Monday 11 June 2018

Sources on Aristotle's Political Context & Career.


(This short post implicitly relates to a youtube video on the same topic, to be found on my channel, here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZEkgohG7k7r2KOvbCAIKvulmFOp1kRKc)

You can get both articles from JSTOR.

(1) "Aristotle's Paradox of Monarchy and the Biographical Tradition."  J. Miller, 1998, in: History of Political Thought, Vol. 19, No. 4,

(2) The "extreme" position (i.e., arguing strongly that Aristotle was "an agent of Macedonia" in Athens) is presented in "Aristotle and the Foreign Policy of Macedonia." Anton-Herman Chroust, 1972, The Review of Politics, Vol. 34, No. 3 (Jul., 1972).

Source #1 repeatedly alludes to the extent to which source #2 has been reluctantly/negatively received by other scholars in the field; for a sense of why this is, see (3) Christopher Kirwan's (negative) review of Aristotle: New Light on His Life and on Some of His Lost Works by Anton-Hermann Chroust, in: The Classical Review, New Series, Vol. 26, No. 1 (1976), pp. 69-70

(4) For a "simple" biographical source on Aristotle, it doesn't get any simpler than Diogenes Laertius (but secondary sources such as the ones linked above are engaged in skeptically questioning to what extent these biographies are historically valid, especially given the long "pause" between the death of Aristotle and the writing of these accounts): http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0258%3Abook%3D5%3Achapter%3D1

(5) There is one further (analytical) source salient to this discussion hidden away in the pages of Essays on the Foundations of Aristotelian Political Science, 1991, edited
by Carnes Lord and David K. O'Connor, although I have left this in fifth place, as its salience is of a more general character.  It is titled, "Aristotle's Critique of Athenian Democracy" by Barry S. Strauss (staring on p. 212). https://books.google.ca/books?id=q58eP8kKBmMC&pg=PA212&dq=On+Aristotle%27s+Critique+of+Democracy&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiw0ZG68czbAhWZGTQIHSOqAqgQ6AEIJzAA#v=onepage&q&f=false