Aristotle

And this is Aristotle’s meaning, when he says, that some things are no sooner named, than we discover their evil nature.

The best division of right, in this general meaning, is to be found in Aristotle, who, defining one kind to be natural, and the other voluntary, calls it a lawful right in the strictest sense of the word law;

But as there is one kind of social tie founded upon an equality, for instance, among brothers, citizens, friends, allies, and another on pre-eminence, as Aristotle styles it, subsisting between parents and children, masters and servants, sovereigns and subjects, God and men.

Aristotle, having philosophized under Plato, passed over to the Lyceum and founded the Peripatetic school.

Now the "Know yourself" some have supposed to be Chilon's, but Chamaeleon, in his work On the Gods, ascribes it to Thales, and Aristotle to the Pythia.

Plato outright called sophistic a "base art," and Aristotle, following him, declares it a kind of thievery, inasmuch as it plausibly filches the whole work of wisdom and professes a wisdom it has not practised.

But let him, learned as he indeed is, yield these matters to his master Aristotle, and teach singing himself;

Aristotle — far excelling all others, save that I always except Plato, both in genius and in diligence — when he had embraced those four familiar kinds of first principles from which all things arise, holds that there is a certain fifth nature, from which mind comes.

But just as Aristotle, a man of the highest genius, knowledge, and copiousness, when he was moved by the renown of the rhetorician Isocrates, began to teach young men to speak as well, and to join prudence with eloquence, so it is my resolve neither to lay aside my former zeal for speaking, and at the same time to occupy myself with this greater and richer art.

Again — does Theophrastus give us only middling pleasure when he treats topics treated before him by Aristotle?

But I suppose that you, like our Triarius, take less pleasure in him because he neglected those ornaments of style proper to Plato, Aristotle, and Theophrastus.

And yet, if I were to translate Plato or Aristotle plainly, in the way our poets translated the plays, I should, I believe, deserve ill of my fellow citizens by importing those divine geniuses into our knowledge.

And Aristotle, in the third book of his Philosophy, throws much into confusion, dissenting from his master Plato;

Aristotle teaches that the poet Orpheus never existed, and the Pythagoreans say that this Orphic poem was the work of a certain Cercon;

As for Phaedrus, nothing was more elegant, nothing more humane, yet the old man was vexed if I said anything too harsh — while Epicurus assailed Aristotle most insultingly, spoke most foully of Phaedo the disciple of Socrates, cut to pieces in whole volumes Timocrates, the brother of his comrade Metrodorus, because he disagreed on some point of philosophy, was ungrateful to Democritus himself, who …

nor, again, have I obtained a meaner education under Aristotle than he did under Phoenix son of Amyntor, a man who was an exile and at variance with his father.

Hearing this, Philip was pleased and said, "Not in vain, Alexander, do we hold Aristotle in such high esteem, and granted him the rebuilding of his native city, Stageira, which is in the territory of Olynthus.

And Philip, who is held to have been the most formidable of kings, brought in Aristotle as teacher and ruler for his son Alexander, on the ground that he himself was not competent to teach the kingly science;

Aristoteles:

Et hoc, sicut post dominiorum distinctionem continuo necessarium fuit, ita originem videri potest antiquiorem habuisse.

Idem Aristoteles τὴν ἐμποριϰήν dividit in ναυϰληρίαν et φορτηγίαν quarum haec terrestri itinere, illa maritimo merces devehit.

Let him summon up some Eubulus and Critolaus and Xenocrates, and in this place Aristotle the friend of Plato.

For so it is that the account of the soul too has been adulterated by the philosophized doctrines of men, who mix water with the wine.

But no one ever poured honeyed water out of an eloquence of Plato into a soul in doubt at its departure, nor stuffed it with the crumbs of Aristotle's hair-splitting talk.

Plato and Aristotle and the whole throng of sages destined to go their separate ways drew more from Socrates' character than from his words.

Man is a species, as Aristotle says;

for this Aristotle calls eidos.

For your shrewdness has surely perceived this, that even among the philosophers outside the faith, those who composed dialogues — Aristotle and Theophrastus — laid hold at once of the matters themselves, because they were conscious of their own lack of Platonic graces.

"Father, you did not teach me this — Homer, that man, no, nor Plato, nor Aristotle, nor Susarion, who knew all things.

'There answers me not Aristotle or Theophrastus, not even Xenocrates or Polemo, but these lesser men, that a truth is of such a kind as a falsehood could not be.

nor will he any more approve that it is now light than, since he is a Stoic, that this world is wise, that it has a mind which has fashioned both itself and the world and moderates, moves, rules all things;

but where did Xenocrates, where did Aristotle touch those things (for you wish these to be as it were the same)?

Yes, and as for Apollo, Aristotle reckons the first the son of Hephaestus and Athena — here, then, Athena is no longer a virgin;

and the father of the school, not understanding the Father of all things, thinks that the one called "Supreme" is the soul of the universe;

The remains of the Orators and the forensic commonplaces preserved by Aristotle in his Treatise on Rhetoric, show that questions of pure law were constantly argued on every consideration which could possibly influence the mind of the judges.

Moral theology, developed by the juridical method of doctor commenting on doctor, provided itself with a phraseology of its own, and Aristotelian peculiarities of reasoning and expression, imbibed doubtless in great part from the Disputations on Morals in the academical schools, take the place of that special turn of thought and speech which can never be mistaken by any person conversant with the Roman law.

The source of the phraseology which has been always employed for metaphysical discussion in modern times was the Latin translations of Aristotle, in which, whether derived or not from Arabic versions, the plan of the translator was not to seek for analogous expressions in any part of Latin literature, but to construct anew from Latin roots a set of phrases equal to the expression of Greek philosophical ideas.

The definition of Aristotle is not far from our own;

Aristotle says that certain passions, if a man uses them well, serve as arms.

"Anger," says Aristotle, "is necessary, and nothing can be carried by storm without it, unless it fills the mind and kindles the spirit;

for when this man settled in Attica, as Aristotle says, the Athenians were called Ionians, and Apollo was named Patroös to them.

for this is divided into three parts, thirds and races and brotherhoods, as Aristotle says in the Constitution of the Athenians.

That he was the first to incline toward the masses, as Aristotle says, and gave up sole rule, Homer too seems to bear witness, in the catalogue of ships naming the Athenians alone "the people.

Aristotle, then, was the first to shake those forms of which I spoke a little before, which Plato had wonderfully embraced, so far as to say that there was something divine in them.

Aristotle excelled, as it seems to me at least, by a certain abundance of genius, but the source was the same for both, and the division of things to be sought and avoided was the same.

"But you, Varro," I said, "seem to me likely to deserve well of your fellow citizens even further, if you enrich them not only with a store of things, as you have done, but also of words.

And to me, indeed, it seems that, since there had been two opinions among the philosophers of old—one of those who held that all things come to pass by fate in such a way that this fate brings the force of necessity (in which opinion were Democritus, Heraclitus, Empedocles, and Aristotle), the other of those to whom it seemed that the voluntary motions of the mind are without any fate—Chrysippus, …

680) and Aristotle (‘Politics,’ i.

Aristotle and the writers who have followed him suppose that the larger groups of men discernible in the twilight of history have somehow grown out of isolated families like that of the Homeric Cyclops.

The Patriarchal theory, during the dark ages, would have shared the fate of much else in Greek speculation if it had not been kept alive by its correspondence with the Scriptural account of the Hebrew Patriarchs.

The thought of Plato, of Aristotle, and of the heroes of modern philosophy is ever proving anew its fructifying power.

Plato and Neoplatonism, Epicurus and the Stoa are opposed to Scholasticism, the real Aristotle to the transformed Aristotle of the Church and the distorted Aristotle of the schools.

Not that which has been considered true for centuries, not that which another says, though he be Aristotle or Thomas Aquinas, not that which flatters the desires of the heart, is true, but that only which is demonstrated to my own understanding with convincing force.

To that of the Athenians, in which Socrates was condemned and from which Aristotle fled to escape condemnation, in which envy crushes the virtues?

Cast it in Plato's teeth that he sought money, in Aristotle's that he took it, in Democritus's that he neglected it, in Epicurus's that he spent it;

Hence too the grievance of Aristotle, ill befitting a wise man, when he arraigns Nature:

For whether we believe the Greek poet that 'sometimes it is pleasant even to be mad,' or Plato that 'the man in possession of his senses has knocked in vain at the doors of poetry,' or Aristotle that 'no great genius has ever existed without a mixture of madness':

If I take my stand on the score of simplicity — Aristotle basely drove his familiar friend Hermias from his place: