It is impossible to overstate Aristotle’s importance in the development of Western thought. A student of Plato, Aristotle quickly distinguished himself from his teacher by rejecting the theory of forms—the belief that the characteristics of any physical thing (roundness, redness) exist apart from it in an abstract realm of forms. Aristotle taught that forms could not be properly understood apart from the physical objects. After a five-year period tutoring the young Alexander the Great, Aristotle set up his own school, the Lyceum, as a rival to Plato’s Academy.
Aristotle is known as the father of logic. He was the first thinker to establish a system of reasoning. One of his best-known rules of logic is the syllogism: for example, “All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore, Socrates is mortal.” Aristotle was also the first thinker to create classifications for knowledge (e.g. mathematics, poetry, etc.).
Aristotle’s works had a profound influence on Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas held Aristotle in such high regard that he refers to him simply as “the Philosopher” throughout his work.
The digital edition of this volume gives you the kind of intertextual connections that philosophers and theologians have dreamed of for centuries. This book is completely indexed and linked across all the other works in your digital library. Jump back and forth between Aristotle and Aquinas with a click. Examine Plato and Aristotle’s similarities and differences with side-by-side textual comparison. The digital edition of this volume will save you time and energy while giving you better access to some of the most important thought in history.
“A tragedy, then, is the imitation of an action that is serious and also, [25] as having magnitude, complete in itself; in language with pleasurable accessories, each kind brought in separately in the parts of the work; in a dramatic, not in a narrative form; with incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish its catharsis of such emotions.” (source)
“The truth is that, just as in the other imitative arts one imitation is always of one thing, so in poetry the story, as an imitation of action, must represent one action, a complete whole, with its several incidents so closely connected that the transposal or withdrawal of any one of them will disjoin and dislocate the whole. For that which makes no perceptible difference by its presence or absence [35] is no real part of the whole.” (source)
“Character gives us qualities, but it is in our actions—what we do—that we are happy or the [20] reverse. In a play accordingly they do not act in order to portray the Characters; they include the Characters for the sake of the action. So that it is the action in it, i.e. its Fable or Plot, that is the end and purpose of the tragedy; and the end is everywhere the chief thing.” (source)
“Tragedy is essentially an imitation not of persons but of action and life, of happiness and misery” (source)
“if two results are [5] the same their antecedents are also the same” (source)