On Aristotle: Saving Politics from Philosophy (Liveright Classics) - Hardcover

Ryan, Alan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 087140706X ISBN 13: 9780871407061

Publisher: Liveright, 2013

Synopsis

An essential, comprehensive, and accessible guide to the life and works of Aristotle.

In On Aristotle: Saving Politics from Philosophy, Alan Ryan examines Plato's most famous student and sharpest critic, whose writing has helped shape over two millennia of Western philosophy, science, and religion. The first thinker to posit that a society should be ruled by laws and not men, Aristotle was born in Stagira, Macedon, in 384 BCE. He would go on to join Plato's Academy and eventually become tutor to Alexander the Great. During his lifetime he would see the revival of Athens following its destruction in the Peloponnesian War, before the ultimate extinction of its radical form of democracy after the Macedonian conquest. Aristotle’s strongly empirical cast of mind was brought to bear on a stunning range of subjects, from rhetoric to physics, from the history of political institutions and mathematics to zoology and botany. The resulting system dominated European thought from the thirteenth to seventeenth centuries.

In Nicomachean Ethics and Politics―both excerpted here―Aristotle attempted to delineate the ideal virtues of a both public and private life as well as critique the utopian antipolitics of his former teacher, Plato. For Aristotle, life in a polis was the natural state of man and provided the greatest opportunity for human beings to fulfill their potential. Unlike his scientific theories, which would eventually be displaced by Galileo, Newton, and Darwin, Aristotle’s meticulous thinking on the nature of human affairs, ethics, politics, citizenship, and virtue in a civil society remains as vital today as it was in his own time.

About this title

About the Author

Alan Ryan was warden of New College, Oxford University, where he was a professor of political theory. He is the author of John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism, Bertrand Russell: A Political Life, and On Politics: A History of Political Thought from Herodotus to the Present.

From Booklist

Ryan (On Politics, 2012) presents a compact and accessible introduction to Aristotle, whose thought, together with that of his teacher Plato, constitutes the bedrock of much of Western civilization. Though Aristotle wrote broadly on all sorts of subjects—his influence on science alone is profound—Ryan’s focus is on his political thought, where his influence is no less dramatic. In part, Ryan’s project is to redeem Aristotle’s political thought for modern audiences, who may be put off by the messiness and inaccessibility of his works, as well as Aristotle’s premodern opinions on slavery, women, and the inherent justice of societal hierarchy. And yet, as Ryan reminds us, though Aristotle’s conceptions of a free society and political freedom are not the same as ours today, they are not entirely different from ours either, and his fundamental concern—how to live a good life in society—remains a pressing question today. Ryan’s erudite and engaging introduction is followed by substantial extracts from Aristotle’s political works, making this text ideal for classroom use. A similar work by Ryan on Machiavelli is reviewed below. --Brendan Driscoll

About this edition

• Publisher: Liveright
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 087140706X
• ISBN 13: 9780871407061
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224