"Aristotle's Physics: a Physicist's Look"
My take is that it was hard to find a better theory, the usual explanation of scholastical dogmatism is to shallow.
European philosophy was not really Aristotelian until the re-arrival of his work in the 12C, so it's hardly fair to 'blame' him for the lack of scientific development that period. When it did arrive, it was extremely controversial, and it took the genius of Aquinas (and even then, only just) for Aristotle to be accepted in Christian thought.
In the 17C, there was a much greater interest in quantitative methods than there had been previously. And some of his physics was obviously found to be wrong. But there was no discovery (and remains no discovery) that falsified broad swathes of his work. The change of interest and focus was far more important in the progress of what we now call science than the supposed rejection of Aristotle.
This is described in E.A. Burtt's Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science.
Pre-modern people were far more interested in living a morally good life (a happy life, in the Aristotelian sense of the word) than they were in controlling nature. That changed in the 17C.
1. Conflating intellectual greatness with moral goodness. These are separate categories.
2. Applying current moral standards to a previous time. You must compare him to others if his time.
Slavery is unquestionably immoral, and it's perfectly reasonable to argue that someone completing philosophical work to support slavery is committing a moral wrong, but you have to keep in mind the society into which this person was enculturated and the time at which he lived.
Literally yes. A mind too dense to see he was drafting his arguments in support of whatever happened to be personally convenient.
Considering he had to pen this screed in the first place, we can tell his view wasn't the exclusive one.
I like to think the negative feedback you are receiving is due to the ambiguity, and so, the multitude of definitions for “intelligence” that each of us has.
I know I have met people who others have touted as “intelligent” that I thought were too deplorable to be given such an accolade.
I am with you, one of my measures of intelligence is how one recognizes the collective fate of all life.
Debating such a subject leaves me with too much ire to articulate sufficiently so I will lean on the eloquence of Martin Luther King Jr:
> Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.
The first and most basic is because they are different things, and for the sake of clarity different things should have different words to refer to them.
The second is because it allows us to have intelligent conversations about people who are intelligent but morally bad, or who are unintelligent but morally good. The person with an IQ barely above that of the strict definition of mentally retarded (or below, but questions of agency and responsibly arise so we won't use them in our example) who recognizes the humanity in every person and volunteers at the soup kitchen every chance be gets is morally good for doing so. The 180IQ engineer who manages the highly complex train schedule to keep the extermination camps running at capacity is morally bad for doing so.
The third is because it allows individuals to recognize that blind respect of intelligence which is unguided by morals or wisdom is a fool's errand.
The fourth is because is prevents the moralizing of language from hampering the clarity of language
The fifth is because the conflation of intelligence and morality provides an easy pathway to morally wrong positions. If the messaging is that "evil people are dumb!" and an impressionable individual encounters an intelligent person making a persuasive argument for something which is morally wrong, you've robbed them of a framework with which to engage and combat this person's ideas.
The sixth and final reason is that modification of language in this way hampers our ability to consider the world independent of our societal preconceived notions. I found the previous comments in this chain ironic because the individual who was calling a great (highly intelligent) philosopher a dunce for being unable to see beyond his cultural ethical norms was doing so from a position which is deeply entrenched in his current cultural and ethical norms, i.e. the inherent evils of slavery, the requirement of strict moral purity, the compulsion to attack every perceived positive characteristic of someone who is morally bad in order to devalue them and their intellectual contributions, and the perception of the world as a pitched battle between good and evil wherein righteous indignation should be one's perpetual state.
Now of course I agree with this commentator's ethical preconceptions, but that's secondary to the importance of the things I listed above in how I approach these things. I mean no disrespect and I hope this has been helpful in understanding my perspective.
- I think taking interest on a (full-recourse) loan is a form of fraud. Or rather, it is to fraud what robbery is to larceny. I also think it produces, in practice, ownership in a share of a person, such that it can be usefully compared with slavery. I think I can make good arguments in support of this. But I don't think people who argue otherwise are dumb, or arguing from self-interest; I just think they haven't fully thought through it. You might extend the same leeway to someone widely acknowledge as one of the greatest minds in history.
- Please let me know of any anti-slavery arguments from that period you're aware of.
- Whether acknowledged or not, all anti-slavery arguments use Aristotelian concepts (as will any attempt at rational discourse, or any attempt at discussion of morals).
If you think interest on a loan is even in the same world as selling a human being to the highest bidder from an auction block, then we view the world so differently that I don't imagine efficient communication is possible.
>widely acknowledge as one of the greatest minds in history.
I mean, he's simply not.
>anti-slavery arguments from that period you're aware of
Well Zeno [0] for one, and Alcidamas [1].
And I'll say again, the fact he had to pen this screed in the first place shows that his view wasn't the exclusive one. In fact it shows how middling his intellect actually was that he was unable to see past his own time and place, despite the fact that others could.
>all anti-slavery arguments use Aristotelian concepts
This is more like Aristotle's fanboys trying to shoehorn other people's natural insights into his worldview.
[0] https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=JbscAAAAIAAJ&q=%22Zeno+a...
The point is that it would be idiotic of me to think somebody defending the practice was stupid or immoral, when it is accepted almost everywhere and by everyone. Same is true for Aristotle and slavery. Calling him stupid or evil on this account is misguided. Every individual and every age has its intellectual and moral blindspots. See Boogie_Man's comment above, he covers the various problems with this approach more thoroughly than I have.
No it most definitely is not. Could you just confirm the following statement is accurate:
It is your belief that interest taking on loans and legalized slavery are a difference of degree, not a difference in kind.
No. They are comparable, and both moral evils, but are different species of action.
But suppose I said yes, then what? It would not affect the argument. Whether I'm right or wrong about interest-taking per se, I would be wrong to believe that people who defended it were wicked or stupid (rather than simply misguided) given its universality. Similarly, regardless of whether Aristotle was right or wrong about slavery per se, you are wrong to believe that Aristotle was wicked and stupid for defending it (rather than simply misguided) given its then-universality.
They are not comparable in any way, shape, or form.
>you are wrong to believe that Aristotle was wicked and stupid
He was unquestionably wicked and stupid compared to his contemporaries who were able to see past the miasma that was the culture they were steeped in.
- Is it possible that you are mistaken about some -- any -- moral issue which is almost universally held by the culture at large?
- If so, would it be reasonable to conclude from this that you're wicked and stupid?
You agree that the answers are "yes" and "no" respectively, right?
Just from a point of common sense logic I would have to assume the vast majority of the slaves' arguments on the subject.
Let me just pull up all of the surviving primary sources written by the slaves of the that period... Oh, right.
We imagine that "if I lived back then, I'd be against it", but we forget that the past is a foreign country. People thought and acted quite differently.
Note that I'm assuming an objective/neutral definition of "slavery", and not the usual "slavery=bad thing".
Now, we could argue that it's a matter of education, circumstances, etc. But surely you must have met people who would obstinately refuse to listen to reason, entertaining their own misery. At least IME, it's sadly a common trait.
Of course, if we define "slavery" as "harsh, senseless, cruel, violent, selfish abuse of other humans", then (I hope in the vast majority of cases), no, contemporary employment and slavery are different in kind.
But I do think there are reasons to doubt this second definition to have been systematically accurate.
For example, it makes no sense, from a cost-effectiveness point of view, for a slave owner to mistreat his slaves that much: it's in his best interest to make sure they live decently. Or, in a society where slavery is culturally acceptable, hence widespread, many slave owners must not have been this inhumane.
I'm not saying it never occurred, merely that there are good reasons to think that it wasn't as systematic as we tend to believe.
What's the cost-effectiveness of a master selling one of his female slave's children away from her, which was a regular occurrence?
Accurately answering your question requires writing a thesis: one needs extensive access to accurate data spanning thousands of years, a solid grasp of history, psychology, ancient customs, etc. Those situations are full of subtle nuances; what historians currently understand might not even be that accurate.
OTOH, casting reasonable doubts by assuming a fair amount of people weren't too stupid is less bold of a position than "slave owners were living devil", but at least it's honest.
(Which doesn't imply that "slave owners were living devil" isn't true, merely that it's dishonest to say that it's true, because it's too difficult to know for sure).
Slavery is an old thing[0]. Even assuming the death rates are correct, one can't honestly conclude that what happened in the West in the past 500 years is similar to what happened, say, in Antiquity in the West[1] - and that's what most relevant to Aristotle - or amongst ancient Jews[2].
I know that there are too many unknowns for me to even have a clear thesis to begin with.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery#History
You seem curiously attached to the happiness in slavery fantasy.
It's not because I don't share your viewpoint that I share its exact opposite either.
Even in the case of the house servant you imagine the typical slave to be, you have not considered factors like having their children sold away from them, or the death of a kind master leading to being sold or inherited by a wicked one.
There are no happy slaves.
Of course, the fields of Philosophical and Mathematical Logic have advanced since Aristotle, especially starting with the work of Frege, but that took approximately 2000 years. And before Aristotle, no work on Logic came close to what Aristotle discovered and developed. Aristotle's work on Logic was sui generis and hardly any advancement in logic occurred until Frege 2000 years later.
I feel his work in Logic alone makes him one of the greatest minds who ever lived. That doesn't take into account his contributions in other areas of philosophy, which were also significant.
The older I get the more I realize that there are a thousand true and intelligent things you can say about any topic. Magazines, journals, and libraries are full to the brim of intelligent people writing intelligent things. But an extremely minuscule portion of that huge mass is made of writing that gets right to the heart of the matter.
And Aristotle is the writer I've encountered the most who constantly gets right to the essence or core of what he's discussing, moving past the trivialities and the unessential to illuminate deep truths in a logical way. It's why a short essay like his Poetics--which in many ways is a limited work for the modern day because it deals wiih a very specific type of ancient literature--is still pored over by modern writers and screenwriters because of the deep dramatic truths it lays out.