•  147
    Review of Pierre Destrée, Aristote: Poétique. (review)
    Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2022 29. 2022.
    Review of Pierre Destrée, Aristote: Poétique
  •  145
    Further Reading on Aristotle's Politics
    In Marguerite Deslauriers & Pierre Destrée (eds.), Cambridge Companion to Aristotle's Politics. pp. 375-406. 2013.
    Topical bibliography of Aristotle's Politics, organized by books/subjects within the Politics.
  •  143
    Review of Scaltas and Mason, eds., Philosophy of Epictetus (review)
    Bryn Mawr Classical Review 11 20. 2008.
    Epictetus, a former slave who lived in Rome during Nero’s reign but was exiled (along with all those who practiced philosophy in Rome) to Greece by Domitian’s decree in 93 CE, espoused an austere ethical philosophy which aimed at happiness (eudaimonia), or tranquility (ataraxia), through the delimitation of valuation to things within one’s control. Although Epictetus never set to writing his beliefs, his disciple Arrian recorded eight books of his sayings (entitled Discourses [ διατριβαί ] of wh…Read more
  •  142
    Comments on Garver's "Living Well and Living Together: The Argument of Politics VII: 1-3 and the Discovery of the Common Life"
    Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium of Ancient Philosophy 25 64-66. 2010.
    Professor Garver’s “Living Well and Living Together” sheds light on one of the more confusing sections in Aristotle’s Politics, namely the discussion of the best way of life for individuals and city in Politics VII.1-3. At a distance, the conclusion of Aristotle’s remarks seem relatively clear: He endorses the claim that the most choice-worthy life and happiness of a city and an individual are the same. Further, the implications of such a claim for Aristotle’s political philosophy also seem cl…Read more
  •  132
    Review of Burger, Aristotle's Dialogue with Socrates (review)
    Bryn Mawr Classical Review 8 33. 2009.
    At first glance, one might wonder how a philosopher such as Aristotle, born in 384 BCE, could—as the title of Burger’s book puts it—have a dialogue with Socrates, who died in 399 BCE. Not only did Aristotle never see or hear Socrates in person, but since Socrates—according to his contemporaries—never wrote anything, Aristotle also never encountered the thoughts or opinions of Socrates at first hand. Of course, Aristotle encountered Plato’s depiction of Socrates and it is Plato’s Socrates whom Bu…Read more
  •  131
    Aristotle on the (alleged) inferiority of poetry to history
    In William Wians & Ron Polansky (eds.), Reading Aristotle: Argument and Exposition, Brill. pp. 315-333. 2017.
    Aristotle’s claim that poetry is ‘a more philosophic and better thing’ than history (Poet 9.1451b5-6) and his description of the ‘poetic universal’ have been the source of much scholarly discussion. Although many scholars have mined Poetics 9 as a source for Aristotle’s views towards history, in my contribution I caution against doing so. Critics of Aristotle’s remarks have often failed to appreciate the expository principle which governs Poetics 6-12, which begins with a definition of tragedy a…Read more
  •  129
    Is there a Poetics in Aristotle’s Politics?
    In Malcolm Heath, Pierre Destrée & D. Munteanu (eds.), The Poetics in its Aristotelian Context, . pp. 129-144. 2020.
    ABSTRACT: Hall (1996) raises the question of the relationship between Aristotle’s Politics and Poetics by claiming that Aristotle had separated drama from its civic origins; various rejoinders to her challenge can be found in Heath (2009) and Jones (2012). In response to this question, I argue that a central connection between these two works is their shared concern about the effects of performance—both in the case of drama and music—either for performers or their audience. Aristotle’s critici…Read more
  •  129
    Review of Mayhew, The Female in Aristotle's Biology (review)
    Bryn Mawr Classical Review 9 19. 2004.
    Natural philosophers make mistakes. Descartes got the laws of inertia wrong, Kant misunderstood the primacy of Euclidian geometry, and almost everyone (except perhaps Aristarchus of Samos) prior to the discovery of the telescope mistakenly thought that the solar system was geocentric. That we find Aristotle mistaken on questions in the life sciences — questions which required advances such as the microscope to even articulate — should come as little surprise. There seems nothing remarkable in th…Read more
  •  124
    Review of Annas, Virtue and Law in Plato and Beyond (review)
    Journal of the History of Philosophy 57 (4): 749-750. 2019.
    About Plato's Laws, Aristotle rather uninspiringly wrote, "Most of the Laws consists, in fact, of laws, and [Plato] has said little about the constitution. He wishes to make it more generally attainable [κοινοτέραν] by actual city-states, yet he gradually turns it back towards the Republic". Julia Annas's new volume seeks to counter such dismissive interpretations of Plato's Laws. Rather than view the work as Plato's final written dialogue, written by a crabby, old, pessimistic author, she argue…Read more
  •  124
    Flannery’s volume looks in two directions. On the one hand, as Flannery announces in the book’s introduction, the chapters in the volume were intended to shed light on three specific ‘background’ issues in contemporary ethics and the interpretation of Thomas Aquinas, namely, Aquinas’ notion of ethical theory (as articulated especially in Summa Theologica 1-2.6-21), the ramifications of physical actions on moral evaluation in contemporary ethics (for instance, whether the fact that an abortion co…Read more
  •  124
    Review of Jost and Shiner, eds. Eudaimonia and Well-Being (review)
    Bryn Mawr Classical Review 7 38. 2004.
    What is at stake in determining how to translate the central term of Greek ethical philosophy, that of eudaimonia? The volume Eudaimonia and Well-Being (a collection of ten papers presented at a conference at the University of Cincinnati in 1993) shows that English terms such as happiness, well-being, and flourishing can have significantly different connotations which complicate our understanding of the Greek term. The volume’s contributors work in both ancient Greek ethics and Anglophone contem…Read more
  •  121
    The eight contributions in this volume result from three conferences held at the Université Michel de Montaigne Bordeaux 3 between 2005 and 2007 on nature and household relations, nature and regime-types (politeiai), and nature and education. Three of the chapters examine Aristotle’s notion of nature through consideration of his remarks about the household (specifically, the relationship between family relations and constitutions in cities, the critique of Plato’s dissolution of the family, an…Read more
  •  120
    The second book of Aristotle’s Politics is generally taken to examine politeiai or constitutions that either exist in cities that are said to be well governed or were proposed by theoreticians and are thought to be well organized (II.1, 1260b30–32; II.12, 1274b26–28). Prominent are Aristotle’s examinations of Plato’s Republic and the constitution of Sparta; but Aristotle also devotes chapters to the examination of Plato’s Laws, the proposed constitutions of Phaleas of Chalcedon and Hippodamos o…Read more
  •  110
    Review of Naddaf, The Greek Concept of Nature (review)
    Bryn Mawr Classical Review 9 49. 2005.
    Few concepts in Greek philosophical thought are more multi-faceted, analyzed, and disputed than that of “nature” ( φύσις). Although the term is rarely used in epic literature, at least since the 6th century publication of Anaximander’s ἱστορία περὶ φύσεως, the notion of nature has been central to Greek thought. Whether the question was that of providing an account of the kosmos, discerning the relationship between what is merely customary and what is eternal in the norms of a people, or seeking …Read more
  •  63
    A Topical Bibliography of Scholarship on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics
    Journal of Philosophical Research 30 1-116. 2005.
    Scholarship on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (hereafter “the Ethics”) flourishes in an almost unprecedented fashion. In the last ten years, universities in North America have produced on average over ten doctoral dissertations a year which discuss the practical philosophy which Aristotle espouses in his Nicomachean Ethics, Eudemian Ethics, and Politics. Since the beginning of the millennium there has been three new translations of the entire Ethics into English alone, several more which transla…Read more
  •  63
    Lessons New and Old
    Political Theory 35 (3): 354-363. 2007.
  •  56
    Many of the philosophical treatises which Cicero wrote in the last years of his life quote, discuss, and debate the various doctrines and philosophical systems of the Hellenistic schools of philosophy. Although Cicero sometimes represents himself as only translating or reproducing Greek ideas for a Latin or Roman audience, his actual philosophical practice is much more subtle and varies from treatise to treatise. In some treatises, such as On the Nature of the Gods or Tusculan Disputations, Cice…Read more
  •  47
    Aristotle's Ethics (annotated bibliography)
    Oxford Bibliographies Online (Classics). 2013.
    Annotated bibliography of Aristotle's ethical writings, organized topically.
  •  33
    Do Lysis’ parents really love him?
    Ancient Philosophy 37 (2): 319-332. 2017.
    Plato’s Lysis has generated a range of scholarly responses, both with respect to its philosophical content and whether its aporetic conclusion— that what is philon is “neither those who are loved nor those who love, nor those who are like nor those who are unlike, nor those who are good, nor those who are akin (oi oikeioi), nor any of the others we have gone through” (222e3-5)—is genuine or masks a doctrinal resolution available within the text. In a series of papers on the Lysis, Francisco Gonz…Read more
  •  31
    Judging Constitutions: Aristotle’s Critique of Plato’s Republic and Sparta
    Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 99 (4): 353-379. 2017.
    Although the second book of Aristotle’s Politics distinguishes between proposed and existing constitutions, careful examination of the criteria which Aristotle uses to judge Plato’s Republic and the Spartan constitution blurs the relevance of such a division. Aristotle uses the same four criteria to evaluate both constitutions and scholars have failed to appreciate that he uses the same criteria to organize his presentation of many of the arguments in Politics 2. By contrast, Aristotle discounts…Read more
  •  28
    In the last two books of the Politics, Aristotle articulates an education program for his best regime in contrast to what he takes to be the goal and practices of Sparta’s educational system. Although Aristotle never refers to his program as liberal education, clearly he takes its goal to be the production of free male and female citizens. By contrast, he characterizes the results of the Spartan system as ‘crude’, ‘slavish’, and ‘servile’. I argue that Aristotle’s criticisms of Spartan education…Read more
  •  26
    At first glance, it looks like Aristotle can’t make up his mind about the ethical or moral status of non-human animals in his ethical treatises. Somewhat infamously, the Nicomachean Ethics claims that “there is neither friendship nor justice towards soulless things, nor is there towards an ox or a horse” (EN 8.11.1161b1–2). Since Aristotle thinks that friendship and justice are co-extensive (EN 8.9.1159b25–32), scholars have often read this passage to entail that humans have no ethical obligatio…Read more
  •  24
    Les études sur les ramifications politiques de la conception aristotélicienne de l’amitié ont été consacrées à «l’amitié politique» et ont perdu de vue l’importance de sa description de la «concorde» (ὁμόνοια). Cela s’explique par un certain nombre de raisons, dont la plus importante est qu’Aristote offre un compte rendu précis de la concorde, mais qu’il n’a presque rien à dire sur l’amitié politique. Mon article examine les aspects éthiques et politiques de la concorde à la lumière d’un désacco…Read more
  •  22
    Aristotle's Politics (annotated bibliography)
    Oxford Bibliographies Online (Classics). 2013.
    Annotated bibliography of Aristotle's Politics.
  •  21
    Aristotle’s Politics on Greeks and non-Greeks
    Review of Politics 83 (4): 465-485. 2021.
    Scholars of race in antiquity commonly claim that Aristotle holds protoracist views about barbaroi or non-Greeks. But a careful examination of Aristotle's remarks in his Politics about slavery, non-Greek political institutions, and Greek and non-Greek natural qualities calls into question such claims. No doubt, Aristotle held views at odds with modern liberalism, such as his views about gender subordination and the exploitation of slave and nonslave labor. But claims that Aristotle holds protora…Read more
  •  20
    The Best Way of Life for a Polis
    Polis 36 (1): 5-22. 2019.
    Politics VII.1-3 enacts a contest that concludes that ‘whether for a whole city-state in common or for an individual, the best way of life would be a practical one’. Scholarship on VII.1-3 has focused on the best way of life for an individual to the neglect and even misunderstanding of the best way of life for a polis. The best way of life for a polis is, I argue, a specification of the foreign policy or ‘inter-polis’ relations for the best constitution. Such a foreign policy appears to include …Read more
  •  20
    Il y a vingt-cinq ans, j’étais un étudiant de doctorat intéressé par la philosophie d’Aristote et à la recherche d’un sujet de thèse. Au cours de mes études supérieures, j’ai eu la chance d’étudier l’Éthique à Nicomaque avec Rémi Brague et Les Politiques avec Judith Swanson. Ces deux érudits m’ont, à leur façon, fait prendre conscience de l’importance d’enquêter sur le public cible des œuvres d’Aristote. Tous deux parlaient en bien du livre Le philosophe et la cité (Les Belles Lettres, 1982) de …Read more
  •  9
    Aristotle, law, and contemporary jurisprudence
    Metascience 32 (1): 137-139. 2023.