亚里士多德的世界
最新书摘：
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/nuː s/2014-01-05Yet the generalities contain something of importance. Aristotle’s first general account of the soul amounts to this: for a thing to have a soul is for it to be a natural organic body actually capable of functioning. The second general account explains what those functions are. Thus Aristotle’s souls are not pieces of living things, nor are they bits of spiritual stuff placed inside physical bodies; rather, they are sets of powers, sets of capacities or faculties. Possessing a soul is like possessing a skill. A carpenter’s skill is not some part of him, responsible for his skilled acts; similarly, a living creature’s animator of soul is not some part of it, responsible for its living activities.
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[已注销]2011-05-30Aristotle invented this use of letters. Logicians are now so familiar with the invention, and employ it so unthinkingly, that they may forget how remarkable an invention it was.
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[已注销]2011-05-30According to Aristotle, ‘there is a science which studies beings qua being and the things that belong to them in their own right’. (This science is often identified as metaphysics, or at least as a chief part of metaphysics, and Aristotle studies it in his Metaphysics. But Aristotle never uses the term ‘metaphysics’, and the title ‘Metaphysics’ means literally ‘What comes after natural science’.) The phrase ‘beings qua being’ has a pleasantly esoteric ring to it, and many scholars have supposed it to denote some abstruse and abstract item. (The supposition is aided by a common mistranslation of the Aristotelian formula which renders it in the singular, as ‘being qua being’.) In fact Aristotle means something neither abstract nor abstruse. ‘Beings qua being’ are not a special class or kind ...
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[已注销]2011-05-30He loved Plato, and on his death wrote an elegy in which he praised him as a man ‘whom it is not right for evil men even to praise; who alone or first of mortals proved clearly, by his own life and by the course of his arguments, that a man becomes good and happy at the same time’. But you may love a man while rejecting his beliefs. Aristotle was no Platonist. Many of the doctrines central to Platonism are strongly criticized in Aristotle’s treatises, and he criticized Plato during his lifetime. ‘Plato used to call Aristotle the Foal. What did he mean by the name? Clearly it was known that foals kick their mothers when they have had enough milk.’ Ancient critics accused the Foal of ingratitude, but the charge is absurd – no teacher requires his pupils to subscribe to his own doctrines from...
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[已注销]2011-05-02For if Aristotle’s historical researches are impressive, they are nothing compared to his work in the natural sciences. He made or collected observations in astronomy, meteorology, chemistry, physics, psychology, and half a dozen other sciences; but his scientific fame rests primarily on his work in zoology and biology: his studies on animals laid the foundations of the biological sciences; and they were not superseded until more than two millennia after his death.
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[已注销]2011-05-02Above all, Aristotle is tough. A good way of reading him is this: Take up a treatise, think of it as a set of lecture notes, and imagine that you now have to lecture from them. You must expand and illustrate the argument, and you must make the transitions clear; you will probably decide to relegate certain paragraphs to footnotes, or reserve them for another time and another lecture; and if you have any talent at all as a lecturer, you will find that the jokes add themselves. Let it be admitted that Aristotle can be not only tough but also vexing. Whatever does he mean here? How on earth is this conclusion supposed to follow from those premises? Why this sudden barrage of technical terms? One ancient critic claimed that ‘he surrounds the difficulty of his subject with the obscurity of his ...
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/nuː s/2014-01-06（亚氏原文）Snakes copulate by twining around one another; and they have no testicles and no penis, as I have already observed - no penis because they have no legs, no testicles ... because of their length. For because they are naturally elongated, if there were further delay in the region of the testicles, the semen would grow cool because of its slow passage. (This happens in the case of men who have large penises; they are less fertile than those with moderate penises because cold semen is not fertile and semen that is carried a long way cools.)
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如水圆清2021-03-22尽管他以一种非凡的投入来追求自己的目标，可他并不认为自己拥有非凡的求知欲；因为他曾断言“所有人都有渴望认识（世界）的天性”，还声称：最恰当地说来，我们中的每个人都是以思想来区分的，因此生命—— 一种完全人类的生命——就是“思想活动”。在其早期的著作《哲学训词》中，亚里士多德宣称“智慧的获得是令人愉悦的；所有的人在哲学中都会感到安适，也希望把其他事放在一边，花些时间在哲学上”。“哲学”一词从词源学上讲，指的是对智慧的热爱。在亚里士多德的书中，哲学家不是一个隐居的大学老师，从事着遥远而抽象的思考；而是寻求“人类的和神圣的一切事物的知识”的人。在他后期的著作《尼各马可伦理学》中，亚里士多德论述道：“幸福”——人们认识自己且感觉最旺盛活跃的一种思想状态——存在于一种充满智力活动的生命中。这种生命是不是过于神圣、人类无法企及？不是的，因为“我们不能听命于那些因为我们是人而督促我们思考人类思想，因为我们是凡人而督促我们思考凡人思想的人。相反，我们应尽可能地使自己不朽，尽可能地按我们身上最精细的元素生活——虽然这类元素在体积上很小，但在能量和价值上却比其他任何元素都更伟大”。一个人的正确目标是仿效众神，使自己不朽；因为这样做就会变成最完全意义上的人，实现最完整的自我。这种自我实现需要他具有求知欲，而这种求知欲是一个人自然而然要具备的。