12/8/21

OK, this is how it goes. Aristotle is the paradigm of privileged white male that is attacked so viciously by liberal media. He is the original idea which passed to the cultural subconsciousness of western culture and took many forms through time (Homo Economicus comes in mind as one).

Aristotle as an aristocrat does not like democracy. He does not like that slaves can buy their freedom and become citizens (and have a say in city's affairs). He likes things neat and tidy so that males with superior intellect can thrive. Aristotle considers women as inferior beings because they have only practical thought and they lack abstract (theoretical) thinking. He also considers slaves inferior because they cannot think well by themselves. So for a person who cannot think well the best he can do is to serve the people who can think well. Slavery for Aristotle is a natural thing.

So if you like misogyny and submission Aristotle is your guy.

Nothing wrong with superior intellect, given that 47-53% of it comes from access to quality food and quality education. Not everyone can be a genius, but in a society where healthy food, healthy water and healthy schooling are standard rather than limited to elites, you can get 85% of the population above the current average, and most of the rest to the current average. Of course, that doesn't change the overall distribution, but it does mean you have a decent society.

The other point is that populism is less effective at mass control when you have people who are educated and intelligent. We can't free everyone from such control, but if we free more than half for any given issue, that frees the remainder. Herd immunity in a democracy.

I have no problems with aristocracy provided they are politically neutral and chosen by merit and intelligence rather than by cash bribes or as payment for support in politics. They should not rule, per-se, but their position affords them a means to stop corruption and perversion of the system. I'd use a jury pool system to decide who can vote - power corrupts, so you turn the power off and only briefly on again. That's how you avoid tyranny.

The democratic part has to improve too, vote fraud by political parties is common, as is gerrymandering, and voters feel too disenfranchised to vote. I'd double the number elected, splitting one vote between the two top candidates according to their percentage of the vote. That way, representatives actually represent the people they say they are. This would keep inside Plato's and Aristotle's political theories but would have the benefit of the experience since them. You see, they weren't wrong on politics, in my opinion, just victims of overgeneralizing and oversimplification. We can fix those errors.

On most other issues, Aristotle was wrong completely. Only in logic was he again partially correct. Women, slaves, medicine, and so on, he was utterly out.

That brings me to the issue of mental health. His axioms are mostly wrong and the rest are oversimplified. His logic doesn't matter because if you put garbage in, you get garbage out.

Of course Aristotle was a racist and misogynist because he was around in a time when gender or racial equality didn't even exist as concepts. However, you can read him very selectively and still find a few, not many, ideas of value -- kind of like a lot of pre-modern thought. Obviously, no one in 2020 should accept everything any ancient thinker wrote or said. Dah! ( )

3.5/5
Pretty much what it advertises. A distillation of Aristotle's most important breakthroughs in philosophy.

Logic, pursuit of happiness, function, form, art and so on.

It's interesting and helps put things into perspective, especially when you realise he lived more than 300BC. Makes you wish his teachings got the same attention as religion got and imagine the world that could have created. ( )

Is Aristotle for everybody? Well, that's Mortimer J. Adler's proposal for this book. With a presentation that is both simple (avoiding complicated terms and hard to grasp concepts) and thorough (trying to cover most of the important aspects of Aristotle's thought, the author does indeed makes Aristotle a more palatable subject for the uninitiated, thus making this book a very good introduction to those looking for broaden their scope into one (if not the) of the most important authors in Ancient Philosophy.

For everybody? Even a child can understand? No.

It seems ironic to me that many people seem to think this book is too simple to understand. I think it suffers from the opposite problem. If you are not interested in philosophy persé and just want to know about Aristotle because he seems to be one of the few philosophers that actually had anything practical and insightful to say then you will be disappointed with this book. It reads like a philosophy book: dull, complex and verbose, needlessly so. The whole reason that I bought this book is because I had hoped Adler had picked the interesting parts of Aristotle's philosophy and made it even more interesting. This is not the case! I might have been better off just reading the works of Aristotle himself.

Definitely not for everybody!
( )