The numbers set within the text of this edition refer to the corresponding lines of the Greek text in the great modern edition of Aristotle’s work published between 1831 and 1870 by the Berlin Academy. The pagination of the Berlin edition has become the customary means by which to locate a passage of Aristotle. A reference to, say, Metaphysics xii. 10. 1075a25 would place the passage in question in Chapter 10 of Book 12 of the Metaphysics, on line 25 of the first column, i. e., column a, of page 1075 of the Berlin edition.
Copyright © 1941 by Random House, Inc.
Biographical note copyright © 1947 by Random House, Inc.
Introduction copyright © 2001 by C.D.C. Reeve
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Aristotle.
[Selections. English. 2001]
The basic works of Aristotle / edited by Richard McKeon; introduction by C.D.C. Reeve
p. cm.—(Modern Library classics)
Originally published: New York: Random House, © 1941. With new intro.
eISBN: 978-0-307-41752-7
1. Philosophy. I. McKeon, Richard Peter, 1900— II. Title. III. Series.
B407 .A2713 2001 185—dc21 2001030607
Modern Library website address: www.modernlibrary.com
v3.1_r1
ARISTOTLE
Aristotle was born in 384/3 B.C. in the little town of Stagira on the eastern coast of the peninsula of Chalcidice in Thrace. His father, Nicomachus, was court physician and, according to tradition, friend of Amyntas II, king of Macedon and father of Philip the Great. Nicomachus died while Aristotle was still a child, and he was raised by Proxenus of Atarneus, whose son Nicanor was later adopted, in turn, by Aristotle and was married to Aristotle’s daughter. In 368/7, at the age of eighteen, Aristotle was sent to Athens, where he remained in close association with the Academy of Plato for twenty years, until the death of Plato in 348/7. After Plato’s death he left Athens and, together with Xenocrates, visited the court of Hermias, a former member of the Academy who had become tyrant of Assos and Atarneus in Mysia in Asia Minor. Aristotle married Hermias’ niece Pythias, and he probably taught at a kind of Academic center in Assos. Somewhat later he went to Mitylene in Lesbos, where he doubtless engaged in biological research. In 343/2, on the invitation of Philip of Macedon, he became tutor to Alexander. The instruction probably extended only to 340, when Alexander was appointed regent for his father, but his tutor did not return to Athens until 335/4, a year after the death of Philip.
The next twelve years Aristotle devoted with extraordinary industry to the establishment of a school, the Lyceum, to the institution and pursuit of a program of investigation, speculation, and teaching in almost every branch of knowledge, and to the composition of all, or most, or at least the more scientific portions, of those of his writings which are now extant. When Alexander died in 323, Aristotle’s Macedonian connections brought him under suspicion and he fled Athens lest, as he is said to have remarked, the Athenians sin twice against philosophy. An accusation of impiety was brought against him, not unlike those which had been brought against Anaxagoras and Protagoras or that on which Socrates had been condemned. The specific charge was that he had instituted a private cult in the memory of his friend Hermias, since he had erected a statue to him at Delphi and had composed a poem, in what was alleged to be the manner of a paean, in his honor. He took refuge under the protection of Antipater, viceroy to Alexander, in Chalcis in Euboea, where he died in 322 a short time before the death of Demosthenes.
Most of the scant information that has come to us concerning the life of Aristotle is suggestive, but there is little positive evidence, in his works or in external sources, to support inferences concerning the formative forces that influenced his work. Since his father was a physician, he was a hereditary member of the guild of Asclepiads, and it is tempting to speculate on the youthful beginnings of his interest in biological investigations and his possible training in dissection, pharmacology, and medicine; but his father died when he was young, and there is no evidence in his works of an early training in medicine. He spent twenty years in the Academy; that period has been used as evidence of a close association with Plato which resulted in a deep impress on his thought, but it has also been argued, by scholars like Burnet and Taylor, that Plato was not in the Academy at the time of Aristotle’s arrival, that he was away for repeated and lengthy periods during Aristotle’s stay, and that Aristotle’s knowledge of Platonism was acquired at secondhand and was never accurate. We do not know how he spent his time at the Academy: there is an ancient tradition that he undertook the teaching of rhetoric in opposition to the flourishing school of Isocrates; it seems probable that he participated in the biological research which was flourishing at the Academy; the fragments of his early dialogues suggest that he wrote works intended to popularize Platonism. His reasons for leaving Athens on the death of Plato can only be conjectured: he may have been dissatisfied with the prospects of the Academy under Plato’s nephew and successor Speusippus, who seemed to Aristotle to have reduced metaphysics to mathematics, or Speusippus may have charged Aristotle and Xenocrates to open a branch of the Academy in Asia Minor. He probably taught in Assos; there is evidence in his biological writings that he collected specimens of animals and fish in Lesbos and in the waters adjacent to the island; he doubtless began the composition of some of the works that have survived during his travels.
In spite of the fact that the relation between Aristotle and Alexander has been a tempting subject for speculation since Plutarch and that the ambition to influence kings through philosophy was deeply implanted in the Academy, there is no evidence that Aristotle had any influence on the moral ideals or political ambitions of his royal pupil, and Aristotle in turn seems to have taken no account of the effects of the ideal of world empire on the forms of political association and on the possible survival of the Greek city-state. There is good reason to doubt the accuracy of the legend that Alexander sent records of astronomical observations and biological specimens to his former master from the East. His writings contain interesting sidelights on the methods and adjuncts of teaching in the Lyceum, but the relation of his writings to the work of the Lyceum, and even the order of their composition, are far from clear. Since they are obviously not “published” works, it has been supposed that they are “lecture-notes,” notes of students, or records of research and thought, brought periodically up to date, for consultation by advanced students. Since the structure of his doctrines is complex, and since he was long associated with the Academy and later a persistent critic of the doctrines of the Academy, his works have been chopped into pieces by critics seeking an evolution in them from Platonic idealism to scientific empiricism.
The period of Aristotle’s manhood coincided with the reduction of the Greek city-states to the hegemony of Macedonia and the twelve or thirteen years of his work in the Lyceum with the campaigns of Alexander the Great. Hermias was doubtless a kind of advance-guard of Philip’s projects against the Persians; Philip’s choice of Aristotle as tutor to Alexander associated him closely with the political fortunes of Macedonia; and Alexander doubtless suspected him of complicity in the plot against his life for which Aristotle’s nephew Callisthenes was executed; it is highly proba
ble that the Lyceum received support and endowments from Callisthenes, Antipater, or even Alexander. In an important sense an epoch of Greek history was brought to a close when Alexander, Aristotle, and Demosthenes all died within somewhat more than a year.
The life of Aristotle was thus spent in a period which has seemed confused and dim to historians who have learned from Demosthenes to see it as the time of the loss of Greek liberties and the decline of Greek ideals; it has seemed a period of stirring action which came close to the fulfillment of an ambitious hope to those who see in the growth of panhellenism preached by Isocrates the beginnings of more stable political organizations and in the exploits of Alexander the spread of Greek ideals. Aristotle spent a large part of his life as an alien in Athens, and he seems to have been unsympathetic with, if not unmindful of, the ambitions of Alexander. Contemporary political events and social changes left few marks on his political and moral philosophy, and the search for effects of social conditions in his metaphysics and in his contributions to science has led only to speculative generalizations concerning the influence of environment on thought: to the conclusion that the existence of classes in society suggested hierarchies in his conception of the universe, that slave labor led him to neglect the mechanical arts and prefer the theoretic to the practical sciences, that his theories were therefore verbal rather than based on the resources of experience, and that his physical principles reflected his conception of political rule. Apart from such speculations, it is clear that the peace which was forced on Athens by Macedonian domination permitted Aristotle to organize a course of studies and to initiate a vast scheme of research into the history of political organizations, of science, and philosophy—the study of constitutions of Greek states, of the history of mathematics and medicine, and of the opinions of philosophers—as well as into the natural history of minerals, plants, and animals, and to lay the foundations thereby for one of the first attempts at an encyclopedic organization of human knowledge.
Richard McKeon
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
How to Use Chapter and Footnote Links
PREFACE by Richard McKeon
INTRODUCTION by C.D.C. Reeve
ORGANON (The collection of Aristotle’s logical treatises)
CATEGORIAE (Categories) (complete)
DE INTERPRETATIONE (On Interpretation) (complete)
ANALYTICA PRIORA (Prior Analytics) (Book I, Chapters 1–7, 13, 23–31; Book II, Chapters 16–27)
ANALYTICA POSTERIORA (Posterior Analytics) (complete)
TOPICA (Topics) (Book I; Books II–VIII omitted)
DE SOPHISTICIS ELENCHIS (On Sophistical Refutations) (Chapters 1–3 and 34; [Chapters 4–33 omitted])
PHYSICA (Physics) (complete)
DE CAELO (On the Heavens) (Books I, II [Chapters 13 and 14], III and IV; [Chapters 1–12 of Book II omitted])
DE GENERATIONE ET CORRUPTIONE (On Generation and Corruption) (complete)
DE ANIMA (On the Soul) (complete)
PARVA NATURALIA (The Short Physical Treatises)
DE MEMORIA ET REMINISCENTIA (On Memory and Reminiscence) (complete)
DE SOMNIIS (On Dreams) (complete)
DE DIVINATIONE PER SOMNUM (On Prophesying by Dreams) (complete)
HISTORIA ANIMALIUM (The History of Animals) (Book V, Chapter 1; Book VIII, Chapter 1; Book IX, Chapter 1)
DE PARTIBUS ANIMALIUM (On the Parts of Animals) (Book I, Chapters 1–5; Book II, Chapter 1)
DE GENERATIONE ANIMALIUM (On the Generation of Animals) (Book I, Chapters 1, 17–18, 20–23)
METAPHYSICA (Metaphysics) (complete)
ETHICA NICOMACHEA (Nicomachean Ethics) (complete)
POLITICA (Politics) (complete)
RHETORICA (Rhetoric) (Books I and II complete; Book III, Chapters 1, 13–19 [Chapters 2–12 omitted])
DE POETICA (Poetics) (complete)
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
ARISTOTLE
How to Use Chapter and Footnote Links
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At the beginning of each work, you can click on the individual chapter numbers in the Contents listing to go to a specific section of that work. Click the number at the start of that section to go back to the Contents listing.
Within the works, you can click on footnotes to access explanatory notes or references to other works. Click the number at the beginning of a footnote to return to your place within the text.
PREFACE
The study of an ancient writer might appropriately envisage one or more of three objectives: the re-discovery and appreciation of past accomplishments and thoughts, the assemblage for present employment of odd, edifying, or useful items of information or knowledge, or the inquiry into truths whose specifications do not change with time. Although these three ends sometimes coincide in the reading of a philosopher who has been studied for centuries, the usual fate of philosophers, notwithstanding the concern for truth evinced in their writings, is to suffer doctrinal dismemberment by later philosophers and to undergo at the hands of historians and philologists reconstructions in which doctrine is barely discernible. As a result of the possible diversification of these ends, the influences that have been attributed to the thoughts of philosophers are not always easily calculable from examination of their own statements, yet the paradoxes, no less than the cumulative lines of progress, in intellectual history suggest the three ideals relevant to an introduction to the philosophy of Aristotle and selections from his works.
An introduction to the works of a philosopher should, first, since it is intended to supply aids to understanding the man and his thought, be specific and clear in its authentication of the information it conveys. The words of the philosopher himself are the best means by which to achieve such authenticity, and therefore the works of Aristotle have been reproduced intact and unabridged so far as the generous limits of space in this large volume have made such reproduction practicable and, where omissions have been unavoidable, the fact of the omission and the character of the omitted portions have been indicated as explicitly as possible. To select and rearrange small fragments of a philosopher’s works is to recompose them and often to alter the doctrines they express. Therefore instead of parcels and snatches selected and pieced together with an eye to what seems more likely to catch the interest of the reader, the entire texts of seven of the most important books are included, and even when omissions have been made from the other seven works of which parts are published in this edition, entire books or entire chapters have been retained.
The vast labors which have been expended on the text of Aristotle during the last century have greatly facilitated the study of his philosophy. The monumental Oxford translation of his works into English, completed in 1931, was made possible by antecedent scholarly efforts, in which philologists have engaged at least since the publication of the great modern edition of Aristotle’s works by the Berlin Academy between 1831 and 1870, to determine and to clarify what Aristotle says. That translation is readable and makes Aristotle’s philosophy available to readers untrained in Greek as no previous English translation had. The eleven volumes of the Oxford translation can be reduced to a single volume, once the clearly inauthentic works have been excluded from consideration, without too serious loss of portions that bear on problems of general philosophic interest. The texts of seven works are complete: the Physics, On generation and corruption, On the soul, the Metaphysics, the Nicomachean ethics, the Politics, and the Poetics. For the most part omissions are from the four biological works; several of the Short natural treatises are omitted; of the physical works only the Meteorology and a portion of one of the four books of On the heavens are omitted; similarly three of the six books of the Organon and one of the three books of the Rhetoric are in part omitted; the Constitution of Athens is not included. Of t
he works which are commonly held to be authentic only three are not reproduced even in partial selection—the Meteorology, On the progression of animals, and the Constitution of Athens; or, if the tendency to accept On the motion of animals and the Eudemian ethics as genuine is justified, the number omitted is five, although it might be held, since three books of the Nicomachean ethics appear without alteration in the Eudemian ethics, that selections from the latter work may be found in the text of the former.
Explanatory notes and cross references by which difficult passages and interrelations have been elucidated by the translators have for the most part been retained. Purely philological notes, on the other hand, have been omitted, although major problems which have led to emendations, interpolations, and transpositions are indicated. The pagination of the Bekker edition of the Greek text of Aristotle, which is published in the first two of the five volumes of the Berlin edition, has become the customary means to locate a passage in Aristotle, and it has therefore been reproduced within the text of the present edition. Thus, a reference to, say, Metaphysics xiii. 4. 1078b27, would place the passage in question in Chapter 4 of Book 13 (or Book M) of the Metaphysics, on line 27 of the second column, i. e. column b, of page 1078 of the Berlin edition. Since the two volumes are paged continuously, no special designation of the volumes is needed; since the line references are to lines in the Greek text, they are of course only approximate in the English translation.
To make a difficult writer like Aristotle available in translation without, in the second place, supplying the dubious reader with more specific and urgent motivation for study than the recommendation that Aristotle is of the select group of timelessly great philosophers would scarcely constitute adequate introduction to his philosophy. For good or evil our interests and our erudition are grounded in the age in which we live, and the justice of our view of the past is moderated by the contemporary angle which can never be wholly removed from the perspective in which we see it. The words, the aphorisms, the distinctions, and even the ideas of Aristotle have in many instances become commonplaces in our culture and in other instances have been made the familiar whipping horses by which we castigate old errors and so boast of our own advances. It is wise to profit by our limitations and to make the familiar vestiges of a philosopher’s thoughts in present-day inquiries and interests the beginning point of the study of his philosophy. The ordered presentation of Aristotle’s doctrines in the Introduction finds its emphases precisely in such vestigial remains selected as points of interest for the reader who comes to Aristotle for renewed acquaintance or for the first time.
The Basic Works of Aristotle (Modern Library Classics) Page 1
