Aristotle's Philosophy - Martha Nussbaum & Bryan Magee (1987) – YouTube Dictation Transcript & Vocabulary

1.our view of the philosophy of the ancient world is dominated by two figures Plato and Aristotle Plato is the first philosopher whose Works have come down to us in the form in which he wrote them Aristotle was one of his pupils in fact there's an extraordinary line of personal succession there for just as Aristotle had been a pupil of Plato So Plato had been a pupil of Socrates in this program we're going to look at Aristotle's work whose greatness and influence rival those of any other philosophers the son of a doctor Aristotle was born in 384 BC not in Athens but he was sent to Athens to be educated and at the age of 17 he became one of the pupils at Plato's Academy he stayed there for 20 years until the death of Plato in 347 BC he was then uprooted and spent the next 12 years in political Exile a period in which he was primarily absorbed in biological researches and even spent a short period as tutor to Alexander the Great he then returned to Athens and for another 12 years taught her to school which he founded himself called the lyceum then he went into Exile again but died only a year later in 322 BC at the age of 62

2.only about one-fifth of Aristotle's work has survived but even that fills 12 volumes and touches on the whole range of what was available knowledge in his time unfortunately all those Works which he prepared for publication and which were praised throughout Antiquity for their great beauty of style have been lost all we have is what he wrote up from lecture notes so it has none of the literary art of what we have of Plato's writings but even so there can be no doubt in the quality or the influence of the thought here to discuss it with me as someone who established a reputation very young in Aristotle scholarship Professor Martha Nussbaum of brown university in the United States Professor Nussbaum can you start by telling us something about the ground covered by Aristotle's output yes we have here a philosophical achievement of tremendous range and complexity we have fundamental work in all the Sciences of his day including especially the science of biology where his contribution was unmatched for a thousand years then work in general foundations of scientific explanation General philosophy of nature work in metaphysics including questions of substance identity continuity work on life and the mental faculties and finally we have terrific work in ethics and political Theory and work in rhetoric and the theory of literature it's an extraordinary fact isn't it that over this incomparable range he was regarded as the Authority for hundreds upon hundreds of years during the Middle Ages yes and I think this actually gives us a great difficulty in approaching Aristotle's thought we're so used to thinking of him as you say as an authority as the philosopher Dante's the master of those who know sitting on his throne and I think actually this prevents us from seeing that Aristotle is really one of the most flexible and open-ended philosophers one who views philosophy as an ongoing search to attend to all the complexities of human experience and who never rests content and but is searching for ever more adequate ways to bring that complexity into his thought now across the enormous range of his output is there only one unifying factor or mode of approach that one can point to well Aristotle tells us that in every area the Philosopher's got to begin by setting down what he calls the appearances then working through the puzzles that these present us with and then coming back to them saving as he puts it the greatest number and the most basic to show you what this is let me give you an example suppose you're a philosopher working on the problem of time now what you'll do According to Aristotle is Begin by setting down not only our perceptual experience concerning temporal succession and duration but also our ordinary beliefs and what we say concerning time you'll set this down then you'll see whether it presents you with any contradictions and if you find contradictions there then you'll go to work sifting and sorting out and you'll try to see which of our beliefs are actually more basic than others and you'll preserve those and then get rid of the ones that actually conflict with those so that you come back in the end to ordinary discourse with increased structure and understanding but time or anything else isn't the same thing as our belief about time or anything else does he make a clear distinction between the world and our discourse about the world well here his notion of appearances covers both our perceptual experience of the world and our ordinary sayings and beliefs now it's a broad conception and one that admits of lots of further subdivisions and certainly he's perfectly prepared to say that sometimes we will rely more on the experience of our senses and sometimes more on ordinary beliefs and sayings but I think he's right to think that there's a general unifying notion here because after all our perception is interpretive and selective and it's a part part and parcel of our conceptual schemes and the ways that as human beings we make sense of the world isn't there a danger though that this approach might be flat-footed or pedestrian because I mean if he always starts from our experience our perceptions and takes off from that and always so to speak returns to it at the end doesn't that mean that the whole of his philosophy is confined to the surface of the world of experience when what we feel we actually want is more like what Plato gives us something that gets behind the surfaces or below the surfaces to a deeper more underlying level compared with which the surface is indeed superficial yes I think you're right to bring in Plato here and it's certainly true that for Plato and lots of the tradition the preceded Plato the dominant image of philosophy is one of going behind or getting out there walking to the rim of the universe and staring Beyond at some Transcendent reality that's above and beyond our experience but actually I think Aristotle would have two things to say about that first of all he would say that our experience is an object of tremendous Wonder richness Beauty in its own right and then second he will say that actually we never can coherently go beyond our experience that the only project that we can really undertake is the mapping the investigating of the area of our experience now let me give you an example of how he argues this point and here there's a fundamental principle in Aristotle's thought which he calls the principle of non-contradiction this is the principle that contradictory properties can't apply to the same subject at the same time in the same respect for example my address cannot be both blue and not blue at the same time in the same place in the same respect and so forth now Aristotle says this is a very basic principle it's so basic that we seem to use it whenever we think and speak now how do we go about justifying such a fundamental principle which is actually the most basic of all as he puts it well he tells us that we can't actually justify it from without from outside our experience because in fact we use it in all our experience in sorting out experience but suppose that an opponent challenges it now now Aristotle says at this point you ask the opponent whether the opponent is prepared to say anything anything definite at all now so suppose he doesn't say anything well then Aristotle says you can dismiss that person because a person who doesn't say anything insofar as he doesn't say anything is pretty well like a vegetable well no suppose on the other hand the opponent does say something and it's something definite then says Aristotle you can actually show that person that in saying anything definite at all he or she is in fact making use of that very principle that the person is challenging because in asserting something definite you've got to be at the same time ruling something out at the very least the contradictory of what you've been asserting in the first place it's easy to see how fundamental logical principles like this can be and indeed are inherent in all our discourse but not how they could provide a foundation for the kind of knowledge it is that Aristotle is seeking well I think Aristotle here is eager to say that we cannot provide for any principle a foundation that does stand altogether outside our discourse and our conceptual schemes and he gives a further reason for this when he gives his general account of discourse his general account says that we can designate in speech a thing only when it is actually impinged on the experience of one of us somebody in our linguistic Community for example he says we can signal thunder in discourse only when somebody Hears A noise in the clouds and at that point we're able to use the name Thunder to refer to that noise and then at that point we can start asking what is that thing there what explains it and we can go on to inquire more about what it is but now suppose we tried to stand altogether outside of experience and find some entity or entities that actually had never entered the experience of any human being at all let's take for example Plato's forms now Aristotle says look here Plato tries to hang philosophy on forms like the form of the white which actually is imagined to be not the color of any real body at all but just a white itself out there now that he says is actually meaningless nonsense talk he says Plato's forms in that sense are like meaningless syllables you say to yourself when you're singing to yourself because we can't actually talk about things that haven't entered our experience at all but if inquiries can find solely to the world of experience why doesn't all of it come under the rubric of what we now call science I mean what is specifically philosophical about it well of course science and philosophy are not very sharply distinguished by Aristotle but I think what he would say is that there is a general search for a structure of explanation that's common to all the scientific areas and in his work the posterior analytics he provides an account of how the philosopher will search for what he calls episteme or scientific understanding in every area whatever and in every area the philosopher is supposed to find certain principles that are prior that are known first and more basic than the others from which as conclusions of a deductive argument the conclusions of that science will follow now here he says we have a faculty by which we're equipped to have insight into the fundamental first principles and I want to pause here for a minute because I think this is also something that's been badly misunderstood about Aristotle this is a faculty which is called intellect or news rather famous term in his thought and just being the Greek word noose being the Greek word for intellect or mind and Aristotle says that it's with this faculty of mine that we we grasp first principles now for centuries this was thought to be a special faculty of intellectual intuition by which we could step outside the sphere of our experience and apprehend as it were prior to all experience the first principles of science now I think you can see already why I want to say Aristotle would be opposed to that kind of foundation for science but in fact recent people who've been working on the text of the posterior analytics have argued quite successfully that that's also a bad reading of the text that in reality what noose is is a kind of insight we get into the explanatory role the fundamental status of a principle by our experience in using it to give scientific explanations Aristotle was wasn't he the first major Western thinker to actually try and map out the separate Sciences in fact he gave some of them the names that we use to this day yes and I think that's true and I think his work has still been of importance for people working in those Sciences particularly in the science of biology and and where his work on explanation has recently come to be extremely important and interesting now can you give an example of the way he would go about as it were isolating a subject area as a single field of inquiry all right well I'm going to give an example that's um in our view wouldn't be from one of the Sciences as we think of it but a very general inquiry that he has in his work on metaphysics into what he calls substance now this is I must interrupt you here because I think this word metaphysics which we're going to hear a lot of ought to be explained can you explain the word well its origin is uh disappointingly trivial that is in an ancient edition of Aristotle's work the editor put the work that had the title after the work that was called physics or natural explanation and the work the title simply means what comes after the work called physics it means the book office yes and what does the word itself come to mean in philosophy well it's hard to give a single account of this but roughly one might say I think that what metaphysics does is not to isolate one range of things and inquire into those but to pursue some perfectly general questions that might be asked about anything whatever questions about identity continuity logical form and so forth the fundamental constituents of the world that we experience yeah space time matter Etc the questions that pertain to any object or whatever it is that exists yeah now Central in this whole project is the question which Aristotle calls the question about substance now I want to start by trying to ask what this question means because I think we don't very naturally have an intuitive sense about what a question about substance could possibly be now if we read what Aristotle writes and try to reconstruct what his questions are I think we find that there are really two questions which he holds together quite closely the first is a question about change and the second is a question about identity now the question about change is that this of course in our experience we come in contact all the time with things that are changing that are the leaf buds turns green turns yellow then Withers child is born grows mature Withers dies now the question is if we're to talk about these changing things there still must be some it That Remains the Same while the attributes of the thing are changing or it'll be very difficult for us to talk about it so the question that Aristotle asks here is what are the more continuous more persisting things on which we can anchor our discourse about the change things which themselves persist while Properties or attributes are changing now the second question which he calls the what is it question I call the question about identity it goes like this supposing I point at some object in my experience say Brian Mcgee and I say all right what is this really now what I'm asking here is which of the many properties that you have which impress themselves on my senses are the more fundamental ones the ones that you couldn't cease to have without ceasing to be yourself you know now clearly you could change your jacket put on a different color of clothing and you would still be Brian Mcgee on the other hand it's not so clear that you could cease to be human or cease to be made of flesh and blood without ceasing to be yourself without in fact being dead so Aristotle's question about identity is the search for which are the parts or elements in the thing which do play that very fundamental role and they have to play two roles isn't that right I mean which are the characteristics that are absolutely inherently fundamental fundamental to any object to make it be that object and secondly what are the characteristics that persist through any change so that the identity of the changing object Remains the Same yes well Aristotle wants to hold these questions tightly together and I think there's a good reason for that because as he sees it to single out what it is that underlies change that persists through change you have to single out something with a definite identity something about which you could answer the what is it question something that is structured enough definite enough to be the subject of some discourse about change on the other hand if we're going to talk about the what is it question we better have as our answer something that itself is persistent enough it's not always going out of existence while we're actually talking about what it is now early philosophers before Aristotle had not always held these questions so closely together or they had focused on one and given strange answers as a result to the other let me give you two examples some early natural philosophers were LED seeing that it looked to them like matter was the most persistent stuff I mean they could see that trees children animals were born out of material stuff and then when they died what was left around was again material stuff they concluded that matter was the basic underlying principle of change and then they seem to conclude from that that matter was also what things really are in some fundamental way so they took an answer to the first question and without much further reflection they applied it plugged it into the second one now on the other side is an explanation given by some platonist theories I Won't Say by Plato himself but one that Aristotle finds in Plato's School which focuses on the identity question and tries to explain the identities of things in terms of their relation to certain stable immaterial objects the forms in something like this way they'll say well you Brian Mcgee are brown in color because of your relation to the form of the brown you are human because of some relation in which you stand to the form of the human and so forth now it's Aristotle's View that we've got to start in answering this second person I'm going to talk about the second person first and then come back to the materialists we've got to start by distinguishing those two kinds of properties that you have because the property of having brown color on you is a property that precisely is on or as we're residing in you that is it's one you could easily lose without ceasing to be yourself whereas as he would say the property of being human is not like that it's not one that you could lose without ceasing to be yourself so in his early work the categories he distinguishes these two sorts of properties the ones that are simply in the subject and the ones that as he puts it reveal the being the what is it of the subject I think it's worth me interrupting at this point to make it clear to the people listening to this discussion that as an approach which is adopted to absolutely everything which Aristotle did this makes it possible for us to describe as it were the whole of reality or the whole of Any Given reality that is to say that you you first of all you pick out something anything um it can be a dog a table a person any material object anything you like you identify something and then you say something about it you either attribute characteristics to it or you describe it as doing something or describe it as having something done to it so these this double-barreled approach that you identify a subject and then you predicate something of it this subject predicate approach has been believed by thinkers ever since to be an approach that makes possible the description of everything the description of the whole world in fact it's become built into our language and our logic hasn't it yes but I think here what Aristotle wants to insist on is that not all predicates are on the same level that there are some which simply are predicated other subject that we've already picked out and identified but there are these other ones like human being or dog or tree which are fundamental in identifying the subject in the first place we cannot pick out a bare subject and then tag predicates onto it but the subject itself has to be identified under some description and its natural kind terms that play the fundamental role here but of course we still haven't answered the materialists and we still haven't said in the notion of human being what is the fundamental analysis of human being that will give us the what is it of the subject so now this is what Aristotle later it goes on to do and this what is it question again applies to everything doesn't it I mean it's Aristotle's attempt to actually discover the true nature of the identity of things of whatever exists including us yes it is I think living substances and to some extent also artifacts play a very Central role here and what he wants to now ask is all right we've now gotten to the point where we see that Notions that we call Natural kinds Notions like human being dog or statue say play a fundamental role in identifying subjects in the world now we have to ask more precisely what they are are they is what it is is it to be a human being is it to be a certain sort of material or is it to be a certain structure and in the metaphysics he argues that what a substance is is fundamentally not some material stuffs or constituents but it fundamentally is a certain sort of order or structure which he calls a form Now by that he doesn't mean simply shape or configuration but he means in the case of say Brian Mcgee the way you're organized to function your form is an organized set of functional capabilities that you've got to have so long as you're in existence now he gives us three reasons for thinking that your materials couldn't be what it is to be you now first of all in the case of you and other living things matter is always going in and out it's always changing and of course you do change your material constituents very very often without ceasing to be yourself but second even if that's not the case say with an artifact we our conception of an artifact is that so long as its functional structure Remains the Same we could always replace bits of the matter without having a different thing in our hands we could take a ship and replace some of its planks so long as it remained that functional structure serving the function of a ship we would still have the same entity on our hands finally he argues that matter is just not definite enough to be what a thing really is matter is just a lump or heap of stuff and so we couldn't say you are some stuff or other but it's only when we've identified the structure that the stuff constitutes that we can even go on to say something intelligent about the stuff itself let me just go over those again because I think they have fun arguments of a very fundamental kind he says first of all Socrates I think the actual example he takes is Socrates isn't it Socrates cannot consist of of the matter that goes to make up his body because this matter is constantly changing and in fact change is completely several times in the course of socrates's life but he's still the same Socrates throughout that life so he can't just be the matter of which he consists but secondly this applies to species as a whole a dog can't just be a dog in virtue of the matter of which it consists because different different dogs are different I mean some some are brown some are black some are white they're different colors different shapes different sizes different weights but they're all dogs so they can't be dogs in virtue of the matter of which they consist and thirdly just a heap of matter without any abstract qualities such as organization or structure or form isn't a dog or a person or a shoe or a house or anything it is just a heap and that anything can only be anything at all by virtue of its structure its form its function is that right yeah that well you've you your second one adds a further argument actually that I didn't mention uh yes the different species members are all of course differently constituted materially that would be one further reason for rejecting the idea that matter gives us a perfectly general account of what it is to be a member of that species but then I want to add the further point that even when the matter in fact doesn't vary still our conception of what it is to be a certain sort of thing say a ship doesn't identify it with the matter and we can see that by performing a thought experiment that says if you replace the material bits just so long as you have continuity of functional structure then you still have the same thing on your hands but now isn't this bringing Aristotle dangerously close to Plato's theory of forms which he's rejected because isn't he now saying a dog isn't a dog by virtue of the matter of which it consists it's a DOT by virtue of its dogness it's it's abstract donors isn't he in that position or dangerously close to it well of course here we get to a very difficult area about what exactly form is and I think no two philosophers are going to be in precise agreement about the interpretation on this but let me try to say what I think now I think first of all it's quite clear that unlike Plato he makes the form something imminent to the particular it does not exist apart from that particular perceptible dog in some Heavenly realm of dogness but it's just there it's what the dog in fact is it's not separate from other words it's not an otherworldly right Spirit right it's it's right there it's what the dog really is it is that dog now the second thing I believe that the Aristotelian forms are individuals that is their particulars and not universals that is to say even though the definition of the doggy form of each dog if I take five dogs I'm going to get only one definition of what it is to be a dog for all of them still if I ask how many examples of doggy form do I have here well the answer is the number is five I mean just as many dogs as there are each one although quite like in quality will be exactly one in number as he puts it that'll be we count forms by counting the number of substances that we have on our hands I must say it seems to me even sort of getting on for 3000 years later that these arguments against materialism are devastating do you think that Aristotle has effectively ever ever been answered by materialist philosophers no I don't think he has and I think what I find so powerful about these arguments is that he starts arguing against materialism not only within the context of philosophy of mind and not only by picking out some special characteristics of the mental which make it different from everything else but precisely here by developing these General theories of identity and substance which show why for things quite generally including artifacts material reductionism is not a good way to go now can you give us an example of an actual area in which Aristotle puts this approach to work and starts identifying in some specific field what sorts of things there are well now we can turn I think to an area that's really very close to his General metaphysics since his General metaphysics is already concerned quite closely as we see with things like human beings dogs and other natural entities to the area of philosophy of nature now here Aristotle is interested in trying to say what kinds of explanations the philosopher of nature can give across the board how many kinds of explanations the philosopher is going to find useful he tells us that philosophy in fact begins with a sense of wonder before the world of nature that when we see the world we're struck by awe and wonder because we see these wonderful things going on and we can't understand why they work as they do he says it's rather like seeing a puppet show where you see these mechanisms moving and you know that behind there there must be some hidden mechanism that explains why it moves as it does but you don't know yet what it is and you want to search and find out now the question is what kind of explanation are you searching for when you ask this why question why does it work as it does now he here Aristotle thinks that lots of philosophers have been too simple because they fail to notice how many different ways we ask and answer these why questions and he wants to say that there's not just one kind of explanation that's useful here but in fact an open-ended list but at any rate at least four types seem to him to be quite important now these are of course the famous four causes we hear about Aristotle's four causes I think it's important to say that those are really four kinds of explanations therefore big causes Four B causes yes that's good four kinds of answers two why questions and of course they're called the material cause and hear the material form of explanation says say we take the question why does a tree grow as it does well the material question material explanation will say the tree grows as it does because it's made of such and such materials now that form of explanation is very useful and interesting but we can already guess that Aristotle is going to think it can't do the work alone without this other kind of explanation which he calls the formal explanation that says the tree grows as it does because it's structured in such and such a way that is its form so you see here the link with the metaphysical arguments then there's a Third Kind called the efficient cause or efficient explanation which says the tree grows as it does because various things from the environment push it in certain ways perhaps the incoming materials or the Earth and so on push it from behind in such and such ways then the last one which I think has been the most misunderstood one is the one that he calls the final cause and which we often call the teleological form of explanation because it refers to an end or Telos towards which the thing moves now this says the tree grows as it does for the sake of becoming a certain sort of mature Tree in other words things in nature are always moving towards the flourishing of their adult condition now that is a mystical or magical element in that that doesn't appear in any of the others or there seems to be well see that I think I want to say that's a misunderstanding too um first of all Aristotle is not saying that there's anything magical out there in the future that goes down and pulls the tree towards its future form as it were from the future exerting a causal pull from the Future No it's all quite natural it's happening within the tree itself it's a way of talking about the plastic and resourceful behavior of living things it's a way of offering a unified account of the way that things like trees in a variety of different natural circumstances always move in the way that promotes their continued life and their development towards their mature form so you see it's saying that in a variety of different climates and weathers the tree will always move towards the Sun and its roots will go towards water and the source of nourishment and that's a perfectly General explanation which will give us a way of understanding the variety of the different things that the tree does so you see in that there's nothing Supernatural there also isn't anything that refers to powers of mind or desire inside the tree itself it's just a way of talking about the resourcefulness of natural movement a lot of Scholars have accredited to Aristotle the notion that there are souls in everything do you think they've understood him correctly and is that part of his teleological explanation no I think they have misunderstood the way he uses teleological explanations I think he uses them only for living beings in the first place I don't think he uses teleological explanations at all for things like eclipses thunderstorms and so on in fact he says that eclipse is not for the sake of anything but in the case of living beings it's not a matter of mind or soul in our sense where that seems to imply some power of mind it's a matter of the general character of what has life now now we get to his work on life now this word life is often translated by our word soul and he wrote a work that was called ansuke which really means on life or the principle of life and it's usually translated in English as on the soul now in reality I think our word Soul contains so many con connotations of spirituality and mentality that it's misleading to use that word here and we'd better think of this as a general inquiry into life in the living what Aristotle tries to do in this work is ask and answer the question what is the animating principle in living things of many different kinds including plants animals human beings can we give some general account of what it is to be alive and the answer he gives is that the animating principle is the form of a living body that's potentially organized so as to function exercise the functions of life now by form of course he means Not Mere shape or configuration but as we've already seen he means a kind of functional structure or organization so what it would be for you Brian Mcgee to be alive would be to be organized so that you can nourish yourself so that you can perceive think exercise all the functions that are characteristic of your type of life and what Aristotle is saying is that this is an organization of matter I mean it's got to be realized at every point in some matter but it's that organization that's your life it's not the matter that makes it up so that when it's when you lose those functional structures that you would be dead and he applied the same principle to non-living things didn't he I remember there's one point in his writings where he says that if an ax had a soul then that Soul would be cutting in other words what he's saying is that that somehow the essence of an ax for example is what it does is its function isn't that right yeah no he uses that of course counter factually he says if if it had and the way he uses it is to illustrate this point that by Form he doesn't just mean the acts like shape and he doesn't mean the fact that it's made of such and such metal but he means the power to exercise certain functions so this is a way of giving us some insight into the more mysterious case of the living creature that what it would be for that creature to have a certain animating principle is of course not not for you Brian Mcgee to have exactly a certain in shape because of course you could change your shape without being dead I've done it frequently and but what it is of course is to have that power to function in various ways and it's losing that that you would be dead yeah now we've covered a lot of ground and even so it touches on only a tiny fraction of Aristotle's output that's inevitable in the short time that we have but can you take three Paces back from what we've been talking about and draw some implications from it to modern philosophy what contemporary concerns in philosophy are being directly influenced by Aristotle's work well I think one is the one we've just been discussing in fact the philosophy of of life and here we call this area the philosophy of Mind coordinating off in a way that Aristotle wouldn't do the mental powers of perception and thought from the rest of the functions of life but I think in his General work on life he has some very important conclusions for contemporary philosophy of mind he tries to show us how material reductionism that says that perception is simply a material process of a certain sort is inadequate to explain the functional characteristics of life and on the other hand in order to reject material reductionism we don't have to introduce some mysterious immaterial entities but what we want to say is that perception is a process that cannot be reduced to a material process because it's realized in always different matter and because the notion of intentionality and outward focusing is fundamental to the correct characterization of the sort of awareness perception is but on the other hand it's not anything mysterious or separate from matter either but it is a function that's always as it would as he puts it constituted in matter realized in some matter or other that seems to me to be an idea of fundamental importance which still isn't universally understood that we are not confronted with the choice between being either materialists on the one hand and believing in some as it were spiritual or abstract realm on the other there is a third way of explanation of our experience and it is as you're suggesting a way that Aristotle pioneered yes now there's something we haven't touched on in this discussion at all but I think we must say something about it and that is Aristotle's writing on ethics I don't think it would be any exaggeration to say that he's the most influential moral philosopher that there's ever been now can you tell us something about where his gigantic influence in this field Springs from I think his influence to me Springs first of all from the question that he begins with some many moral philosophers Begin by making a sharp distinction between the sphere of the moral and the all the rest of human life and they begin ethics with the question what is my duty or what is my moral duty now Aristotle begins instead with a much more general question that is what is it to lead a good human life and this allows him to investigate the areas that we would associate with the moral alongside and in their relation to other areas of human life such as intellectual commitment personal love and friendship and ask subtle questions about their interrelationships and what it would be to construct a good life out of all these elements so he has a very rich sense of what morality consists in that's a contrast with some other very famous moral philosophers isn't it for example the utilitarians thought that the single measure of all moral Behavior was happiness happiness or pain and that you could you could chart the the desirability or non-desirability of all moral action on one single measuring Rod which was named happiness now Aristotle was very alive to the fact that you couldn't do that wasn't he yes you've mentioned the image of the measuring rod that's very important one for Aristotle now in fact it's not only that he refuses to reduce the many things of value to one single measure but he also wants to say that even in each area you can't approach a complex context with a straight edge so to speak he gives this image and he says that just as an architect is not going to try to measure a complex fluted column with a straight ruler so too the ethical judge is not going to take a simple and inflexible set of rules into the complexities of a practical situation instead just as the architect measures with a flexible strip of metal which as he puts it bends to the shape of the stone and is not fixed even so you or I coming into a complex ethical situation have to have our faculties as they were open and responsive ready to shape ourselves to the complex perhaps non-repeatable demands of this particular situation and as he says the Discrimination rests with perception which is going to be prior to any rules at all and another thing that impresses me very much about Aristotle's moral philosophy is his firm grasp of the fact that we don't as it were control our own moral environment that we can't be as the later stoics wanted us to be entirely self-contained moral entities and we can't be as perhaps the epicureans later wanted we can't be detached moral entities we live in a moral environment which buffets us about and that we can't entirely Master he seems to have understood that yes I think he's understood it better than almost any philosopher who's written in this area that the good life for a human being if it's to be rich enough to include everything that's of value say for example personal love and friendship has got to be vulnerable to many factors that we don't altogether control and that any attempt to close off those areas of vulnerability is going to result in an impoverishment of our life and do you think he had anything like the notion of model luck which philosophers have written about in recent years yes I think he does that is he certainly does ask the question which features of the good life are not under our control and how can our not only our ability to act virtuously but actually our virtuous character itself be shaped and altered by factors that we don't control now I think myself he doesn't go quite far enough here because he's so interested in describing a good life that's harmonious and balanced that is his image is always of a life where there are many components that's very rich in different sorts of value but where everything is engineered and balanced together in harmony and I think this prevents him from doing Justice to the way that certain constituents of a life if properly pursued in all their depth actually can have it in them to challenge and call into question all the others that say take the way that deep love can sometimes threaten and oppose virtue I think this is something that Aristotle is very silent on it's an area of moral luck which I would regard is very important that he actually says nothing about in fact he has almost nothing at all to say about erotic love I think because he's so interested in having something that's harmonious and balanced now up to this point in our discussion we've been so concerned to get across some of the really important ideas that he put forward that we haven't stopped to critically evaluate them that you've now put your finger on one aspect of his thought which is in your view a shortcoming uh what what are one or two of the other major respects in which you think Aristotle's open to criticism well I think one of the major areas is his political Theory now I think there are a lot of good things here and among the good things is uh an account of politics or the role of government as providing all the necessary conditions to each citizen for the living of a rich and good human life an account of the good as based on a variety of different functionings that actually go to constitute a good human life but the problem comes with his account of who it is who's to be a citizen and here he has a a very narrow-minded attitude towards The Foreigner towards women but isn't it being unfairly anachronistic to condemn Aristotle from our position now in the 20th century for having been for having undervalued women or undervalued the lower orders or undervalued foreigners because after all didn't more or less everybody at that time think in that way no I don't think so certainly on the issue of slavery he's opposed to some more radical positions that would say that all slavery is unjust he knows those positions he argues against them and in the case of women well I think first of all in just in his biology of women he rejects theories that are vastly more informed and more correct than his about the contribution of women to reproduction you know he thinks that a woman doesn't actually contribute any formal characteristics to The Offspring well even democracy is just a sort of conduit for The Offspring and in politics of course Plato was able to take a position of Detachment towards women that did come to the conclusion that we better educate each individual person in the state according to that person's personal capabilities and that meant to Plato that women ought to be given the chance to be assessed as individuals and to be educated accordingly thank you very much Martha