Alan Saunders: Hi, I'm Alan Saunders, and this week on The Philosopher's Zone, we're staying in the Greek world. We've looked at the Hellenistic schools, the philosophers to came after Aristotle, and how their thought was carried into the Roman world. Today, we're turning to the work of Aristotle himself and what happened to it.

Physics, metaphysics, poetry, theatre, music, logic, rhetoric, politics, ethics, biology and zoology—there were few areas of thought that Aristotle didn't touch on and he laid down principles that were to last for more than a thousand years.

Like Alexander the Great, Aristotle came from Macedonia. He was born there in 384 BC and at around the age of seventeen, he was sent to Athens to study in Plato's Academy, then a pre-eminent place of learning in the Greek world.

In 343, King Philip of Macedon, invited him to become tutor to his thirteen-year-old son, Alexander. It didn't last long—by the age of fifteen, the young lad was already a deputy military commander—but it's difficult not to think that the association must have meant something to at least one of them.

Aristotle returned to Athens in 335 and set up his own school in a public exercise area dedicated to the god Apollo Lykeios, whence its name, the Lyceum. The members of the school became known as Peripatetics, probably after the peripatos, the covered walkway, on the school's property.

He was settled here for thirteen years. His wife died and he began a relationship with a woman who might have been his slave or who might have become his wife; we're not sure. What we do know is that after the death of Alexander, anti-Macedonian sentiments began to be revived in Athens.

Would the Athenians—the men who, a generation before, had put Socrates to death—do the same to Aristotle? They didn't get a chance: Aristotle was out of there, remarking before he went that he wouldn't let them make the same mistake twice. The following year, 322, he died of natural causes on the island of Euboea.

To talk about Aristotle and his heritage, we're joined now by Dr Han Baltussen, Senior Lecturer in Classics at the University of Adelaide. So why does he think that Aristotle matters so much?

Han Baltussen: Well, there are a couple of reasons, Alan, but the most important one I think is to just start out with knowing that he was a great scientist, and probably one of the first great scientists, and that from that kind of core of his research, he developed his philosophical ideas, and so the philosophical strands of his thinking are very much characterized by a hugely systematic way of thinking, his ambition to be very comprehensive, and therefore to cover almost every branch of knowledge that was known then, and develop others, and new areas as well.

Alan Saunders: I mean no disrespect to either of them, but I tend to think of Plato as a bit of a poet and Aristotle as a bit of a bureaucrat, just sort of making sure that everything's in the right folder. Is that unfair?

Han Baltussen: Well, I would think so, but I can see your thinking about that, because Plato has been called the most unsystematic of creators, and that means that he was really very much a pioneer in that sense, and his kind of literary skills on top of all that, makes the kind of deep thinking that he does also very attractive. The unfortunate thing about Aristotle's work and transmission of his work is of course that we only have the more scholarly and internal works, so-called esoteric writings, which make reading him very difficult. It's a densely kind of constructed prose, and his thinking sort of moves beyond in certain areas what Plato had said. So there is in our access to the material certainly a big difference in how creative, how attractive both were. But I do think that Aristotle's got a lot of creative force in his thinking, so we shouldn't underestimate that.

Alan Saunders: You said that he was respected in his day, or immediately after his day, as a great scientist. Obviously that's a modern term, but was it his empirical work - I mean he was very, very good at marine life, he was a strong observer of that—was it this sort of empirical work that captured people's attention more than the sort of thing that we're interested in now, which tend to be the metaphysics and the morals?

Han Baltussen: Well it depends a little bit on what you think the audience might be for certain areas. I do think that the works that have been lost were well-known for their graceful style, and so Aristotle was certainly somebody who was attractive to a broader audience. But from the work that we do have, we can see that it was probably his natural philosophy as well as the metaphysics that were quite important to his successors. And in addition to that, of course, the way in which he systematized a lot of the ideas about ethics, which was very closely connected to politics in his view, were also studied to some extent, but I don't think that it made such an impact. It is very difficult to trace a lot of these different areas of his work, really, and we're going have perhaps a bit more to say about that, but there's a problem there.

Alan Saunders: If people were reading his metaphysics, what was he offering them there in terms of metaphysics, which really is about I suppose what the universe contains on a theoretical level, and how it all holds together. What did he have to tell them there?

Han Baltussen: Well, Aristotle did, of course, learn a lot from Plato in thinking about what is not visible to us but has still got to be there in order to explain the patterns that you can see in the world, so we started talking about matter and form, and distinguishing between what is a particular thing, made up of. And so his idea was that form was far more important, because that determined identity of objects and individuals, and there is something there that is a spinoff from what Plato's thinking, it's just that they just differ in the way in which this is all driven. So the form is for Aristotle in the thing, and from Plato it's somewhere outside. So that was the big easy breakdown perhaps, and it's a bit of a crude summary, but that's how Aristotle saw things. It's about what you can't see that has to be there, so to construct some kind of thing that goes beyond physics as the literal term means, 'meta physics' in order to explain what's going on in the world.

Alan Saunders: But it's a very different world for him to Plato's world. For Plato there are chairs, and chairs have the form of a chair, but there is, as it were a heavenly ideal form of a chair somewhere, of which all these individual chairs are inadequate versions.

Han Baltussen: Yes, yes, definitely. So Plato sort of plays down the importance of our immediate sensory world, and thinks that the only way we can explain that we have abstract notions of the objects that we see, that somehow if chairs look different in colour or in shape, they must be an essential thing that makes us think about it as a chair, and that he would then hypothesize as being outside of this world, and therefore this world is far less important than the one that drives this world, and informs it for what it is.

Alan Saunders: So if Aristotle's turning his attention to furniture, he is not assuming that there is some form of a chair which lies beyond the individual chairs that the world contains?

Han Baltussen: No, he thinks it's the carpenter who has a sense of what a chair should be like, which is based on a form of expertise, the notion of how you make things, how they are functional, that will create that particular object, and he works from a form that is in some sense, perhaps ideal, but it will be somehow created in the material like with wood, because he has that level of skill.

Alan Saunders: So I somewhat unfairly compared Aristotle to a bureaucrat, but there's a poem by WB Yeats in which he mentions Plato and Aristotle and in comparison with Plato he refers to 'solider' Aristotle, and there is a sort of solidity to this vision of the universe, almost a sort of an earthbound quality to it.

Han Baltussen: Yes, yes, I would agree with that. I mean Aristotle was just ... I do think that it's not just a biologist and what we would call a scientist, somebody who is really interested in observation, in looking really closely at things around and then trying to find causes and explanations which are within nature, and within the things. But it is certainly a very important factor in the way that he works, and therefore, as you say, you come to see him as somebody who is more maybe down to earth if you like. And if one would—if we just had more of his works that would have been written in this beautiful flowing style that Cicero describes to us, we would be in a better position to compare Plato and Aristotle on that particular aspect as well.

Alan Saunders: And Cicero, the Roman writer, he says this does he, because he has access to works which are no longer available to us?

Han Baltussen: To some extent, yes. I mean, the interesting thing is about that is that this is the question of the transmission of Aristotle, and there was this very fascinating story which survives in the first century historian Strabo, which talks about the works being somehow taken away out of Athens and somehow hidden in a ditch by a man called Neleus, and there's a lot of ink been spilt about that story and we can't quite decide whether it's true or not, but it's an intriguing story because it's trying to explain why there is so little interaction with the works of Aristotle, not only among his successors, but also among some of the other philosophical schools which start to rise like the Stoics and there's been a lot of research into that. I think, well, we don't see clearly how people are responding to Aristotle, and you would have expected that anyway, and so it seems that we always have to work from arguments from silence and saying, well, there's very little that is concretely Aristotelian or a response to Aristotle. Now Cicero must have had access to some works that were re-emerging in the 1st century BC, so roughly 200 years after Aristotle died, and there's a very important moment late in the 1st century where some kind of edition was created and so people had been speculating about that in order to explain why there was this revival of study of Aristotle's work. So the first 150 years we have successes, and they're not very impressive, which I think is in a way sort of a judgment of hindsight, and it's not quite fair, and we're not going to say that all the physicists after Einstein are not as good as Einstein, because it's one of a kind, so if you come after, it's good enough to understand what he's doing and try to develop details, and that's what they did.

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Alan Saunders: On The Philosopher's Zone here on ABC Radio National, I'm talking to Han Baltussen from the University of Adelaide about the legacy of Aristotle.

So let's look at the development of Aristotle's thought after his death and who was working on it, and the first person we should turn to is Theophrastus, who was a student of Aristotle's and had a personal relationship with him.

Han Baltussen: He is really quite impressive in his own right, in the same sense as I sort of hinted at earlier, that he has got the breadth of knowledge to cover a lot of what Aristotle covered as well, but of course Aristotle's already there, so what he does in his work, he trades on the presence of these works and starts to find out whether there is a full systematic coherence to the work and whether there are empirical data that could be improving on that, or could be correcting, even, some of the views that Aristotle put forward. Because, while Plato was called this unsystematic creator, people sometimes have referred to Aristotle as this most inconclusive systematiser, in the sense that he had this broad view of the world, to try to explain much or almost everything, but couldn't really finish off all the things that he'd been doing because the breadth of his research and knowledge is just astounding. So Theophrastus picks up on that, and does a pretty good job in continuing and trying to improve some of the works.

Alan Saunders: Eudemus of Rhodes was Theophrastus' rival really for the role of successor, Aristotle's successor at the Lyceum, which was the school he founded, but he was also Aristotle's first editor, wasn't he?

Han Baltussen: Yes, he did some work on some of the ethical writings and he was really a strong rival for the succession, and it's perhaps an interesting question of What if? ff he had been the scholarch instead of Theophrastus, but the anecdote goes that Aristotle on his deathbed said, 'Well, the Lesbian wine is a bit sweeter than the Rhodean wine', and so in this kind of symbolic way he sort of chose Theophrastus over Eudemus, and it is said that Eudemus then sort of left Athens and went back to Rhodes to maintain his own kind of teaching environment, maybe a school, because Rhodes remains quite important in the Aristotelian tradition.

Alan Saunders: We were talking about the revival of interest in Aristotle, about 200 years after his death, but something that happened in that intervening period is the rise of the Hellenistic philosophers—the Sceptics, the Stoics, the Epicureans—how did this affect interest in Aristotle?

Han Baltussen: There is a sense, although as I said, it's very difficult to determine exactly on the basis of any evidence, but there is a sense that there was an interaction between these schools of thought because they were close to each other. I mean, Athens wasn't that big and they must have known about each other. And it is clear that some of the discussions that were going on, especially in natural philosophy, were connected to Aristotelian ideas. Theophrastus had some quarrel with Zeno about the eternity of the world, for instance, one of the bigger questions of natural philosophy. But it seems that the Hellenistic world was much more in need of having some good ethical values and moral code, and I think that the Stoics really managed much better in offering a moral code which was in their view closely connected to some knowledge about the natural world, because they were very much keen on connecting up all these different areas, the three most important being logic, natural philosophy and ethics. And I think they just had more to offer in a world which had become quite turbulent, because, of course, when Alexander the Great died, about one year after Aristotle, the big Alexandrian empire collapsed, as it were, and was divided up into all kinds of smaller kingdoms, and I think that some of that social disorder had an influence on the preference and the prevalence of moral thinking over natural philosophy.

Alan Saunders: But it's not as though Aristotle was not a moral thinker. He wrote the Nichomachean Ethics, which is normally regarded as one of the great works of moral philosophy in history.

Han Baltussen: Oh absolutely, but I think there we come to the problem of the availability of the works, and although we have not enough evidence to make very pertinent statements about it, it seems as if the immediate successes were not very much engaged with it, nor some of the other schools around them, and the suspicion is that it might have been the case that for some time the works were not readily available. Although the story, as I said earlier, that is told us about it being taken away to Asia Minor does not preclude there being other copies around. It's just one possible explanation to actually say, well, the emphasis didn't seem to be very much on ethics, except internal to the school.

Alan Saunders: Now as you say, there's a revival in interest in Aristotle. Once we come to, say, the beginning of the Christian era, what is Aristotle's status?

Han Baltussen: We have got some information on the broader attitude of Christian authors towards Greek philosophy, and they are somewhat torn. The first authors in the Christian tradition from the 2nd century onwards, we see that they are interested in some of the argumentative aspects of what Greek philosophy can offer, in order to defend their own faith.

Alan Saunders: So that would be Aristotle's logic, for example?

Han Baltussen: Yes, some of his logic, because if one work stands out in the 1st century BC, and AD, in the way that we know of some of the sparse evidence we have, is that they were very interested in the logic, especially what we now call the Categories. So the Categories is a work that looks at terms, if you like (I mean there's a debate even in antiquity about whether it's about terms or the things that are referred to by these terms, but apart from that) they were very interested in that. And so because a lot of early Christian fathers are part of the Greek world that we find even under the Roman Empire, and are educated within the Greek system, much of what they read comes still out of the Pagan tradition, and there's a bit debate, obviously, on how much you are supposed to be reading of that stuff if you are on the other side of the fence in terms of beliefs and religion. And so they have a very kind of torn view about retaining one bit, and rejecting others. And so logic seems to sort of get away with it, because it's not specifically related to questions of religion as such, and so it's rather neutral in theological terms. And they use it to good effect to actually argue in favour of things like the existence of God and the importance of Christian religion.

Alan Saunders: In the Middle Ages, Aristotle was known as the philosopher, you didn't have to name him, you could just say 'the philosopher says this' or 'in the opinion of the philosopher'. When does he acquire this status?

Han Baltussen: It's not an easy question, but I think that it's important to think of the way in which his work became to translate into Latin at some point, and we think that that's especially true with the work of Boethius, who was setting himself the task of trying to translate all of the logical works, or everything to do with reasoning as such. He just didn't manage to finish that, but I think the penetration into the Latin West, slowly though, because enough of the works didn't really reach the west until much later, have something to do with that. But I think the title of the Philosopher is partly to do with the fact that the form of canonization was unavoidable, especially in the second century AD, when the Professor of Aristotelian Philosophy in Athens, Alexander Aphrodisias started to write these elaborate commentaries. In his teaching he would then try to explain Aristotle to his pupils and he wrote up much of those explanations, and they are vast detailed and very much helpful commentaries that explain Aristotle to anyone who wants to know about him. And he was a Peripatetic in his thinking, although he did criticize Aristotle on some points. So if you have somebody who advocates Aristotelianism in a way that is based directly on Aristotle's works—except, because that had happened before, there were parallel stories about Aristotle which would be just based on summaries—then you have a much better chance of getting that particular authority across of the philosophy.

Alan Saunders: I mean this is an impossible question, but is it possible to imagine Western philosophy without Aristotle and his heritage?

Han Baltussen: Eventually I don't think so, because of the impact that his works had. We're very lucky that much has survived in the east, and then in the 15th century came across to the west. I mean some of it came a little bit earlier because of course we owe a lot to the Arabic philosophers in the 9th century, who almost obliterated most of his followers because they were just interested in Aristotle, people like Al Kindi, Al Farabi. I'm not an expert on that area, but they're crucial in the way in which Aristotle already came to the west through Spain, much earlier, but with the fall of Constantinople in the 15th century, of course, that was a major influx. And people were so blown away by that kind of huge systematic approach to the world where there was so much that was being explained which hadn't been done, at least not known to the West, that there is hardly a possible way of thinking about the Western canon without Aristotle.

Alan Saunders: More in our next show about Al Kindi, Al Farabi and what was known as the translation movement, centred on the city of Baghdad, and what happened to the work of Aristotle there.

This week I've been talking to Dr Han Baltussen, Senior Lecturer in Classics at the University of Adelaide.

The program is produced by Kyla Slaven, with technical production by Charlie McCune.

Don't forget that there's a special Greek page on our website, which is also the place to visit if you want to record your thoughts about the show.

And I'll be back with more Philosopher's Zone next week.