Aristotle
Author biography. Trumpet Publishing House Authors Directory.
Who he was
Aristotle was born in 384 BCE at Stagira in northern Greece and died in 322 BCE. His father was physician to the Macedonian court, which may explain the habit that marks everything he wrote: he looked at things closely and wrote down what was actually there.
At seventeen he went to Athens and studied under Plato for about twenty years. He then tutored the boy who became Alexander the Great. He returned to Athens and founded his own school, the Lyceum. When anti-Macedonian feeling turned against him he left the city rather than let Athens, as the story has it, sin twice against philosophy.
Why he wrote it
What survives is not polished books for the public. It is closer to lecture material, worked over for teaching, and it reads that way: compressed, argumentative, occasionally repeating itself.
The Nicomachean Ethics is named for his son Nicomachus. It asks the plainest question available, and asks it of ordinary adults rather than specialists: what actually makes a good life, and a good man.
The book we publish, and why
We publish The Nicomachean Ethics unabridged because his answer is useful and almost nobody is told it.
The answer is not a feeling. It is habit. You do not become fair by admiring fairness, you become fair by acting fairly over and over until it is simply what you do. Courage, honesty, generosity and self-command are trained the way a trade is trained, by repetition, and they can be lost the same way. He is also realistic about money, friendship and anger, none of which he treats as beneath discussion.
A reader comes away with something to do rather than something to feel. For anyone raising children, that distinction is the whole game.
His principal works
The surviving corpus runs to some thirty works and the ordering is scholarly convention rather than his own. The major ones, grouped as they are traditionally grouped:
- Logic, collectively the Organon: Categories, On Interpretation, Prior Analytics, Posterior Analytics, Topics, Sophistical Refutations.
- Natural science: Physics, On the Heavens, On Generation and Corruption, Meteorology, On the Soul, History of Animals, Parts of Animals, Generation of Animals.
- Metaphysics.
- Ethics and politics: Nicomachean Ethics, Eudemian Ethics, Politics, Constitution of the Athenians.
- Rhetoric and art: Rhetoric, Poetics.
Much of what he wrote is lost, including the dialogues published in his lifetime, which ancient readers admired more than anything we now have.
General reference on Aristotle. External links open outside Trumpet Publishing House.
Our editions
This collection grows as further editions and formats are added, so it is worth returning to.
All Trumpet editions by Aristotle