Sublime

The conception involved here is that of organism: a hand, when the body is destroyed, is, we are told, no longer a hand. The implication is that a hand is to be defined by its purpose—that of grasping—which it can only perform when joined to a living body. In like manner, an individual cannot fulfil his purpose unless he is part of a State. He who

Chacun doit donc être et fournir à soi-même ce qu’il y a de meilleur et de plus important. Plus il en sera ainsi, plus, par suite, l’individu trouvera en lui-même les sources de ses plaisirs, et plus il sera heureux. C’est donc avec raison qu’Aristote a dit : η ευδαμονια των αυταρχων εστι (Mor. à Eud., VII, 2) (Le bonheur appartient à ceux qui se s

Aristotle was born at Stagira, in the dominion of the kings of Macedonia, in 384 BC. For twenty years he studied at Athens in the Academy of Plato, on whose death in 347 he left, and, some time later, became tutor of the young Alexander the Great. When Alexander succeeded to the throne of Macedonia in 336, Aristotle returned to Athens and establish

The theoretical framework for this outline history of poetry is provided by the first three chapters, which construct a matrix of three different ways in which poems can be distinguished from other kinds of imitation and from each other – in terms of their medium, object and mode.

Locke, as we saw, believed pleasure to be the good, and this was the prevalent view among empiricists throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Their opponents, on the contrary, despised pleasure as ignoble, and had various systems of ethics which seemed more exalted. Hobbes valued power, and Spinoza, up to a point, agreed with Hobbes.

He was more charitably disposed towards the role of everyday pleasures in making us happy, and encouragingly looks for balanced qualities to ensure an ethical life. Thus virtue, according to Aristotle, could be found in balancing extreme qualities with their opposites: finding the mean. For example: courage taken to an extreme is foolhardiness; its

Charles Collier writes, in his guidebook on philanthropy Wealth in Families, that “according to Aristotle and his latter-day student, Thomas Jefferson, the ‘pursuit of happiness’ has to do with an internal journey of learning to know ourselves and an external journey of service of others.”

Another way of putting this, which Aristotle discusses in chapter 9, is to say that poetry ‘tends to express universal (51b6f.).