Questions to ask Aristotle

Aristotle in one paragraph

Aristotle was born in 384 BC at Stagira in northern Greece. His father Nicomachus was doctor to Amyntas III, king of Macedon and father of Philip II. At 17, in 367 BC, he went to Athens and stayed in Plato's Academy for twenty years, until Plato died in 347. He then lived at Assos in Asia Minor, where he married Pythias, a relative of the ruler Hermias, and on the island of Lesbos, where he and his colleague Theophrastus studied animals. Around 343 BC Philip II hired him to teach his son Alexander, then 13. In 335 he returned to Athens and founded his own school, the Lyceum. After Alexander's death in 323 he left Athens for Chalcis, on the island of Euboea, and died there in 322 BC.

What survives, and why it reads like notes

Aristotle wrote polished dialogues for the public, which the Roman orator Cicero admired for their flowing style. All are lost. What survives, about thirty works, are mostly his lecture notes and research files, edited by later scholars: dense, packed with lists and objections. A lost work turned up in 1890: The Constitution of the Athenians, on a papyrus bought by the British Museum, one of 158 city constitutions his school collected.

Cite him by Bekker numbers, the standard references printed in the margins of translations (for example Nicomachean Ethics 1094a). For a wax museum or interview, the Aristotle of about 330 BC works well: around 54, walking and lecturing in the covered walks (peripatoi) of the Lyceum, which is why his followers were called Peripatetics.

Which work answers which question

Questions about the Academy and Plato

The record: he stayed with Plato longer than almost anyone. Yet in the Metaphysics he rejects Plato's theory of separately existing Forms, arguing that the form of a thing exists in the thing itself. In Nicomachean Ethics I.6 he says it is hard to criticise the Forms because friends introduced them, but that piety requires honouring truth above friends.

1. What did twenty years at the Academy teach you, and what did you disagree with from the start?
2. Why do you think a horse's form is in the horse, not in some other world?
3. Was it hard to criticise your teacher in public?
4. Why were you not chosen to lead the Academy after Plato died?

Yuga stages this disagreement as a debate between the two philosophers: Plato and Aristotle at the Academy, 350 BC.

Questions about animals and science

The record: on Lesbos, around 345 to 343 BC, he studied sea creatures in the lagoon at Pyrrha. He correctly noted that dolphins breathe air and give birth to live young, and described the special mating arm of the male octopus, which naturalists only confirmed in the 19th century. He also got things wrong: he taught that heavier bodies fall faster, that the heart rather than the brain is the seat of thought, and, in the History of Animals, that men have more teeth than women.

1. Why cut open animals at all, when many philosophers thought that was beneath them?
2. How did you work out that a dolphin is not a fish?
3. What is the brain for, if thinking happens in the heart?
4. Did you ever count your wife's teeth?
5. If I showed you a feather and a stone falling at the same speed in a vacuum, what would you say?

Questions about teaching Alexander

The record: Plutarch (Life of Alexander 7 to 8) says Philip brought Aristotle to Mieza, a quiet place near the Macedonian capital, around 343 BC, and that Alexander kept a copy of the Iliad corrected by Aristotle. Beyond that, very little is known about what he taught. Do not invent advice he gave. Later, after Alexander's death, anti-Macedonian anger in Athens made Aristotle leave; later writers report him saying he would not let Athens sin twice against philosophy, a remark that may be legend.

1. What was Alexander like at 13?
2. What did you teach him, and did any of it stick?
3. Did you approve of his plan to rule Persians and Greeks alike?
4. Why did you leave Athens in 323 BC?

See also questions to ask Alexander the Great.

Questions about the good life

The record: in the Nicomachean Ethics, happiness (eudaimonia) is the highest good, reached by virtuous activity across a whole life, and it needs friends and some external goods. In Book II, each moral virtue is a mean between two vices: courage lies between cowardice and rashness. In the Poetics (chapter 6), tragedy imitates a serious action and through pity and fear brings about a catharsis of such emotions.

1. Can a person be happy if they are poor, ill or friendless?
2. How do I find the mean between too much and too little in my own life?
3. Is a virtue a habit or a feeling?
4. Why do people enjoy watching tragedies that make them cry?

Hard questions: slavery, women and money

The record: in Politics Book I (chapters 4 to 7) he argues that some people are slaves by nature, while admitting that many actual slaves had been enslaved unjustly through war. In Politics I.13 he says women's deliberative faculty lacks authority. In Politics I.10 he calls lending money at interest the most unnatural way of making money. His will, preserved by Diogenes Laertius, frees some of his own slaves.

1. How can you say some people are slaves by nature when you admit war enslaves free people?
2. What evidence would change your mind about women?
3. Why is earning interest on a loan unnatural?

Let him state these views honestly, without making him apologise in modern terms, and then add your own note. Later writers used the natural slavery argument to defend Atlantic slavery and conquest in the Americas.

Sample answers in his words

Question: Why do people want to learn? His Metaphysics begins with the delight we take in our senses:

Question: Why must a scientist get the basics right?

Question: What is courage? A sourced answer, in paraphrase: Nicomachean Ethics Book II places it as a mean between cowardice and rashness, found by practice rather than by rule.

Question: How could you contradict Plato? A sourced answer, in paraphrase: Nicomachean Ethics I.6 says that although the Forms were introduced by friends, it is right to put truth before friendship.

What Aristotle could not have known

• That the Earth moves around the Sun. He placed a motionless Earth at the centre of the heavens.
• Evolution. He thought animal kinds were fixed.
• That medieval writers in Arabic and Latin called him simply “the Philosopher”, or that Ibn Rushd (Averroes) and Thomas Aquinas wrote commentaries on him.
• Galileo's falling-body experiments, which challenged his physics.

Where to read Aristotle

Project Gutenberg has the Nicomachean Ethics, the Politics and the Poetics in older translations. The Perseus Digital Library has Greek texts and English translations of many works with Bekker numbers. Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Book 5, gives his ancient biography and his will.

Yuga's Aristotle is an AI recreation built from his works and the ancient sources, useful for practising a philosophy interview by voice. It is not Aristotle and can be wrong, so cite the works by Bekker number. Continue with questions to ask Plato and Plato and Aristotle compared.