The Politics of Aristotle

by Aristotle

  F 22 R3 (Cicero, Academica II xxxviii 119):

  When your Stoic sage has said all these things to you syllable by syllable, Aristotle will come, pouring out his golden flow, to say that the Stoic is talking nonsense; he will say that the world was never generated, because there was never a beginning based on a new plan for such a brilliant work, and that it is so well designed in every part that no force can effect such great movements and so great a change, and no old age can come upon the world by lapse of time, so that this splendid world should ever fall to pieces and perish.

  F 23 R3 (Cicero, de natura deorum II xv 42):

  Since some living things have their origin in earth, others in water, others in air, Aristotle thinks that it is absurd to suppose that in that part which is fittest to generate living things no animal should be born. Now the stars occupy the ethereal region; and since that region is the most rare and is always in movement and activity, any animal born in it must have the keenest perception and the swiftest movement. Thus since it is in ether that the stars are born, it is proper that in these there should be perception and intelligence. From which it follows that the stars should be reckoned among the gods.

  F 24 R3 (Cicero, de natura deorum II xvi 44):

  Aristotle is to be praised, too, for judging that all things that move do so either by nature or by force or voluntarily, and that the sun and moon and all the stars are in movement, and that things that move by nature are carried either downwards by their weight or upwards by their lightness, neither of which happens to the stars, because their movement is in an orbit or circle. Nor again can it be said that some greater force makes the stars move contrary to nature; for what force can be greater? What remains, then, is that the movement of the stars is voluntary.

  F 25 R3 (Censorinus, de die natali XVIII 11):

  There is, further, the year which Aristotle calls greatest (rather than great), which the spheres of the sun, the moon and the five wandering stars complete when they return together to the same point where once they were all together; the winter of such a year is a great cataclysm or flood, the summer an ecpyrosis or conflagration of the world; for at these alternate periods the world seems now to be consumed in fire, now to be covered in water.

  F 26 R3 (Cicero, de natura deorum I xiii 33):

  Aristotle, in the third book of his On Philosophy, creates much confusion by dissenting from his master Plato. For now he ascribes all divinity to mind, now he says that the world itself is a god, now he sets another god over the world and ascribes to him the part of ruling and preserving the movement of the world by a sort of backward rotation. Then he says that the heat of the heavens is a god, not realising that the heavens are a part of the world, which he has himself elsewhere called a god.

  (Cicero, Academica I vii 26):

  The fifth kind, from which are made stars and minds, Aristotle thought to be something distinct, and unlike the four I have mentioned above.

  (Cicero, Tusculanae disputationes I × 22):

  Aristotle, who far exceeded all others—Plato I always except—both in intellect and in industry, after taking account of the four well-known kinds of first principles from which all things were derived, considers that there is a fifth kind of thing, from which comes mind; for thought, foresight, learning, teaching, discovery, remembering many things, love and hate, desire and fear, distress and joy, these and their like he thinks cannot be included in any of those four kinds; he adds a fifth kind, which lacks a name, and so he calls the mind itself by a new name, ἐνδελέχεια, as being a sort of continuous and endless movement.

  (Aristoxenus, Elementa harmonica II 30–31):

  This, as Aristotle was always saying, was the experience of most of those who heard Plato’s lecture On the Good. Each of them attended on the assumption that he would hear about one of the recognised human goods—such as wealth, health, strength, and in general some marvellous happiness. When Plato’s lectures turned out to be about mathematics—numbers, geometry, astronomy—and to crown all about the thesis that the good1 is one, it seemed to them, I fancy, something quite paradoxical; and so some people despised the whole thing, while others criticised it.

  (Philoponus, Commentarius in de Anima 75.34–76.1):

  By the books On Philosophy Aristotle means the work entitled On the Good; in this Aristotle reports Plato’s unwritten seminars; the work is genuine. He relates there the view of Plato and the Pythagoreans about what exists and about first principles.

  F 27 R3 (Vita Aristotelis Latina 33):

  In the work On the Good he says: ‘Not only he who is in luck but also he who offers a proof should remember he is a man’.

  F 28 R3 (Alexander, Commentarius in Metaphysica 55.20–56.35):

  Both Plato and the Pythagoreans assumed numbers to be the first principles of existing things, because they thought that that which is primary and incomposite is a first principle, and that planes are prior to bodies (for that which is simpler and not destroyed along with something else is primary by nature), and on the same principle lines are prior to planes, and points (which the mathematicians call sêmeia but they called units) to lines, being completely incomposite and having nothing prior to them; but units are numbers; therefore numbers are the first of existing things. And since Forms or Ideas are prior to the things which according to him have their being in relation to them and derive their being from them (the existence of these he tried in several ways to establish), he said that the Forms are numbers. For if that which is one in kind is prior to the things that exist in relation to it, and nothing is prior to number, the Forms are numbers. This is why he also said that the first principles of number are first principles of the Forms, and the One is the first principle of all things.

  Again, the Forms are the first principles of all other things, and the first principles of number are first principles of Ideas since they are numbers; and he used to say that the first principles of number are the unit and the dyad. For, since there are in numbers both the One and that which is other than the One (i.e. the many and the few), he assumed that the first thing there is in number, apart from the One, is the first principle both of the many and of the few. Now the dyad is the first thing apart from the One, having in itself both manyness and fewness; for the double is many and the half is few, and these are in the dyad; and the dyad is contrary to the One, since the latter is indivisible and the former is divided.

  Again, thinking to prove that the equal and the unequal are first principles of all things, both of things that exist in their own right and of opposites (for he tried to refer all things to these as their simplest elements), he assigned equality to the monad, and inequality to excess and defect; for inequality involves two things, a great and a small, which are excessive and defective. This is why he called it an indefinite dyad—because neither the excessive nor the exceeded is, as such, definite; they are indefinite and unlimited. But when limited by the One the indefinite dyad, he says, becomes the numerical dyad; for this kind of dyad is one in form.

  Again, the dyad is the first number; its first principles are the excessive and the exceeded, since it is in the dyad that the double and the half are first found; for while the double and the half are excessive and exceeded, the excessive and the exceeded are not thereby double and half; so that these are elements of the double. And since the excessive and the exceeded when they have been limited become double and half (for these are no longer indefinite, nor is the treble and third, or the quadruple and quarter, or anything else that already has its excess limited), and this is effected by the nature of the One (for each thing is one in so far as it is a ‘this’ and is limited), the One and the great and the small must be elements in the numerical dyad. But the dyad is the first number. These then are the elements in the dyad. It is for some such reasons that Plato used to treat the One and the dyad as the first principles both of numbers and of all existing things, as Aristotle says in his work On the Good.

  F 28 R3 (Simplicius, Commentarius in Phys
ica 151.6–11):

  Alexander says that according to Plato the first principles of all things, and of the Ideas themselves, are the One and the indefinite dyad, which he used to call great and small, as Aristotle relates in his work On the Good. One might gather this also from Speusippus and Xenocrates and the others who were present at Plato’s lecture on the Good; for they all wrote down and preserved his doctrine, and they say he used these as first principles.

  F 28 R3 (Simplicius, Commentarius in Physica 453.25–30):

  They say that Plato maintained that the One and the indefinite dyad were the first principles of sensible things as well. He placed the indefinite dyad also among the objects of thought and said it was unlimited, and he made the great and the small first principles and said they were unlimited, in his lectures on the Good; Aristotle, Heraclides, Hestiaeus, and other associates of Plato attended these and wrote them down in the enigmatic style in which they were delivered.

  F 29 R3 (Sextus Empiricus, adversus mathematicos III 57–58):

  But Aristotle says . . . that the length without breadth of which they [sc. the geometers] speak is not inconceivable, but that we can without any difficulty arrive at the thought of it. He rests his argument on a rather clear and illuminating example: we grasp the length of a wall, he says, without considering also its breadth, so that it must be possible to conceive of the length without any particular breadth of which the geometers speak—for the phenomena are our way of seeing what is non-evident.

  F 30 R3 (Alexander, Commentarius in Metaphysica 59.28–60.2):

  One might ask how it is that, though Plato mentions both an efficient cause . . . and also that for the sake of which and the end . . ., Aristotle mentions neither of these causes in his account of Plato’s doctrines. Is it because he mentioned neither of them in what he said about causes (as he has shown in On the Good), or because he does not treat these as causes of things that come into being and perish, and did not even work out any theory about them?

  F 31 R3 (Alexander, Commentarius in Metaphysica 250.17–20):

  For the proof that practically all contraries are referred to the One and plurality as their first principle, Aristotle sends us to the Selection of Contraries, where he has treated expressly of the subject. He has also spoken about this selection in the second book On the Good.

  F 34 R3 (Pliny, naturalis historia XXX ii 3):

  Eudoxus related that this Zoroaster lived six thousand years before the death of Plato; Aristotle agrees.

  F 37 R3 (Cicero, de divinatione I xxv 53):

  What, is the singular, the almost divine, intellect of Aristotle in error, or does he wish others to fall into error, when he writes that his friend Eudemus of Cyprus while on a journey to Macedonia came to Pherae, a Thessalian town of considerable note at that time, but held in cruel subjection by the tyrant Alexander? Now in that town, he says, Eudemus fell so ill that all the doctors feared for his life. He dreamed that a handsome young man told him that he would soon recover, that in a few days the tyrant Alexander would die, and that five years later Eudemus himself would return home. And indeed, Aristotle writes, the first two predictions were fulfilled forthwith: Eudemus recovered and the tyrant was killed by his wife’s brothers. But towards the end of the fifth year, when the dream had led him to hope that he would return from Sicily to Cyprus, he died in battle at Syracuse. And so the dream was interpreted as meaning that when Eudemus’ soul had left his body it had returned to its home.

  (al-Kindi, cod. Taimuriyye Falsafa 55):

  Aristotle tells of the Greek king whose soul was caught up in ecstasy, and who for many days remained neither alive nor dead. When he came to himself, he told the bystanders of various things in the invisible world, and related what he had seen—souls, forms, and angels; he gave the proofs of this by foretelling to all his acquaintances how long each of them would live. All he had said was put to the proof, and no-one exceeded the span of life that he had assigned. He prophesied too that after a year a chasm would open in the country of Elis, and after two years a flood would occur in another place; and everything happened as he had said. Aristotle asserts that the reason for this was that his soul had acquired this knowledge just because it had been near to leaving his body and had been in a certain way separated from it, and so had seen what it had seen. How much greater marvels of the upper world of the kingdom would it have seen, then, if it had really left his body.

  F 38 R3 (Themistius, Commentarius in de Anima 106.29–107.4):

  Almost all the weightiest arguments that he [sc. Plato] used about the immortality of the soul make reference to the intellect. . . . as is also the case with the more convincing of those worked out by Aristotle himself in the Eudemus.

  F 39 R3 (Elias, Commentarius in Categorias 114.25–115.3):

  Aristotle establishes the immortality of the soul in his acroamatic works as well, and there he establishes it by compelling arguments; but in the dialogues he naturally uses plausible arguments. . . . In his dialogues he says that the soul is immortal because all we men instinctively make libations to the departed and swear by them, but no-one ever makes a libation to or swears by that which is completely non-existent . . . [115.11–12]. It is chiefly in his dialogues that Aristotle seems to announce the immortality of the soul.

  F 40 R3 (Proclus, Commentarius in Timaeum 323.31–324.4):

  Aristotle in emulation of him [sc. Plato] treats scientifically of the soul in the de Anima, saying nothing either about its descent or about its fortunes; but in his dialogues he dealt separately with those matters and set down the preliminary discussion.

  F 41 R3 (Proclus, Commentarius in Rem Publicam II 349.13–26):

  The excellent Aristotle also gives the reason why the soul on coming hither from there forgets the sights it saw there, but on going hence remembers there its experiences here. We must accept the argument; for he himself says that on their journey from health to disease some people forget even the letters they have learned, but that no-one ever has this experience when passing from disease to health; and that life without the body, being natural to souls, is like health, and life in the body, as being unnatural, is like disease. For there they live according to nature, but here contrary to nature; so that it not unreasonably results that souls that pass thence forget the things there, while souls that pass hence thither continue to remember the things here.

  F 42 R3 (Damascius, Commentarius in Phaedonem 530):

  That there must actually be a whole race of men which is nourished in this way is shown by the case of the man who was nourished by the sun’s rays alone, as recorded by Aristotle from his own observation.

  F 43 R3 (Plutarch, quaestiones convivales 733C):

  Aristotle has related how in Cilicia Timon’s grandmother used to hibernate for two months each year, showing no sign of life apart from breathing.

  F 44 R3 ([Plutarch], Consolatio ad Apollonium 115BE):

  Many wise men, as Crantor says, not of today but of long ago, have wept for the human lot, thinking life to be a punishment and birth the beginning of the greatest disaster for a man. Aristotle says that Silenus stated this opinion to Midas after he had been captured—but let me set down the philosopher’s actual words; he says this in the work entitled Eudemus or On the Soul:

  ‘For that reason, best and most blessed of all men, in addition to thinking that the dead are blessed and happy, we hold it impious to speak any falsehood about them or to slander them, since they have now become better and greater. And these customs are so ancient and long-established among us that no one at all knows when they began or who first established them, but they have been continuously acknowledged for an indefinite age. In addition to that, you observe the saying which has been on men’s lips for many years’.

  ‘What is that?’, he said.

  He said in reply: ‘That not to be born is best of all, and to be dead better than to be alive. Heaven has given this testimony to many men. They say that when Midas had caught Silenus he interrogated him after the
hunt and asked him what was the best thing for men and what the most desirable of all. Silenus at first would not say anything but maintained an unbroken silence; but when, after using every device, Midas with difficulty induced him to address him, he said under compulsion: “Shortlived seed of a toiling spirit and a harsh fortune, why do you force me to say what is better for you not to know? For a life lived in ignorance of its own ills is most painless. It is quite impossible for the best thing of all to befall men, nor can they share in the nature of what is better. For it is best, for all men and women, not to be born; and second after that—the first of things open to men—is, once born, to die as quickly as possible.” It is clear that he meant that time spent dead is better than time spent alive’.

  F 45 R3 (Philoponus, Commentarius in de Anima 141.33–142.6, 144.21–145.7):

  Some . . . thought that the soul was an attunement of the body, and that the different kinds of soul answered to the different attunements of the body. This opinion Aristotle states and refutes. In the present work [i.e. the de Anima] he first merely records the opinion itself, but a little later on he also sets out the arguments that led them to it. He had already opposed this opinion elsewhere—I mean, in the dialogue Eudemus—and before him Plato in the Phaedo had used five arguments against the view. . . .