David Sedley, Companion to Greek and Roman Philosophy [end of year Aristotle series]
Aristotle/2022: The aim is to find out what it would be like to face the questions that Aristotle faced and to think as he thought..
[Readers of Social Science Files please note that for the 2 remaining weeks of 2022 I will be focusing on Aristotle (d.322 BC). Exhibits will be shortish sometimes daily.]
David Sedley wrote:
Introduction
… It was the Stoics of the third century BC who, building on a set of insights provided by their figurehead Socrates, set the standard for what is to count as ‘good’ so high that only moral virtue could satisfy it; all other, conventional uses of ‘good’, they inferred, as applied for example to what is merely practically advantageous, represent a different and strictly incorrect sense of the term. The Stoics did not themselves go on to infer that the (genuine) goodness of a life is not something given in nature, but their distinction is nevertheless the very earliest forerunner of that radical division between kinds of goodness.
Once we have reconstructed where and how our own presupposition began its long career, it becomes not only easier, but also potentially liberating, to put the clock back and consider the advantages of the earlier outlook, where ‘good’ was not roped off into moral and functional senses. It was from such a unified starting point, for example, that Aristotle was able to compose an ethical treatise, the Nicomachean Ethics, which has still not in two and a half millennia been superseded by any rival.
Another common reaction to the same treatment of moral goodness as some kind of functional goodness is to protest that, unlike a scalpel, a human being cannot be assumed to have any function at all – not, at any rate, without supplying some contentious theological presuppositions. Here too there is much to learn from Aristotle, who made a powerful case for understanding living beings, humans included, and their parts in terms of their natural functions, without for a moment admitting divine design or government. …
… In reconstructing the thought of the ancients, we need not be seeking to vindicate their beliefs, whether by assimilating our ideas to theirs or theirs to ours. But what we can always fruitfully do is find out what it would be like to face the questions that they faced and to think as they thought. Learning to strip off our own assumptions and to try on the thought processes of others who lacked them is almost invariably an enlightening and mind-stretching exercise. For a variety of reasons, the Greek and Roman philosophers are supremely suitable subjects for the kind of enterprise I have been sketching. For one thing, as inaugurators of the tradition to which most of us are heirs they inevitably have a very special place in our understanding of our own intellectual make-up. …
The Source:
David Sedley, ‘Introduction’, in The Cambridge Companion to Greek and Roman Philosophy, University of Cambridge 2003
[MGH: David Sedley was signed up today as a subscriber and during the next 2 weeks we shall exhibit his chapter on ‘Aristotle’ in Creationism and Its Critics in Antiquity.]
Evolutions of social order from the earliest humans to the present day and future machine age.