Most of the arguments are highly technical, and bear the marks of esoteric discussions in the Academy: but perhaps the clinching one is that ethics is a practical science, about what is within human power to ac
From the time of Aristotle it had been said that man is a social animal: that human beings naturally form communities. I couldn’t accept it. The whole of history and pre-history is against it. The two dreadful world wars we have recently been through, and the gearing of our entire ...
Aristotle wants to bring these two together and to say that it is only by fulfilling our function as human beings that we shall attain happiness. Virtue Aristotle introduces another key concept: virtue. This might be better translated as 'excellence'. Social Animals A parallel: an acorn that a...
In fact, however, the pleasures differ quite a lot, in human beings at any rate. For some things delight some people, and cause pain to others; and while some find them painful and hateful, others find them pleasant and lovable…But in all such cases it seems that what is really so ...
If human beings get to the point when we completely understand the universe, said Hawking, then we would know the mind of God. Sometimes Aristotle implies that he believed the very distant celestial bodies might be God. He was fascinated by astronomy. We know from the things he tells us ...
He also believed that humans are the most imitative animals delight in the imitating and learns that way,thus imitative arts are not just for entertaining but educational as well, because he belived that learning is a pleasure for all humanities. ...
Aristotle's conception of sexual difference in biology and politics, there is a tension between his view of the inferiority of female bodies and women and his commitment to the idea that females and women are valuable both for generation and for the political life characteristic of human beings....
Plants and animals, since they are endowed with the power of adaptation, have souls, and the human soul is peculiar only in this, that to the vegetative and sensitive faculties, which characterize plant-life and animal life respectively, it adds the rational faculty—the power of acquiring ...
But on Aristotle's view, the lives of individual human beings are invariablylinked together in a social context. In theΠεριΠολις(Politics) he speculated aboutthe origins of the state, described and assessed the relative merits of various types of government, and listed the obligation...
Major premise: all children are human beings. Minor premise: Chris is a child. Conclusion: Chris is a human being. Later in life Aristotle had a son whom he named Nichomachus, giving him the name of his father who had died when Aristotle was young. ...