Reference
Aristotle, by Christopher Shields,
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 29 Jul 2015
Partial list of sections: Aristotle's Life - The Aristotelian Corpus - Logic, Science, and Dialectic - Essentialism and Homonymy - Category Theory - Aristotelian Teleology - Happiness and Political Association - Rhetoric and the Arts - Aristotle's Legacy
"Aristotle was sent to Athens at about the age of seventeen to study in Plato's Academy, then a pre-eminent place of learning in the Greek world. Once in Athens, Aristotle remained associated with the Academy until Plato's death in 347, at which time he left for Assos, in Asia Minor, on the northwest coast of present-day Turkey. There he continued the philosophical activity he had begun in the Academy, but in all likelihood also began to expand his researches into marine biology."
Aristotle (382-322 BC), by Fred Miller,
The Encyclopedia of Libertarianism, 15 Aug 2008
Biographical essay
"Aristotle of Stagira was a Greek philosopher, logician, and scientist and one of the most influential ancient thinkers. As a young man, Aristotle entered Plato's Academy in Athens, where he studied for 20 years. Subsequently, he was invited by Philip of Macedon to tutor his son, the future Alexander the Great. Aristotle later returned to Athens to found his own school, the Lyceum, and write some of his most important treatises. After Alexander's sudden death, Aristotle had to flee Athens because of his Macedonian affiliation, and he died soon after."
Aristotle (384-322 B.C.E.),
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Includes biography, general and detailed reviews of Aristotle's writings on various topics; major sections: Life - Writings - Logic - Metaphysics - Philosophy of Nature - The Soul and Psychology - Ethics - Politics - Art and Poetics
"Aristotle is a towering figure in ancient Greek philosophy, making contributions to logic, metaphysics, mathematics, physics, biology, botany, ethics, politics, agriculture, medicine, dance and theatre. He was a student of Plato who in turn studied under Socrates. He was more empirically-minded than Plato or Socrates and is famous for rejecting Plato's theory of forms."
Biography
Aristotle (384 BC-322 BC)
Part of the Goodrich Seminar Room; includes bibliography and links to Thales, Plato and others
"In 335 B.C. he returned to Athens and established the Lyceum, a rival school to the Academy of Plato. Indicative of Aristotle's competing philosophical position, the Lyceum was a center for philosophic contemplation and empirical research. Aristotle's surviving works appear to have been lectures given at the school. They cover a variety of topics, including politics, physics, ethics, economics, a historical analysis of the Athenian Constitution, and much more."
Web Pages
Aristotle - Online Library of Liberty
Includes picture, short biography and links to quotes and works by the author, in particular
Constitution of Athens,
The Nichomachean Ethics,
The Politics and
Posterior Analytics
"Aristotle was an ancient Greek philosopher who set up a rival academy, The Lyceum, to challenge Plato's Academy. Aristotle wrote influential works in a range of disciplines - politics, physics, ethics, economics - and had a profound impact on Western thought."
Articles
Aristotle Called the 2016 Election, by Martin Cothran, 17 Nov 2016
Argues that, as per Aristotle in
Rhetoric, in an election contest between a candidate with an inspiring personality (
pathos) vs. another with good character (
ethos) or intellect (
logos), the former is more likely to win
"Almost 2,500 years ago, Aristotle wrote his book, Rhetoric. It remains today one of the best books on persuasion ever written. Such a book comes in handy during an event like an election, since an election is what Aristotle might have called a "rhetorical situation." It is an event in which two or more people are each trying to persuade the public that he or she is the best person for the job. In his book, Aristotle says that there are three ways in which people are persuaded: ethos, logos, and pathos. ... Pathos has to do with the emotional state of the audience: does the speaker reach the hearts of his hearers?"
Aristotle Understood the Importance of Property, by
Richard Ebeling, 27 Sep 2016
Discusses Aristotle's views on private property and property rights (contrasting them with those of Plato), the "ends" of human life, economics ("household management"), wealth acquisition, prices, money and related topics
"When we turn to another famous ancient Greek philosopher, Aristotle (384 B.C. – 322 B.C.), we find little of the political regimentation that characterizes his teacher, Plato. For Aristotle, the appropriate behavior is the "golden mean," that is, the avoidance of "extreme" ... goals ... While he hopes that wise policies may help to improve the conditions and actions of men, Aristotle recognizes that man possesses a human nature that cannot be molded or bent or transformed to conform to some ideal of a perfect State populated by transformed people in the way that Plato believed was in principle desirable and possible."
Ayn Rand on Aristotle, by
George H. Smith, 4 Mar 2016
Examines Rand's appreciative view of Aristotle based on his epistemological theories while disregarding his comments on slavery, racism and coercive government laws
"Thus, if Aristotle's rational epistemology did not prevent him from defending racism, slavery, and statism, this could only be because Aristotle himself did not understand the logical implications of his own epistemology. And if later defenders of racism, slavery, and statism were profoundly influenced by Aristotle's theories, this was only because they, too, did not appreciate that such theories were inconsistent with Aristotle's theory of knowledge."
Bourgeois Virtues?, by Deirdre McCloskey,
Cato Policy Report, May 2006
Offers an apologia (formal defense) of capitalism, in particular of the phrase "bourgeois virtues" as being neither a contradiction in terms nor a lie
"The virtues came to be gathered by the Greeks, the Romans, the Stoics, the Church, Adam Smith, and recent 'virtue ethicists' into a coherent ethical framework. Until the framework somewhat mysteriously fell out of favor among theorists in the late 18th century, most Westerners did not think in Platonic terms ... They thought in Aristotelian terms of Many Virtues, plural. 'We shall better understand the nature of the ethical character,' said Aristotle, 'if we examine its qualities one by one.'"
Dialectics and Liberty: A Defense of Dialectical Method in the Service of a Libertarian Social Theory, by
Chris Matthew Sciabarra,
The Freeman, Sep 2005
Written ten years after publication of the first two of Sciabarra's "Dialectic and Liberty" trilogy, discusses Hayek's and Rand's dialectical analysis approaches and suggests that such context-keeping analysis is important in radical libertarian theory
"In fact, the father of dialectics, the man whom Hegel himself called the "fountainhead" of dialectical inquiry, was Aristotle. In works such as the Topics—the very first theoretical treatise on dialectics—Aristotle presented numerous techniques by which one might gain a more complete picture of an issue by varying one's "point of view." The Topics serves as a grand discussion of how shifts in one's perspective can reveal different things about the objects of our inquiry, and about the perspectives from which those objects are viewed."
Ethics Study Guide: Aristotle, by
Roderick T. Long
Part of study guide to Prof. Long's introductory ethics course; includes biographical details, comments on Aristotle's ethical and political writings, short introductions to
Rethoric and
Nichomachean Ethics and study questions
"Aristotle believes that most of his fellow Greeks are mistaken about the nature of the human good, identifying it with wealth or power rather than with virtuous activity. ... Aristotle's theories have been seen as a mere transcription of existing mores only because modern scholars have mistakenly read Aristotle's outlook back into the mores that he is in fact criticizing. ... But a careful reading of his works shows that Aristotle was keenly aware of, and bitterly opposed to, the centralizing political trends of his day."
First Freedom, by Tom G. Palmer,
Reason, Jun 1993
Review of
Liberty and Nature: An Aristotelian Defense of Liberal Order by Douglas B. Rasmussen and Douglas J. Den Uyl
"In Liberty and Nature: An Aristotelian Defense of Liberal Order, the authors attempt to ground a defense of (classical) liberal values in the tradition of inquiry initiated by Aristotle. That seems to be quite a challenge, given that Aristotle himself, apart from a few lines critical of Plato's proposals for communism and the abolition of property, was in general either hostile to or unaware of (understandable, given the times) most of the principal elements of classical-liberal political thought ..."
Herbert Spencer - Hero of the Day, by
Chris Matthew Sciabarra,
The Daily Objectivist, 2000
Argues that Spencer was a pioneer of "dialectical" (context-keeping) libertarianism
"Spencer is a genuine contextualist, sensitive to the reciprocal relations among parts within a whole. It was Aristotle who first explored the mutual implications of "correlatives," such as "master" and "slave." Hegel stressed the same notion in his analysis of the relationship between "lord" and "bondsman." Like Aristotle and Hegel, Spencer explains "that correlatives imply one another," as surely as a father implies a child, a child the father. ... Spencer absorbs the organic metaphor from Aristotle in much the same way as Hegel did."
Libertarianism: The Moral and the Practical, by
Sheldon Richman,
Future of Freedom, May 2014
Explores whether libertarian policies ought to be based on moral or practical bases, with insigths from Aristotle, Adam Smith, Tibor Machan, Roderick Long and others
"The concern of ethics, according to Aristotle, is to learn how such a being must think and act in order to flourish individually and as a member of society; the object of consideration is 'the practical life of man as possessing reason.' That's why prudence (or practical wisdom) finds a place on his list of virtues. In Rational Man: A Modern Interpretation of Aristotelian Ethics, Henry B. Veatch elaborates why ethics may be regarded as the art of living, although, to be sure, it is an art unlike all other arts."
The Philosophical Origins of Austrian Economics, by David Gordon,
Mises Daily, 17 Jun 2006
Surveys the views of the schools of philosophy and economics that influenced or competed with Austrian economics, including Hegel, the Historical School, Franz Brentano, Occam, Karl Marx, Aristotle, Kant, the logical positivists and Karl Popper
"Aristotle argues that a complete science must start with a self-evident axiom and, by the use of deduction, exfoliate the entire discipline. ... Aristotle also discusses the necessity of self-evident principles in the Nicomachean Ethics. He notes that to justify a proposition, one would normally proceed by citing another proposition. But if matters are left at this, the task is not finished. What in turn justifies the proposition advanced in support of one's original claim?"
The Revolution Was, by
Garet Garrett, 1938
Monograph describing the nine problems faced by New Dealers and how they were handled according to "revolutionary technic"
"There are those who have never ceased to say very earnestly, 'Something is going to happen to the American form of government if we don't watch out.' These were the innocent disarmers. Their trust was in words. They had forgotten their Aristotle. More than 2,000 years ago he wrote of what can happen within the form, when 'one thing takes the place of another, so that the ancient laws will remain, while the power will be in the hands of those who have brought about revolution in the state.'"
Books
Aristotle: A Contemporary Appreciation
by Henry Babcock Veatch, 1974
Partial contents: Aristotle Redivivus - Physics: The Nature of Things Physical - Physics: The Nature of Things Animate and Things Human - Varieties of Human Achievement: Ethics, Politics, Poetics and the Arts - After the Physics, Methaphysics
Aristotle's First Principles
by Terence Irwin, 1988
Partial contents: The Problem of First Principles - Inquiry and Dialectic - Constructive Dialectic - Puzzles about Substance - The Formal Cause - Conditions for Science - Puzzles about Science - The Universal Science - The science of Being
Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism
by
Chris Matthew Sciabarra, 2000
Partial Contents: Aristotle: The Fountainhead - From Aristotle to Hegel - After Hegel - Defining Dialectics - Foundations - The Market versus the State - Class Dynamics and Structural Crisis - On the Precipice of Utopia - The Dialectical Libertarian Turn
Books Authored
A New Aristotle Reader
by J. L. Ackrill (Editor), Aristotle, 1988
Contents: Translations - Aristotle's Works - Introduction - Glossary - TEXTS: Logic - Natural Philosophy - Metaphysics - Practical Philosophy - Topics - List of Books
Audio
2. Aristotle, by David Gordon,
The History of Political Philosophy: From Plato to Rothbard, 5 Jun 2007
Lecture 2 of 10 of the
History of Political Philosophy series, 90 minutes
"Aristotle, 384-322 BC, joined Plato's Academy in Athens at eighteen and remained there until the age of thirty-seven. He was not a citizen of Athens. His writings constitute the first comprehensive system of Western philosophy. He tutored Alexander the Great. That experience provided him with an abundance of supplies to work with. He established a library in the Lyceum."
Videos
Liberty & Virtue, by James Otteson, 29 Jun 2011
Explains why virtuous behaviour presupposes freely taken or uncoerced decisions
"Not all freely made choices, after all, are good. Some of them are bad. So what's the distinction? The distinction, I think—and I'm going to draw on Aristotle—is when we employ the concept of good judgment, the person of good judgment is the one who makes wise, virtuous choices. So take another step back. How do you get to be a person of good judgment? Well, there are two things that are necessary. First of all, as Aristotle said, you have to practice it. You can't have good judgment if you don't practice. Judgment is a skill. It's like other skills."
PHILOSOPHY - The Good Life: Aristotle, by Chris Surprenant, 9 Sep 2015
Summarises the views of Aristotle, as discussed in his Nicomachean Ethics and Politics, on what constitutes a "good life", why some humans act in a vicious or virtuous manner and what can influence such behaviour