade do aborrecimento humano. como é que este capítulo escapou a Aristóteles

Le bonheur n'est pas une chose; c'est une pensée. Ce n'est pas un fait; c'est une invention. Ce n'est pas un état; c'est une action. Disons le mot: le bonheur est création.[...] C'est une praxis, disait- Aristote, et point une poiésis.

Children should be educated and instructed in the principles of freedom. Aristotle speaks plainly to this purpose, saying, 'that the institution of youth should be accommodated to that form of government under which they live; forasmuch as it makes exceedingly for the preservation of the present government, whatsoever it be.

Aristotle says clearly, and St. Thomas follows him, that corporeal similitudes excite the memory more easily than the naked notions themselves.

Criticism, as it was first instituted by Aristotle, was meant as a standard of judging well; the chiefest part of which is to observe those excellencies which delight a reasonable reader

From a Thomistic point of view, Paley and Co. have sold their birthright for a mess of pottage; and while the Darwinians have been unquestionably thuggish and often dishonest in their critiques of the "Intelligent Design" movement, to the extent that ID proponents have followed Paley in trading in Aristotle for a basically mechanistic picture of the physical universe, they have been "asking for it.

uncaused cause, or to use Aristotle's famous expression, an Unmoved

Compared to the way in which final causality has – in actual practice, if not in theory and rhetoric – maintained its grip on biological thinking, the Darwinian "revolution" is a trivial blip on the continued silent and unacknowledged hegemony of Aristotle.

How significant is Aristotle? Well, I wouldn't want to exaggerate, so let me put it this way: Abandoning Aristotelianism, as the founders of modern philosophy did, was the single greatest mistake ever made in the entire history of Western thought.

What Hitchens should have written is: "I wouldn't know the difference between conceptualism and realism, essentially and accidentally ordered causal series, Aristotle and Hume, etc., even if I were intellectually honest; but then, neither will the book reviewer at the New York Times, so who cares?

Overall, then, Aristotle just isn't as "sexy" as Plato. His only advantage is being right.

The trouble with this, in MacIntyre's opinion, was that all the insistence on the primacy of reason and of "rational debate" had ever achieved was to have erased from men's minds what, since Aristotle, had been the main support for their entire moral, intellectual, and political lives: the concept of virtue. And it had given them nothing in return. Their intellectual "light" was, in fact, nothing other than moral darkness.

No excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of madness.

The true end of tragedy is to purify the passions.

Since we think we understand when we know the explanation, and there are four types of explanation (one, what it is to be a thing; one, that if certain things hold it is necessary that this does; another, what initiated the change; and fourth, the aim), all these are proved through the middle term.

Humour is the only test of gravity, and gravity of humour, for a subject which will not bear raillery is suspicious, and a jest which will not bear serious examination is false wit.

Where some people are very wealthy and others have nothing, the result will be either extreme democracy or absolute oligarchy, or despotism will come from either of those excesses.

Tragedy is an imitation of a whole and complete action of some amplitude. . . . Now a whole is that which has a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Happiness is prosperity combined with virtue.

Madness is badness of spirit, when one seeks profit from all sources.

Both excess and defect are alike prejudicial to moral virtue.

Justice is the fundamental virtue of political society, since the order of society cannot be maintained without law, and laws are instituted to declare what is just.

Superiority in war ... cannot surely be a proof of justice, since wars are often unjustly undertaken, and successfully, though wickedly, carried on and concluded.