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Posts tagged ‘Aristotle’

Jan 24

Day 24: Against Efficiency

This month I have found myself thinking about the ways that concepts from commercial life have come to pervade our thinking about ethical and political life to our detriment.  Debt economics was one way.  Efficiency is another.

In Republic II, Plato has Socrates justify having each person in the city do one task with recourse to efficiency.  What would be more efficient?  Accepting this point and the notion that each person has a nature suited to only one particular task leads to the city where each person is assigned a place.  Multiple machinations and myths are required to keep things in that order.  I believe that Plato is showcasing to us a political order based on a series of assumptions that he does not defend in order to challenge those assumptions.  One of those assumptions is that efficiency is good for human beings. Read more

Dec 2

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Aristotle on Happiness

Aristotle scholars spend a lot of time arguing over whether and in what way a life of action, what is called a ‘practical life’ (from the Greek praxis), which includes a life focused on ethical and political concerns, can possibly achieve happiness, or whether only contemplation — the theoretical life of the philosopher or thinker or scientist — can achieve complete happiness for human beings.  Commenters suppose from several chapters in Nicomachean Ethics X.7 that the case is obviously on the side of contemplation.  Then they fight over how to limit that claim or re-interpret it.

But today, I’ve been prepping those passages to teach and I just don’t think they add up to the obviously strong argument for contemplation against deliberation that pretty much everyone who reads Aristotle seems to think they do.  One argument in particular — that it’s what the gods do — seems just not the case.  What the heck then is Aristotle doing?  Here’s what Aristotle writes:

But that complete happiness is a certain contemplative activity would appear also from this: we have supposed that the gods especially are blessed and happy–but what sort of actions ought we to assign to them?  Just acts?  Or will they appear laughable as they make contracts, return deposits, and do anything else of that sort?  But what about courageous acts?  Do the gods endure frightening things and run risks, because doing so is noble?  Or liberal acts?  But to whom will they give?  And it is strange if they too will have legal currency or something of that sort.  And what would their moderate acts be?  Or is the praise, “they do not have base desires,” a crude one?  All that pertains to actions would appear, to those who go through it, petty and unworthy of gods. (1178b8-17, Bartlett and Collins translation)

Puh-lease, Aristotle.  It seems just as likely from all this that the gods don’t do any of these things because the gods don’t really live virtuous lives.  Do the gods do just acts?  No, Zeus steals women and cheats on Hera on the regular.  The whole of Hesiod’s Theogony seems to be about the frightening risk-taking acts of gods.  But no, not because it’s noble.  They want power, or they’re just bored.  Liberal acts?  Well, basically, that seems to be all of Homer and most of Hesiod where Zeus gives things to gods, and that part where Zeus and Prometheus divide stuff up and give it out.  “And what would be their moderate acts?”  Got me there, Aristotle: we don’t know, because no god has yet to be moderate. Read more

Apr 17

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Book Panel at Antioch College TODAY

As part of the GLCA Ancient Philosophy Collaborative Initiative, I and my collaborators Lewis Trelawny-Cassity and Kevin Miles will be discussing my book Aristotle and the Nature of Community tomorrow, April 17, 2015, at Antioch College, MacGregor 149 at 4 PM.  This panel will be convened in conjunction with the philosophy roundtable that meets regularly in Yellow Springs.  I’m posting my comments below:

It’s an honor to be given this time and this venue to discuss my research.  I’m grateful to Lewis Meeks Trelawny-Cassity and to Kevin Miles for the time and the consideration they have given my book.  Kevin Miles was the first person with whom I read the Politics.  Since reading Plato and Aristotle with him as a graduate student, I have found a persisting tension between the project of elucidating the question of a text and offering a sympathetic account of it.  My own interest in developing a positive account of Aristotle’s Politics might seem to repress rather than illuminate the questions of the text.  My drive has been to give the strongest reading in an effort to find an alternative to modern conceptions of political life.  I hope that today and not only today, I can try to get clearer about the questions this reading forces upon us. Read more

Apr 8

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One Sex, Two Sex, Aristotelian Sex: APS’15 talk

I have of late found myself turning to Aristotle’s biological works to think more carefully about Aristotle’s conception of nature, because I think it is there that the strongest challenge to my reading of physis as the internal principle by which things move from within themselves to fulfill themselves is found.

In the biology, the male semen seems to impose its form on the female menses, suggesting that at the microcosmic level of natural generation, form is imposed on material, external principles master what needs forming.  But as I investigate Aristotle’s biology, I have come to learn that material in Aristotle might not be what we’ve thought it was.

On Saturday, April 11, 2015 at 11 AM at the Ancient Philosophy Society meeting at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, I am presenting a paper (part of my current book project) that focuses on the strange and evasive role of vital heat in Aristotle’s biology.  I argue that the complexities of vital heat might tell us something about whether Aristotle has a one-sex or two-sex model of sexual difference and that his model might also recast our understanding of Aristotelian material. Read more

Mar 29

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Treading on Ourselves? Government in Aristotle and Contemporary Political Life

Since Rousseau expressed his concern that government, established to carry out the general will of the people, might become a separate body with its own distinct general will, members of the polity have worried from one end of the political spectrum to the other, that government is imposing its will on the people, rather than executing the people’s will.  It’s not even correct to date this concern to Rousseau, since we could argue that such a concern is encapsulated in Thrasymachus’ realpolitik definition of justice — we all know, let’s be honest Socrates, that the laws serve the powerful and not those who are supposed to follow them.  In these cases, government is understood to be against us, treading on us with its laws and impositions, limiting our freedom rather than protecting it.

Government and Constitution in Aristotle

Eric Schwitzgebel refers to Aristotle to talk about blameworthiness for implicit biases in his talk at the Pacific APA next week.  I’m pleased to join in the appeal to Aristotle to think about contemporary political and ethical problems.  My argument is that Aristotle addresses this problem of thinking the government as an imposition by arguing for an account that drives politeuma, or government, closer to an identity with the politeia, constitution or regime.   Read more

Jan 18

Friendship, Part II: Aristotle and Romantic Friendship

Cross-posted from Genetic Method.

In my last post on friendship, I responded to my friend Ashley Vaught’s questions about the role of proximity in friendship in Aristotle.  I  consider some questions there about whether virtue friendship is possible when we are still on the way to becoming completely virtuous.  I was left wondering how we can ever become virtuous if we need friends to become virtuous but we can’t be virtue friends before we are completely virtuous.  Perhaps it isn’t just that friendship is impossible, but rather that our friends who help us become virtuous must be more virtuous than we are.  One possibility is that virtue in Aristotle unlike in Plato can be partial and always underway since virtue is practiced and requires a practice of ethical perception which is then limited based on our individual habits of seeing.  Against the view that friends become virtuous and then become capable of having complete and virtuous friendships with us, I think that Aristotelian virtue friends make us have more complete virtue because together we can see better, ethically speaking.  It is not lost on me that my exchange with Ashley over friendship in Aristotle illustrates how friends help us see more and better.  I appreciate the meta-ness of that more and better being about how friends help us see more and better.

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Jan 12

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Friendship, Part I: My friends, there are no friends.

Cross-posted from guest blogging appearance at Genetic Method.

My friend Ashley Vaught sent me a long inquisitive email about teaching Aristotle on friendship. Let me just say to start that I really don’t like thinking about, writing about or teaching Aristotle on friendship. When I teach the Nicomachean Ethics, I rarely teach the friendship bits. I have always wondered what the philosophical point was. And as someone interested in how political life is foundational for Aristotle, I have bristled at readings that maintain that Aristotle’s account of friendship implies a pre-political ethical life. Moreover, I’ve never understood what the purpose of this account was except just explaining more about friendship. And what is the point of that? Do people read this and start pursuing more complete friendship? I can just picture someone sitting down and graphing her friendships to judge which friendships are complete and which are for pleasure and which utilitarian, I don’t know, to keep things organized? I don’t think it makes me a bad friend to not enjoy theorizing about friendship. But I do think good friends respond to their friend’s serious inquiries, so when I got a long email from Ashley about friendship in Aristotle, I agreed to have some thoughts. Read more

Nov 18

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Aristotle on the Nature of Community reviewed at Bryn Mawr Classical Review

Lee Trepanier reviews my book at the Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2014.11.18

Adriel M. Trott’s Aristotle on the Nature of the Community examines Aristotle’s Politics by placing his understanding of nature (physis) at the center of political life. According to Trott, the human being and the polis operate according to natural ends which allow both entities to fulfill their nature, although the political ends of both the citizen and the polis will always remain incomplete as citizens will continually deliberate among themselves over the political community’s goals. By reclaiming nature at the center of political life, the book makes a substantial contribution to our understanding of Aristotle’s political thought and how it could be applicable to contemporary political questions of citizenship, democracy, and community.

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Oct 31

#SPEP14

Last weekend, the annual meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, the umbrella organization for continental philosophy in North America was held in New Orleans.  New Orleans is a fantastic city.  I had never visited before, so I had an impression that was kitschy.  But I left thinking it was beautiful.  I stayed in the Garden District.  My first morning there I took the streetcar to the conference hotel and the driver of the streetcar got out of the streetcar and went into a hotel and was gone for five minutes.  As a friend said, “Union break, don’t h8.”  The city was loud and colorful and much better than anything I had ever learned from The Pelican Brief about what the city would be like.

SPEP was all a-Twitter® and I storify it here.  In this post, I want to give a more sustained consideration to two panels I attended, two papers in particular: Sara Brill’s “Beyond Zôê and Bios: On the Concept of Shared Life in Aristotle’s Ethics” and Robin James’ remarks at the Advocacy Committee’s New Media, Social Networks and Philosophy panel.* Read more

Aug 26

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On Thomas Pangle’s New Book: Reading as Eristic

I read Thomas Pangle’s new book, Aristotle’s Teaching in the Politics (University of Chicago Press, 2013), with both great interest and suspicion.  With great interest because with Pangle, I think the Politics needs to be read creatively and imaginatively–an approach which many people seem willing to use in reading Plato but much more reticent to employ in reading Aristotle.  With suspicion because I realized early on in the monograph that Pangle was a Straussian, someone who thinks there are two levels of writing and reading at work–one wherein Aristotle speaks to the common reader and one wherein Aristotle writes for what Pangle calls “the morally serious reader.”  This kind of bifurcation of the world of thinkers and readers worries me for philosophical and political readings.  I began writing this post with the effort to criticize that reading strategy, and I finished realizing that Pangle’s reading of Aristotle was highly provocative, but it didn’t need the Straussian reading approach to get there.  Resorting to that approach explained some difficulties, but also testified to Aristotle’s explicit effort to take into account many varied and competing positions on the meaning of the political and the role of the philosophical. Read more

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