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On Man in the Universe
Providing newly revised translations of selections from Aristotle's most important works, five lectures consider widespread topics that affect everyday people, from the natural world to human nature.
441 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1943
40 people are currently reading
651 people want to read
About the author
Aristotle
4,333 books5,553 followersAristotle (Greek: Αριστοτέλης; 384–322 BC) was an Ancient Greek philosopher and polymath. His writings cover a broad range of subjects spanning the natural sciences, philosophy, linguistics, economics, politics, psychology, and the arts. As the founder of the Peripatetic school of philosophy in the Lyceum in Athens, he began the wider Aristotelian tradition that followed, which set the groundwork for the development of modern science.
Little is known about Aristotle's life. He was born in the city of Stagira in northern Greece during the Classical period. His father, Nicomachus, died when Aristotle was a child, and he was brought up by a guardian. At 17 or 18, he joined Plato's Academy in Athens and remained there until the age of 37 (c. 347 BC). Shortly after Plato died, Aristotle left Athens and, at the request of Philip II of Macedon, tutored his son Alexander the Great beginning in 343 BC. He established a library in the Lyceum, which helped him to produce many of his hundreds of books on papyrus scrolls.
Though Aristotle wrote many treatises and dialogues for publication, only around a third of his original output has survived, none of it intended for publication. Aristotle provided a complex synthesis of the various philosophies existing prior to him. His teachings and methods of inquiry have had a significant impact across the world, and remain a subject of contemporary philosophical discussion.
Aristotle's views profoundly shaped medieval scholarship. The influence of his physical science extended from late antiquity and the Early Middle Ages into the Renaissance, and was not replaced systematically until the Enlightenment and theories such as classical mechanics were developed. He influenced Judeo-Islamic philosophies during the Middle Ages, as well as Christian theology, especially the Neoplatonism of the Early Church and the scholastic tradition of the Catholic Church.
Aristotle was revered among medieval Muslim scholars as "The First Teacher", and among medieval Christians like Thomas Aquinas as simply "The Philosopher", while the poet Dante Alighieri called him "the master of those who know". His works contain the earliest known formal study of logic, and were studied by medieval scholars such as Pierre Abélard and Jean Buridan. Aristotle's influence on logic continued well into the 19th century. In addition, his ethics, although always influential, gained renewed interest with the modern advent of virtue ethics.
Little is known about Aristotle's life. He was born in the city of Stagira in northern Greece during the Classical period. His father, Nicomachus, died when Aristotle was a child, and he was brought up by a guardian. At 17 or 18, he joined Plato's Academy in Athens and remained there until the age of 37 (c. 347 BC). Shortly after Plato died, Aristotle left Athens and, at the request of Philip II of Macedon, tutored his son Alexander the Great beginning in 343 BC. He established a library in the Lyceum, which helped him to produce many of his hundreds of books on papyrus scrolls.
Though Aristotle wrote many treatises and dialogues for publication, only around a third of his original output has survived, none of it intended for publication. Aristotle provided a complex synthesis of the various philosophies existing prior to him. His teachings and methods of inquiry have had a significant impact across the world, and remain a subject of contemporary philosophical discussion.
Aristotle's views profoundly shaped medieval scholarship. The influence of his physical science extended from late antiquity and the Early Middle Ages into the Renaissance, and was not replaced systematically until the Enlightenment and theories such as classical mechanics were developed. He influenced Judeo-Islamic philosophies during the Middle Ages, as well as Christian theology, especially the Neoplatonism of the Early Church and the scholastic tradition of the Catholic Church.
Aristotle was revered among medieval Muslim scholars as "The First Teacher", and among medieval Christians like Thomas Aquinas as simply "The Philosopher", while the poet Dante Alighieri called him "the master of those who know". His works contain the earliest known formal study of logic, and were studied by medieval scholars such as Pierre Abélard and Jean Buridan. Aristotle's influence on logic continued well into the 19th century. In addition, his ethics, although always influential, gained renewed interest with the modern advent of virtue ethics.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
July 26, 2010
A man may be scorned for not being able to jump to the moon, but he should be commended when he has mastered the art of jumping over a tree. Some of the most celebrated thinkers of all time including Plato, Aristotle, Copernicus, Kant, Newton, Darwin, Freud, Jung, and Einstein all suffer the same slanderous buffeting by the forgetful zeitgeist of modern science: “They were wrong”. But the question shouldn’t center on whether or not they were wrong about some things. In the pursuit of truth they were RIGHT, headed in the right direction, despite having drawn some wrong conclusions. They were right for their time. They were right in their fearless quest of the unknown. They were right for having agonized over something they believed in, for having written with their own blood, for being relentless in their burning zeal to confront and expose error in their own society and to bring the boon of social reform and a renewal of hope. And they did this with a level of accuracy that far outstripped other thinkers in their own time. A person need not be accurate for all Time…only for their time.
Aristotle was a renaissance man in his own era: astronomist, botanist, zoologist, political scientist (tutored Alexander the Great), theatre and literary critic…all this, and still he is preeminently remembered as a philosopher. But his brand of philosophy harkens back to its simple definition, not as a branch of knowledge concerned chiefly with metaphysical musings, but rather a love of all knowledge and wisdom (philo—“loving”, sophia—“wisdom”). He was a forerunner in analytic philosophy, which means that above all he was a logician. Aristotle resembles the great Eratosthenes (called ‘Beta’ in his own age for being supposedly the second best in the world in any field), who calculated the circumference of the earth from Egypt in the 3rd century BCE, using the small arc of his geographical position as his only frame of reference. It was like shaking a closed box and deducting its contents from the faint taps, rattles, and imbalance that resulted. Given his experiences and the materials he had to work with, he went as far theoretically as any many could, in any age.
I personally found the sections of his Nicomachean Ethics, Politics, and Metaphysics to be the most engaging(in that order). It is truly a wonder to watch the probings of a genius into the relatively virgin and unmapped territories of knowledge. He even tears up the floors of the then current science with the basic question ‘why’, saying that the ‘why’ of philosophical pursuit is what separates the facts-people from idea-people. “Wisdom is knowledge of principles and causes”, and it is more an ‘art’, in his opinion, than a science.
Einstein said that imagination is more important than knowledge. Why? Because imagination is about calculating cumulative tendencies of the objective world, and subjectively creating a larger, composite picture from that data. Give an imaginative person the tip of an iceberg and he could limn its entire mass. If someone should say, ‘but he didn’t see that air pocket there’, or ‘that vein of water is less solid than he supposed’, we should respond that this is a natural result of theorizing (the true task of the philosopher/scientist) and not merely observing (historian). Aristotle treated philosophy like a living art form rather than a dead science of empirical facts, and his ideas will live on because of it. “We call the masters wiser, not because they can do things, but because they grasp the theory and understand the causes.”
Aristotle was a renaissance man in his own era: astronomist, botanist, zoologist, political scientist (tutored Alexander the Great), theatre and literary critic…all this, and still he is preeminently remembered as a philosopher. But his brand of philosophy harkens back to its simple definition, not as a branch of knowledge concerned chiefly with metaphysical musings, but rather a love of all knowledge and wisdom (philo—“loving”, sophia—“wisdom”). He was a forerunner in analytic philosophy, which means that above all he was a logician. Aristotle resembles the great Eratosthenes (called ‘Beta’ in his own age for being supposedly the second best in the world in any field), who calculated the circumference of the earth from Egypt in the 3rd century BCE, using the small arc of his geographical position as his only frame of reference. It was like shaking a closed box and deducting its contents from the faint taps, rattles, and imbalance that resulted. Given his experiences and the materials he had to work with, he went as far theoretically as any many could, in any age.
I personally found the sections of his Nicomachean Ethics, Politics, and Metaphysics to be the most engaging(in that order). It is truly a wonder to watch the probings of a genius into the relatively virgin and unmapped territories of knowledge. He even tears up the floors of the then current science with the basic question ‘why’, saying that the ‘why’ of philosophical pursuit is what separates the facts-people from idea-people. “Wisdom is knowledge of principles and causes”, and it is more an ‘art’, in his opinion, than a science.
Einstein said that imagination is more important than knowledge. Why? Because imagination is about calculating cumulative tendencies of the objective world, and subjectively creating a larger, composite picture from that data. Give an imaginative person the tip of an iceberg and he could limn its entire mass. If someone should say, ‘but he didn’t see that air pocket there’, or ‘that vein of water is less solid than he supposed’, we should respond that this is a natural result of theorizing (the true task of the philosopher/scientist) and not merely observing (historian). Aristotle treated philosophy like a living art form rather than a dead science of empirical facts, and his ideas will live on because of it. “We call the masters wiser, not because they can do things, but because they grasp the theory and understand the causes.”
November 19, 2009
Just as Plato was likely the greatest of Socrates' students, so, too, was Aristotle the mightiest of Plato's pupils who studied at his Academy. His "Metaphysics," one of the most important components of this collection of Aristotle's works, addresses the fundamental issue of knowing. And even though he breaks with his mentor in many of his works, in the end he remains a good Platonist in that he believes that humans can come to understand essential reality. Early in the "Metaphysics," he says that "wisdom is knowledge of principles and causes." This version does a competent job of translating this important work.
While Aristotle does not accept the Platonic theory of forms in its pure statement, he contends that through thinking and wisdom, humans can come to understand the essences, the substance of that which is. He argues for a deductive method of inquiry, whereas the Sophists, his antagonists, began with induction from sensory experience and observed facts. He claims that:
". . .the things best to know are first principles and causes. For through them and from them all other things may be known but not they through the things covered by them. Supreme then among the sciences and superior to all subordinate science is that which knows the end for which everything takes place, which is the good for each thing and, as a whole, the highest good for all nature."
Aristotle is confident that there is an objective reality "out there," beyond human senses, but one which can be understood.
Aristotle specifically targets the Sophist Protagaras. He claims that ". . if all men are equally wrong and right, a person like that can neither speak nor tell us anything, for he is saying at the same time both 'yes' and 'no.'" He perceives that the key weakness of the Sophist worldview is that Protagaras and his peers see the sensory world as the "real" world, or as Aristotle puts it, "they took the sense world to be all that is." However, Aristotle contends that there is more than just sensation to guide our understanding of "the real."
He sees that there are "essences" and "substances" that are the underlying truth of things as they are and as they are potentially. He simply observes that "Whatever then is produced is produced by something (by this I mean the starter of the process), and out of something (and let this be matter. . .), and becomes something. . . ." There is a reality before our senses can apprehend its overt manifestation. In the end, there is something that exists before our sensation of those objects. Through reason, humans must try to understand the end of things, their purposes or goals. Of the community and politics, Aristotle says that:
Aristotle was highly critical of the Sophists; Aristotle in the "Metaphysics" named names, in the instance noted above, Protagaras.
Some of the basic points in this work: (1) there is a definable reality that we humans can know through the exercise of reason; (2) right and wrong are concepts with a clear meaning that can be ascertained by wise people; (3) people and their community are wed.
As to the third point, Aristotle said in his "Politics," ". . .he who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god: he is no part of a state." Humans and their political community must exist together.
In the end, this is an important work in the history of philosophy (and political philosophy), laying out one vision of how we know what we know. The work attacks those who are skeptical about an objective reality that humans can come to understand. All in all, a competently done translation of a key work in the philosophical conversation over the generations. Aristotle
While Aristotle does not accept the Platonic theory of forms in its pure statement, he contends that through thinking and wisdom, humans can come to understand the essences, the substance of that which is. He argues for a deductive method of inquiry, whereas the Sophists, his antagonists, began with induction from sensory experience and observed facts. He claims that:
". . .the things best to know are first principles and causes. For through them and from them all other things may be known but not they through the things covered by them. Supreme then among the sciences and superior to all subordinate science is that which knows the end for which everything takes place, which is the good for each thing and, as a whole, the highest good for all nature."
Aristotle is confident that there is an objective reality "out there," beyond human senses, but one which can be understood.
Aristotle specifically targets the Sophist Protagaras. He claims that ". . if all men are equally wrong and right, a person like that can neither speak nor tell us anything, for he is saying at the same time both 'yes' and 'no.'" He perceives that the key weakness of the Sophist worldview is that Protagaras and his peers see the sensory world as the "real" world, or as Aristotle puts it, "they took the sense world to be all that is." However, Aristotle contends that there is more than just sensation to guide our understanding of "the real."
He sees that there are "essences" and "substances" that are the underlying truth of things as they are and as they are potentially. He simply observes that "Whatever then is produced is produced by something (by this I mean the starter of the process), and out of something (and let this be matter. . .), and becomes something. . . ." There is a reality before our senses can apprehend its overt manifestation. In the end, there is something that exists before our sensation of those objects. Through reason, humans must try to understand the end of things, their purposes or goals. Of the community and politics, Aristotle says that:
Aristotle was highly critical of the Sophists; Aristotle in the "Metaphysics" named names, in the instance noted above, Protagaras.
Some of the basic points in this work: (1) there is a definable reality that we humans can know through the exercise of reason; (2) right and wrong are concepts with a clear meaning that can be ascertained by wise people; (3) people and their community are wed.
As to the third point, Aristotle said in his "Politics," ". . .he who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god: he is no part of a state." Humans and their political community must exist together.
In the end, this is an important work in the history of philosophy (and political philosophy), laying out one vision of how we know what we know. The work attacks those who are skeptical about an objective reality that humans can come to understand. All in all, a competently done translation of a key work in the philosophical conversation over the generations. Aristotle
November 20, 2024
While staying at a boathouse with friends, I stumbled upon this book on a shelf and was immediately captivated. It consumed me to the point that my inclination to party faded entirely. Instead, I found myself retreating into the woods, sitting on the dock, or sprawling across the couch, engrossed in its pages for days. Years later, I purchased my own copy. Though there were moments when Aristotle's ideas provoked my skepticism or even elicited an eye-roll, I relished engaging with his thoughts nonetheless. What I appreciated most was how this book drew me away from the allure of youthful revelry at a lake house and into the quiet, reflective space of reading.
August 17, 2018
Only cuts out the boring bits.
August 6, 2023
Such depth of wisdom as well as hubris and written 2 and a half millenia ago.
December 28, 2007
Philosophy has always been hard for me to read, it takes alot to work through the ideas
December 31, 2023
Some interesting insights.
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May 16, 2008888.5
November 3, 2010
The basis of all modern Western philosophy. A must read for a serious study of the subject.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews