The Basic Works of Aristotle

1752 Pages·2001·8.46 MB·English

by  Aristotle

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 All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright
Conventions. Published in the United States by Modern Library, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a
division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
MODERN LIBRARY and the TORCHBEARER Design are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
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: 978-0-30741752-7
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 probable 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