Corpus evidence — top 10 passages

Most-relevant passages from the entire indexed corpus (67,286 paragraph chunks across YouTube transcripts, PubMed, arXiv, archive.org, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, OpenAlex, and more) ranked by semantic similarity (bge-small-en-v1.5).

1. 01 · gutenberg0.789

   Aristotle's Politics, then, is a handbook for the legislator, the expert who is to be called in when a state wants help. We have called him a state doctor. It is one of the most marked characteristics of Greek political theory that Plato and Aristotle think of the statesman as one who has knowledge of what ought to be done, and can help those who call him in to prescribe for them, rather than one who has power to control the forces of society. The desire of society for the statesman's advice is taken for granted, Plato in the Republic says that a good constitution is only possible when the rul…

   gutenberg/PG-6762-politics-a-treatise-on-government/PG-6762.txt

2. 02 · yt0.788

   And let's just remember what politics is for the Greeks. It comes from the Greek verb pelein, which is the verb that was used by the Greeks to describe smoke rings going up from a pipe in a circles. Why is that about politics? Because politics is that activity that unites a group of diverse citizens around a common center that holds them together. The North Pole, the South Pole, a pole is that which people revolve around or the Earth revolves around. Politics is that center that holds a community or a polis together. And if for Sophocles, man is this wondrous creature who can do many things, h…

   yt/OxavWGRTDtM-roger-berkowitz-exploring-the-human-condition/transcript.txt

3. 03 · blog0.780

   Before attempting to distinguish and evaluate various constitutions Aristotle considers two questions. First, why does a city-state come into being? He recalls the thesis, defended in Politics I.2, that human beings are by nature political animals, who naturally want to live together. For a further discussion of this topic, see the following supplementary document: Supplement: Political Naturalism Aristotle then adds, “The common advantage also brings them together insofar as they each attain the noble life. This is above all the end for all both in common and separately” (III.6.1278b19–24). S…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/aristotle-s-political-theory.md

4. 04 · blog0.770

   (For a parallel discussion, see Posterior Analytics I 22.) On such an account, Aristotle is showing the opponent that if she wants to reject PNC she must pick out the same object and say that contradictory predicates apply, but if she does not mean anything definite by “human being”, for example, then she will be unable to pick out a subject of predication, for example, a human being, and say that contradictory predicates apply. Saying that an individual human being is a human being and not a human being, where the first means “two-footed animal” and the latter means something different is not…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/aristotle-on-non-contradiction.md

5. 05 · blog0.768

   Like Plato, Aristotle thinks that we can take a person’s pleasures and pains to be a sign of his state of character. To explain what the virtuous person’s pleasures are like, Aristotle returns to the idea that virtue is an excellent state of the person. Virtue is the state that makes a human being good and makes him perform his function well ( Nicomachean Ethics 1106a15–24). His function (his ergon or characteristic activity) is rational activity, so when we exercise our fully developed rational powers well, when we realize our nature as rational beings, we are good (virtuous) human beings and…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/moral-character.md

6. 06 · blog0.768

   There is some dispute about which of the psychic abilities mentioned by Aristotle in De Anima qualify as full-fledged or autonomous faculties. He evidently accepts the three already mentioned as centrally important. Indeed, he is willing to demarcate a hierarchy of life in terms of them. Even so, he also discusses two other capacities, imagination ( De Anima iii 3) and desire ( De Anima iii 9 and 10), and appeals to them in both his account of thinking and his philosophy of action. He does little, however, to characterize either in any intrinsic way. He evidently regards imagination as a sort …

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/aristotle-s-psychology.md

7. 07 · gutenberg0.767

   2. Aristotle in his account of the ideal state seems to waver between two ideals. There is the ideal of an aristocracy and the ideal of what he calls constitutional government, a mixed constitution. The principle of "tools to those who can use them" ought to lead him, as it does Plato, to an aristocracy. Those who have complete knowledge of the good must be few, and therefore Plato gave entire power in his state into the hands of the small minority of philosopher guardians. It is in accordance with this principle that Aristotle holds that kingship is the proper form of government when there is…

   gutenberg/PG-6762-politics-a-treatise-on-government/PG-6762.txt

8. 08 · gutenberg0.767

   The Politics of Aristotle is the second part of a treatise of which the Ethics is the first part. It looks back to the Ethics as the Ethics looks forward to the Politics. For Aristotle did not separate, as we are inclined to do, the spheres of the statesman and the moralist. In the Ethics he has described the character necessary for the good life, but that life is for him essentially to be lived in society, and when in the last chapters of the Ethics he comes to the practical application of his inquiries, that finds expression not in moral exhortations addressed to the individual but in a desc…

   gutenberg/PG-6762-politics-a-treatise-on-government/PG-6762.txt

9. 09 · gutenberg0.766

   It is more true to say, as Aristotle said long ago, that man is naturally a political animal, that he lived under strict social laws as a mere item, almost a nonentity, as compared with the Order, Society, or Community to which he belonged, and that such privileges as he subsequently acquired have been obtained in virtue of his growing importance as a member of a growing organisation. But if this is even approximately true, it seriously restricts that liberty of the individual for which Mill pleads. The individual has no chance, because he has no rights, against the social organism. Society ca…

   gutenberg/PG-34901-on-liberty/PG-34901.txt

10. 10 · blog0.764

    Further textual support, from over 60 of Aquinas’ works, can be found in Finnis 1998. Criticisms of the interpretation of Aquinas’ theory that is proposed in that work can be found in Paterson 2006, Wheatley 2015, Long 2004, and earlier in Lisska 1998 and McInerny 1997. These works argue in various ways that that interpretation denies or neglects the metaphysical foundations of the principles of practical reason that it offers to identify. Support, in general, for the approach in this article will be found in Rhonheimer 2012 and 2000. The first issue underlying this debate is whether the order…

    blog/plato-stanford-edu/aquinas-moral-political-and-legal-philosophy.md