The first section is simple but profound: all beings strive for the good for themselves, so we have a starting point to address the good of each and possibly all even across fundamental differences.

> he has some pretty messed up and weird views

They do, but by insisting on rationalizing any view rather than leaving it as a religious given, he sets the stage for destroying bias. Remember, Aristotle trained Alexander, and Alexander's military was successful because they embraced rather than destroying the people conquered (if they didn't fight back), and they even lost a fair bit of his Greek ways.

What’s an example?

Technically the words are that of Durant but the core idea is Aristotle.

My favorite part is the useless comment bellow each quote like: "The commenter above has stated that the quote is not from aristotle, this is important for the article"

Technically the words are that of Durant but the core idea is Aristotle.

It stemmed from the idea from Buddhism that 'a thousand words mean nothing compared to a single word that brings peace'. Some of the most profound and useful sayings I have come across have been just single lined things. That doesn't mean that it is the only way to communicate, not even close, just that they have a very useful place but only in context.

As for the translations, I recommend people look at multiple translations of ancient texts to see how they vary wildly. The Tao Te Ching is a great example because of how many options you have available. Some are poetic, others are fairly blunt. Others just completely miss the point. It is fun to see.

In his defense (sorry if defending him offends here), women probably did, at the time, often have fewer teeth due to worse dental care.

I found the views of the Neoplatonists to be fascinating even if one doesn't subscribe to those views.

Generally, read broadly and from multiple points of view.

Philosophy is not about clever observations! They are developing systems and arguments you have to actually read to understand.

One very common error people make is to believe that ethics - at least epistemically and for the most part - is sectarian. This view seems to stem from an ultimately nihilistic presupposition that morality is a fiction supplied by the fiction of religion. But that is not the natural law view and thus a view alien to both Aristotle and to Christianity. The natural law view is that human beings have a nature, which is most centrally to be a rational animal with the freedom to choose between alternatives apprehended by the intellect. Thus, Man has moral responsibility, because he plays a part in choosing what he does. Accordingly, because human nature defines what is good or bad for human beings (that which actualizes human potential in accord with reason vs. that which frustrates or opposes reason and the actualization of potential in accord with it), we bear responsibility for how we exercise our powers. Aristotle wasn't completely, but the core principles in the Metaphysics or his ethical works or in epistemology are - in my view - spot on.

What Christianity does or claims to do is supplement what is knowable by unaided reason with revealed knowledge - the object of faith - which, of course, does have ethical import, but it does not negate or supplant what is knowable by unaided reason.

FWIW, Aquinas drew heavily from Aristotle and had such enormous respect for Aristotle, he referred to him as simply "the Philosopher".

Entertaining an idea is understanding it. And, there is some research to show that understanding an idea is believing it. Hence, understanding an idea and not believing it is very effortful.

[1] https://bear.warrington.ufl.edu/brenner/mar7588/Papers/gilbe...

Would love to know if others have takes.

I agree it’s still interesting that major religions were not founded at the time of the early philosophers — maybe it’s because religion as we conceive of it today depends on a type of bureaucracy that wasn’t achievable in the classical era?

edit: whoa, I didn't realize how racist this guy was. He could be classified as a eugenicist I suppose.

He also believed in spontaneous generation (fair, without technology we have now it would be really confusing to understand where all kinds of things come from).

Seemed to believe infinity was impossible yet also that the heavens are infinite. Maybe he distinguished between the earthly and heavenly planes, but still seemed to think they were similarly constructed from elements.

The list goes on.

https://archive.org/details/religionpursuito0000lowe/page/n5...

Along the same lines: "Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence." -- Robert Frost

The classic example that's a bit wrong is a glass of water half empty or half full.

The true optimist doesn't see it as half full, he sees it as full. Half with water, half with air (being grateful for the air as well.)

The neutral person sees it as half full, and the depressive sees it as half empty.

An original source for this. I wonder if wisdom teeth affected this count? It’s so odd of a claim

Yeah, it's people like Tim Ferris, Ryan Holiday and others who write titles such as "how to think like a Roman emperor" (a terrible title if you know anything about Aurelius or Stoicism in some depth) and other tech bros are to blame. They drummed up excessive hype for Aurelius, he's good marketing material.

Neoplatonists: I tried reading Plotinus, but it didn't resonate with me, afraid. But it was a weak attempt.

I didn’t make that claim in any implied way, I asserted, correctly, that Aristotle is not an Abrahamic thinker.

> The natural law view is that human beings have a nature, which is most centrally to be a rational animal with the freedom to choose between alternatives apprehended by the intellect. Thus, Man has moral responsibility, because he plays a part in choosing what he does. Accordingly, because human nature defines what is good or bad for human beings (that which actualizes human potential in accord with reason vs. that which frustrates or opposes reason and the actualization of potential in accord with it), we bear responsibility for how we exercise our powers. Aristotle wasn't completely, but the core principles in the Metaphysics or his ethical works or in epistemology are - in my view - spot on.

The Nichomachean Ethics doesn’t discuss ethics within any context of absolute free will even, it is a very qualified doing. Aristotle explicitly points out that the actions of slaves are entirely disqualified from being considered ethical. Most Christian theologies would vehemently disagree precisely because having the supra-knowledge of the Mystery imparted upon one necessarily brings one's being into the dimension of revealed universality. That's not what Aristotle is talking about.

> What Christianity does or claims to do is supplement what is knowable by unaided reason with revealed knowledge - the object of faith - which, of course, does have ethical import, but it does not negate or supplant what is knowable by unaided reason.

All three of the Abrahamic theologies were infected by Neoplatonism, which . The Europeans revived their Neoplatonism through the Muslims even. The Middle Ages Christian theology of the "chain of being" is a riff on Neoplatonist "ladder of being".

Aristotle was describing in Metaphysics a cosmology concerned with unpacking the notion of motion as the actualization of potentiality, hence, "First Mover", which is not at all an Abrahamic idea.

> FWIW, Aquinas drew heavily from Aristotle and had such enormous respect for Aristotle, he referred to him as simply "the Philosopher".

This doesn’t interact with my point since it requires us first to ask how he read Aristotle, whom was not an Abrahamic thinker. An aside, but the Muslims called Aristotle “The Philosopher” (Ibn Rashud, Ibn Sina), and that tradition was received through the Muslims by their European readers.

-- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up[1], Esquire, February 1936

[1] https://www.esquire.com/lifestyle/a4310/the-crack-up (https://web.archive.org/web/20250328074803/https://www.esqui...)

apparently not, actually:

"The earliest that this quotation appears in print is in Religion and the Pursuit of Truth (1959) by Lowell Bennion."

or

"First attributed to Aristotle in Lowell L. Bennion, Religion and the Pursuit of Truth (1959). Unfound as such.

Sometimes thought (though I feel it's a bit of a stretch) a misinterpretation of Nicomachean Ethics 1.3.4 (1094b): "For it is the mark of an educated person to search for the same kind of clarity in each topic to the extent that the nature of the matter accepts it.""

I’m not sure. It appears this way from what I read, but it’s hard to know having not been alive 2000 years ago.

The notion that all human individual are of equal worth isn't exactly common. You may think it's weird, but it was fairly standard worldview for a lot of humanity for a lot of history. Your outlook may simply be shaped by living in a Christian-based culture:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominion_(Holland_book)

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_WEIRDest_People_in_the_Wor...

While I think curiosity is a natural human trait, doing "science" is not 'as natural', as certain metaphysical assumptions need to be in place before it can really be done, and not all worldviews/cultures accepted them:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalism_(philosophy)#Provid...

Which is to say that the founding of the Church by Jesus is not rooted in some wise teachings, but in claims about his identity. If his claim of Godhood is false, then the Church and the Christian faith are total charlatanism.

These are unfortunately still all too common beliefs. The latter has mostly been folded into racial essentialism and racial realist beliefs, because slavery is no longer legal (13th amendment loophole notwithstanding) and you can still find people arguing women are intellectually inferior and incapable of rational thought.

The whole anti-DEI movement is based on the premise that non-whites and women categorically don't deserve the same status in the workforce as white men, and the only reason they have "equality" is due to anti-white racism.

Aristotle has flaws, that's all.

I love his work on happiness. On the academic side of Philosophy, I believe his conception stands alongside what is typically called "Hedonism" defining the two major schools of thought, obviously with modern takes and twists. See the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on "Happiness" if you're interested.

To be clear, I'm a huge Aristotle fan. He's a towering intellect I will never come close to equaling. His ideas set the stage for very nearly all western thought. It just goes to show that everyone everywhere has deficiencies and blind spots. The smartest person who ever lived can still be wrong in extremely obvious ways in retrospect. Intelligence is no guarantee you're going to actually be right about very much.

> I didn’t make that claim in any implied way, I asserted, correctly, that Aristotle is not an Abrahamic thinker.

I was trying to make sense of what your two disconnected sentences were saying and used this as an opportunity to address what I suspected may be the underlying presuppositions.

> The Nichomachean Ethics doesn’t discuss ethics within any context of absolute free will even

Aristotle does, in fact, discuss "choice" (προαίρεσις) and the "voluntary" (τὸ ἑκούσιον) to lay the ground for moral responsibility. I grant you it is not identical to the view of, say, Aquinas who goes further than Aristotle - indeed, he takes Augustine's account of the will and integrates it with the Aristotelian - but it isn't a wholesale departure from the Aristotelian either. Aquinas calls the will "rational appetite" (voluntas ut ratio) which is a very Aristotelian take. A notable and immediately relevant Neoplatonic refinement he makes here - consistent with Aristotle - is the supplementation with voluntas ut natura.

Furthermore, I didn't write "absolute free will", by which I can only assume you mean "sheer will"? Rather, I intentionally wrote "freedom to choose between alternatives apprehended by the intellect". Absolute free will is more of a modern, secular notion, not a classical or Christian one (we do see its origins in the "sheer will" of Ockham), hence why we obsessively speak of "sovereignty" and "autonomy" today.

> Most Christian theologies would vehemently disagree precisely because having the supra-knowledge of the Mystery imparted upon one necessarily brings one's being into the dimension of revealed universality.

Whatever the Abrahamic influence on the course of Aristotelian thought, there is no reason to believe that Abrahamic influence was absolutely necessary to "universalize ethics" (take the early Stoics, for instance). This is expected and returns to my original point, that much of ethics is knowable in principle through unaided reason alone.

People have casually dismissed Aristotle in total merely because his physics is obsolete, even though it is separable from and in no way necessarily implied by his metaphysics. Similarly, his views about slaves and so on do not follow from these core principles and are rather auxiliary rationalizations of prevailing cultural practices. It was very much a failure on Aristotle's part to be consistent with his own natural law views.

> All three of the Abrahamic theologies were infected by Neoplatonism

"Infected" here is a needlessly tendentious and loaded term. I don't consider this influence as somehow undermining the essential core of Aristotelian thought. I do not think Aristotle was condemned to hold the aforementioned views on slaves, etc.

> Aristotle was describing in Metaphysics a cosmology concerned with unpacking the notion of motion as the actualization of potentiality, hence, "First Mover", which is not at all an Abrahamic idea.

Under a strict understanding faithful to Aristotle's complete views, yes, the Prime Mover is not "Abrahamic". But that doesn't mean the essential characteristics of the Prime Mover are in contradiction with, say, a traditionally Christian account, even if they are incomplete. At the very least, the Prime Mover establishes that there is a first actualizer along with some properties this actualizer must have.

> An aside, but the Muslims called Aristotle “The Philosopher” (Ibn Rashud, Ibn Sina), and that tradition was received through the Muslims by their European readers.

Yes, but this doesn't contradict what I wrote.

I just don't think it should be.

Also, he was referring to people performing labour, not people adhering to spiritual belief or ideological systems.

I see what you mean, but I don't think this means what he believed was true. I see it as categorically different. People adhering to beliefs without critical thought vs being forced into labour due to their 'nature' are very different matters.

And, are you now signalling yours?

Aristotle directly refutes this in Nichomachean Ethics, this is why I wrote that it is “a very qualified doing”. He asserts that you can’t simply “get good” at committing virtuous acts because they require the correct upbringing firstly (“it makes a very great difference; or rather all the difference”); a good amount of that text reads like a parenting book; you can’t turn the skip later in life. So when you say:

> freedom to choose between alternatives apprehended by the intellect

I don’t think this is exhaustive in describing what’s going on in Nichomachean Ethics to any degree to render all else negligible. Given the way he talks about “soul” (a word which also conveys the worst interpretation of what he’s talking about in De Anima), it becomes clearer to me why conditioning is so important to him.

If you need to apologize for defending Aristotle after more then 2000 years after his death, you must be a part of a political establishment which is very out of tune with the feelings of ordinary people and are a part of a religious community which is unforgiving of any transgressions and can cancel and outcast you for a minor verbal delict.

>>And, are you now signalling yours?

Not very precisely. I think at least 90% of political body would disagree with their position. Also all the biggest world religions believe in repentance.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12996756

many people are meant to be slaves is also a fact -- it is not like everyone is gifted cerebrally, or even blessed to be in an environment where, by the time they are adults, have been shown a good formula for life; so consequently a section of the society is destined to be just slaves, it just needs the presence of a manipulator.

Aristotle, being an endless questioning guy he was, might have figured this out, although i'm not sure.

I think you're committing a naturalistic fallacy, and I don't agree at all that people are ever meant to be slaves.

The most I can agree to is that "some humans are born into slavery due to chance". This is factual. That people are meant to be slaves is not a fact. Perhaps we have a language barrier here.

I dunno--as far as I can tell Aristotle never asked the slaves who supported his philosophical lifestyle what they thought about it.

I've no disagreements with your position or moral principles. But spherical cow is different from reality.

you come across as a child by being snarky - you definitely need to spend some time learning how to behave like an adult.

My guess is he likely did with the slaves he freed or made provisions for in his will (and preserved by Diogenes Laërtius)