Aristotle

Similar to Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle explores another facet of good living by outlining the best governing practices that benefit the majority, and not the minority. In The Politics, he defines various institutions and how they should operate within an established system. The Politics provides an analysis of contemporary government as it relates to all people. Aristotle discusses the positive and negative qualities of authority and how they affect...

Written sometime in the 4th Century BC, Aristotle's "Rhetoric" is the definitive treatise on the art of persuasive public speaking. The art of oratorical persuasion was an essential skill for the successful politician during the days of ancient Greece and Aristotle's "Rhetoric" is considered one of the greatest works from antiquity on the subject. Like many of the surviving works attributable to Aristotle, "Rhetoric" was not intended for public dissemination,...

"All men by nature are actuated with the desire of knowledge," declared Aristotle. The philosopher's works are foundational to the history of science, and his treatise on metaphysics, or "first philosophy," is divided into sections on previous philosophical thought and theories; a refutation of skepticism; a demonstration of God's existence; an examination of the relation of metaphysics to the other sciences; an elucidation of the nature of the infinite;...

Ancient accounts of Aristotle credit him with 170 Constitutions of various states; it is widely assumed that these were research for the Politics, and that many of them were written or drafted by his students. Athens, however, was a particularly important state, and where Aristotle was living at the time; it is plausible that, even if students did the others, Aristotle did that one himself, and possible that it was, intended as, a model for the rest....

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. Despite dating from the 4th century BC, The Art of Rhetoric continues to be regarded by many as the single most important work on the art of persuasion. As democracy began emerging in 5th-century Athens, public speaking and debate became an increasingly important tool to garner influence in the assemblies, councils, and law courts of ancient Greece. In response...

The Ethics of Aristotle is one half of a single treatise of which his Politics is the other half. Both deal with one and the same subject. This subject is what Aristotle calls in one place the 'philosophy of human affairs;' but more frequently Political or Social Science. In the two works taken together we have their author's whole theory of human conduct or practical activity, that is, of all human activity which is not directed merely to knowledge...

Written in 350 BC, Aristotle's "De Anima" or "On the Soul" is not a work on spirituality, as the title would suggest, but rather a work that could be described as one of biopsychology, or a work on the subject of psychology from a biological perspective. Aristotle's exposition centers on the soul. Aristotle's soul however is not the same as the common modern spiritual conception of something distinct from the body that lives on past death. Rather...

The Categories is a text from Aristotle's Organon that enumerates all the possible kinds of things that can be the subject or the predicate of a proposition. They are "perhaps the single most heavily discussed of all Aristotelian notions". The work is brief enough to be divided, not into books as is usual with Aristotle's works, but into fifteen chapters. The Categories places every object of human apprehension under one of ten categories (known to...

On Interpretation is among the earliest surviving philosophical works in the Western tradition to deal with the relationship between language and logic in a comprehensive, explicit, and formal way.

We have, in the next place, to treat of Memory and Remembering, considering its nature, its cause, and the part of the soul to which this experience, as well as that of Recollecting, belongs. For the persons who possess a retentive memory are not identical with those who excel in power of recollection; indeed, as a rule, slow people have a good memory, whereas those who are quick-witted and clever are better at recollecting.