Aristotle: His Life and School

243 Pages·2013·6.91 MB·English

by  Carlo Natali (Author)

Aristotle

A r i s tot l e
His life And
scHool
cArlo nAtAli
edited by d. s. HutcHinson
Princeton university Press
Princeton And oxford
copyright © 2013 by Princeton university Press
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library of congress cataloging-in-Publication data
natali, carlo, 1948–
[bios theoretikos. english]
Aristotle : his life and school / carlo natali ; edited by d.s. Hutchinson.
pages cm
includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-691-09653-7 (alk. paper)
1. Aristotle. 2. Peripatetics. 3. Philosophers, Ancient—biography.
i. Hutchinson, d. s., 1955– ii. title.
b481.n3813 2013
185—dc23 [b] 2013009174
british library cataloging- in- Publication data is available
the translation of this book has been funded by sePs
via val d’Aposa 7, 40123 bologna, italy
tel: [phone] fax: [phone]
[email protected] - www.seps.it
this book has been composed in dante Mt std
Printed on acid- free paper. ∞
Printed in the united states of America
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
contents
Preface (2013) - p. vii
introduction (1990) - p. 1
Chapter One • The Biography of Aristotle:
facts, Hypotheses, conjectures - p. 5
1. Many facts, not All of equal interest - p. 5; 2. stagira - p. 6; 3. A family of
notables - p. 8; 4. A Provincial Pupil - p. 17; 5. A sudden interruption - p. 31;
6. At the courts of Princes and Kings - p. 32; 6.1. Atarneus - p. 32; 6.2. Macedonia -
p. 42; 7. the Adventure of callisthenes - p. 52; 8. Athens revisited - p. 55; 9. trial
and flight - p. 60; 10. from traditional customs, a new Model - p. 64
chapter two • institutional Aspects of the school of Aristotle - p. 72
1. the three conditions of the theoretical life in Aristotle - p. 72;
2. the organization of Theōria: the nature and organization of the
Philosophical schools - p. 77; 3. the organization of Theōria: Philosophical
schools and Permanent institutions - p. 83; 4. subsequent events - p. 90
Chapter Three • Internal Organization of the School of Aristotle - p. 96
1. the collections of books - p. 96; 2. Methods of Gathering and interpreting
information - p. 104; 3. teaching supports and instruments of research - p. 113;
4. teaching While strolling - p. 117
chapter four • studies of Aristotle’s biography
from Zeller to the Present day - p. 120
1. sources of Aristotle’s biography - p. 120; 1.1. texts of Aristotle - p. 120;
1.2. official documents - p. 124; 1.3. Ancient biographies of Aristotle - p. 125;
1.4. the Testimonia of Ancient Authors - p. 130; 2. images of Aristotle from the
nineteenth century to the Present - p. 135
Postscript (2012) - p. 145
notes to: ch. 1 - p. 153; ch. 2 - p. 170; ch. 3 - p. 175; ch. 4 - p. 177
index of sources - p. 181
i) epigraphy - p. 181; ii) papyri - p. 181; iii) ancient authors - p. 181; iv) ancient
biographies of Aristotle - p. 193; v) modern collections of evidence - p. 194
bibliographical index - p. 196
index of Persons and Places - p. 211

PrefAce (2013)
one of the first books i recall reading, after i learned italian in my for-
tieth year, was carlo natali’s scholarly study on Aristotle’s biography
and the establishment of the lyceum, BIOS THEORETIKOS: la vita di
Aristotele e l’organizzazione della sua scuola (bologna 1991). i found it to be
a masterful demonstration of the skill of marshalling complex informa-
tion; and a stable and more detailed picture of Aristotle came into focus
for me. i thought i was an expert in Aristotle, as i had read many books
on Aristotle in the course of my university career; but i had never seen
such a quantity of information about who Aristotle really was, some
derived from extraordinarily arcane sources, presented with such clarity
and such compactness. What i absorbed by reading this one book amply
repaid the effort i invested in learning italian.
it gives me great pleasure to present this translated and updated
version of carlo natali’s book to english readers. i am confident that
Aristotle: His Life and School will serve as the new modern standard
biography of Aristotle, and the essential starting point for all future
research on the person of Aristotle and on the intellectual way of life
that he pioneered.
Aristotle’s thought remains very much alive for us today, despite
the great antiquity of his works, and his Nicomachean Ethics is the most
widely studied book of moral philosophy at present on north American
university campuses. Aristotle invented a new way of being an intellec-
tual and his legacy as an institution-b uilder is profound: he founded an
institution dedicated to advancing the life of the mind and the progress
of the sciences, a research and teaching institution that is the distant
forerunner of modern scientific learned societies. As our modern aca-
demic and research institutions continue to evolve in changing times,
the life that Aristotle led and the intellectual life of his lyceum remain
topics of fascination and inspiration.
viii • Preface •
it is no easy matter to assemble all the available information about
Aristotle and sort it from the misinformation, so that a complete and
coherent biography results. there were two celebrated attempts to
do this in the twentieth century, both of which remain classics in the
field: Werner Jaeger’s Aristotle (1923, translated into english in 1934),
and ingemar düring’s Aristotle in the Ancient Biographical Tradition
(1957). for judicious evaluations of these books, readers are invited to
consult natali’s comments on them (these can be located by using the
indexed bibliography compiled for this updated english edition). it is
not my place to evaluate the contributions made by these two books,
but this surely is the place for me to point out to my readers the virtues
of natali’s book.
in my view, this book is as comprehensive as düring 1957, and as
insightful as Jaeger 1923; the evidence is as close to hand as in düring,
and the prose is as readable as in Jaeger; natali’s organization is far
clearer and more user-f riendly than düring’s, and his judicious con-
clusions are not vitiated by controversial speculations about the supposed
development of Aristotle’s philosophy, a vice of historiography that rep-
resents the main flaw in Jaeger’s work. in my personal library, natali’s
book has become the standard- setting work, the most outstanding
Aristotle biography of the twentieth century.
in the rest of this preface, i will give a brief account of how this
revised and updated english edition came about, as well as what is new
and what has been improved. but first i wish to reflect briefly on the
achievements of the original italian edition in bringing together a coher-
ent biographical framework with which to control the scattered, exigu-
ous, indirect, and uncertain forms of evidence that presently survive.
in his introduction (1990), natali reflected on what it would be to
succeed at his task, starting from criteria derived from George steiner.
the biography of a philosopher should “seek to make the biographical
data correspond with the work of the philosopher, and to draw from
this attempt the grounds of its legitimation; and yet completing a proj-
ect of this sort, with a vision of the connections between life and theory
that is both analytic and intuitive, would ‘require something like genius’
and ‘demand formidable authority.’ linking the biographical events of
a philosopher with the special characteristics of his thought is there-
• Preface • ix
fore an undertaking as difficult as it is fascinating.” in some cases, this
linkage is possible and has been brilliantly carried out, notably by Mau-
rice cranston in his magnificent biographies Jean-J acques: The Early Life
and Work of Jean- Jacques Rousseau, 1712– 1754 and The Noble Savage: Jean-
Jacques Rousseau, 1754– 1762 (published in 1983 and 1991). these biogra-
phies have the rich narrative flow and insightful detail of novels, while
being rigorously based only on the most primary evidence, namely
archival documents written by rousseau himself or his correspondents.
but this is precisely where the difference resides between an Aristotle
biography and a rousseau biography. the surviving handwritten archi-
val evidence written by and pertaining to rousseau is so extensive and
so expressive of his personality and thought that cranston was able to
dispense with later scholarly sources, since he had better evidence in the
modern archives than had been used by previous rousseau biographers.
With Aristotle, the situation is entirely reversed: not a single archival
document survives from the classical period; Aristotle’s personality
was not morbidly self- expressive in the way that rousseau’s clearly was
(i cannot conceive of Aristotle writing a work like rousseau’s Confes-
sions); the facts and probabilities about key events need to be puzzled
out on the basis of later ancient scholarly sources, all of whose works
have themselves been lost in their original forms, except to the extent
that there are damaged papyrus fragments remaining, or portions of
their work that happen to have survived in one or more medieval manu-
scripts and have received a modern printed edition. Access to the scat-
tered exiguous information on Aristotle is multiply indirect, and often
compromised into uncertainty by the agendas of the ancient (or mod-
ern) scholars who transmit it. the brilliance of a successful Aristotle
biography such as this one resides primarily in the careful marshaling
and judicious assessment of the intermediate sources, as well as the
insightful interpretation of passages in Aristotle’s own works; the result
is a stable and responsible picture of the biography, even though the phi-
losopher is not personally revealed as fully or as intimately as rousseau.
i became acquainted with carlo natali in 1997–9 8 in Padua, where
i was spending the year as a guest of our colleague enrico berti. After
i had commented on a draft of an english translation of natali’s book
La Saggezza di Aristotele (published in 2001 as The Wisdom of Aristotle), i