Socrates, Plato and Aristotle This was a unique combination of teachers and students never again seen in the history of Western Civilization. Information on Aristotle's life comes from lots of sources, some good, some not so good. Aristotle Greek Born in 384 BC in Stagira Parents were Nicomachus and Phaestis His father was court physician to the king of Macedon. At 17 he traveled to Athens. At the time Athens was the center of culture and learning Became pupil of Plato, who was of course a pupil of Socrates He left Athens in 347, it is unclear why. Possibly due to Plato's death After that he went to the court of king Philip II of Macedon where tradition says he was Alexander's main tutor. When Alexander became king he went back to Athens and founded the Lyceum "Peripatetics": Based on Greek verb meaning to walk and stroll about Aristotle stayed there for about 12 years until he was brought up on charges of impeity as Socrates was Unlike Socrates, Aristotle got the hell out of Dodge and left Athens, to prevent Athens from "erring against philosophy a second time" Not all of Aristotle's works have survived. Over 20 volumes in a standard Greek-English edition. Subjects covered by Aristotle: Logic Rhetoric Morals Politics Biology Physics Metaphysics, the "first philosophy" Four extant writings associated with Aristotle that deal with right action and matters of character: Eudemian Ethics Nicomachean Ethics Magna Moralia Virtues and Vices Authenticity of VV and MM are generally doubted Eudemian Ethics was by Aristotle but is very less polished, possibly a first draft Nicomachean Ethics Comprises 10 books each divided into a number of chapters Chapter divisions likely the work of later editors The title is never used by Aristotle himself but may refer to Aristotle's father or son. No one knows. The Nicomachean Ethics is very carefully organized and is half of a whole work on the "philosophy of human affairs" The other have is the Politics Each book refers to the other Question at the heart of NE: What is the human good? Another way to phrase the question, What is happiness? Eudaimonia: Happiness that covers the excellence specific to human beings as human beings, or virtue (arete) Virtue can only be identified relative to activity! For Aristotle, then, the question of how to be happy is the question of how to live well as a human being. Living well is inseparable from attaining the virtues that make possible the best activity. Humans live in communities, thus there is an unbreakable connection between the Ethics and the Politics. The Ethics is about ultimate individual happiness and good. The Politics is about ultimate priority of the collective human good. Is this possible? Not in the current day and age. Collective wisdom tells us that nobody knows what THE good life is. Your answer is as good as Aristotles! Is the quest that Aristotle set for himself possible, or merely interesting? Is your answer to that question based on actually reading and understanding the Ethics, or just on "conventional wisdom"? Be open minded Are we modern people really the very first ones who have dealt with the issues of "the good" and moral relativism? Aristotle had to deal with Sophists like Heraclitus: "the human being is the measure of the things that are that they are; of the things that are not, that they are not" The Ancient Greeks knew that our perceptions of the outside world were not reliable access to the objective world. At the start of the Ethics, Aristotle covers a troubling consequence of this view: If there is no knowable good or end in accord with which human beings can order their lives, then all human longing is finally "empty and pointless" ... but see Nietschze Aristotle does NOT refute this claim, but presses on with his mission because the question of our good is too important Aristotle also observes that every political community supplies us with an authoritative answer to the question of human good Each community has an orthodoxy of good, and every individual in that community is shaped by that communities views on the good and the bad. In spite of this, Aristotle presses on with his mission to understand "the good" The Ethics has at it's heart the most important human question: What is our purpose, what is "good"? This is in spite of moral relativism and the fact that we already have LOTS of answers for what is "good" for a particular community. The most well-known part of the Ethics is the discussions on the moral and intellectual virtues that are most important to human perfection. It is fucking weird. Why is "happiness" ignored and moral virtues are covered instead? Why are there 11 moral virtues? Why not 10? Or 15? How did Aristotle figure out that these virtues are the most important ones? In trying to figure out the answers to these questions and many, many others, your opinions and perspectives will be challenged. What's at stake here? Aristotle on Friendship: "...without friends, no one would wish to live, even if he possessed all other goods" The Ethics is Aristotle's intellecutal hunt for the life worth living. Aristotelian philosophy was taught as the "truth" in early "universities" established by the Roman Catholic Church following the fall of the Western Roman Empire. From roughly 500 AD to 1000 AD, there were no universities anywhere. Scholasticism: Method of critical thinking that dominated the teaching of early academics in the earliest universities from about 1100 to about 1700. Early Scholasticism dates from around 700 AD Places a very strong emphasis on dialectical reasoning, extending knowledge by inference, and resolving contradictions. Thomas Aquinas Dominican friar and Roman Catholic priest The greatest thinker to arise from the Scholastic period and one of the most influential philosophers and theologians of Western civilization Much of modern philosophy is in response to Aquinas Most known works Summa Theologica: One of the greatest works of Western philosophy and literature. Summarizes and explicates the theology of the Catholic Church Summa contra Gentiles: Apologists "manual" for missionaries. Commentaries on Sacred Scripture and Commentaries on Aristotle All of St. Thomas Aquinas' work reflects a strong influence from Aristotle as he worked to incorporate Aristotle into Catholocism. Thomism is the school of thought influenced by his works. From the Middle Ages onward, Aristotle's influence was strong in our view of morality. So what happened? Why do we have moral relativism nowadays? Alasdair MacIntyre MacIntyre was well established as a Marxist theorist by the early 1960s At that time, Nikita Khruschev in the USSR was opening up about the atrocities committed during the reign of Josef Stalin Since MacIntyre was a Marxist, one of the things he felt he had to do was to defend Marxism against being "stained" by Stalinism. He couldn't do it. This problem launched him on a life-long quest to figure out why. He read the works of Thomas Kuhn and Irme Lakatos on the philosophy of science and epistemology. He realized he could re-frame his perspective on ethics by looking at modern ethics "... not from the standpoint of liberal modernity, but instead from the standpoint of... Aristotelian moral and political practice" What did he discover: The Enlightenment! During the 1600s and 1700s, cultural and intellectual forces in Western Europe emphasized reason, analysis, and individualism rather than tradition and lines of authority .