Reviews for Aristotle's dialogue with Socrates

The average rating for Aristotle's dialogue with Socrates based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2009-01-13 00:00:00 Jeremy Matches This book is exactly what the title says it is: an examination of how on nearly every page of Aristotle's ethics, he is in dialogue with Socrates. There are no opinions of Aristotle's that are not somehow related to a view proposed in Plato's works. Considering how much there was a debate, if not battle, about whether you were a Platonist or Aristotelian in the later middle ages and the Renaissance, this book is a corrective to the view that they are opposite poles. Inasmuch as they disagreed with each other, Aristotle fundamentally worked from and was deeply influenced by his teacher. To sum up, Burger writes, 'What is the good life for a human being? is the Socratic question that the Ethics set out to address. Is it, we should now ask, a Socratic "answer" at which the inquiry arrives in the end? Plato's Socrates comes closest to making his own answer thematic at his public trial, in the context of explaining why he would not accept it if the penalty imposed on him were only the demand to remain quiet and live in silence. His reason—though he doubts the jury will be persuaded by it—is the conviction that the unexamined life is not worth living for a human being (Apology 38a). Taken literally, Socrates' claim, however playful, is shockingly radical: all his fellow citizens—whom he had just likened to a sleeping horse, annoyed at the gadfly who awakens them—might as well be dead. Aristotle, who is perhaps less playful, appears more generous: "happiness" can be expanded to include a life governed by ethical virtue, albeat only as a secondary form relative to the perfect happiness of the theoretical life." (212) The pre-Socratic philosopher, however, was limited (like many scientists today) by his view of 'distinterested' knowledge and by claiming to possess it all perfectly (or at least be capable of possessing it perfectly and fully). "But the Socratic philosopher who is characterized by his central concern with the question of what is good for a human being, is fully aware, and must be aware, of the paradoxical self-fulfillment that comes with his disinterested practice: he recognizes that the activity he engages in as en end in itself, because not in the service of any higher end, is in fact the good that makes human life worth living. He understands his own activity to be the paradigmatic expression of a natural desire, in all human beings, for possession of the good and knowledge of the good, which must be of the greatest use, if without it everything else we possess and everything else we know is useless (Republic 505a-e). Driven by a selfless and uncalculating eros of the beautiful, he discovers and embraces his own good in that very pursuit.' (213-4) On almost every page of Aristotle's Ethics, "one can hear the echo of a discussion in the Platonic dialogues ... the action of the Ethics involves Aristotle's ongoing, if implicit, dialogue with an imagined interlocutor who is indistinguishably the Platonic Socrates or the Socratic Plato. The sharing of speeches and thoughts, through that dialogue in deed, is the activity in which Aristotle has from the start invited his reader's participation" (215).

Review # 2 was written on 2010-09-05 00:00:00 Annie Herve As of the end of the first few chapters, not very helpful.