[lbo-talk] Re: Butler on Derrida

Chris Doss lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com
Wed Oct 27 04:47:06 PDT 2004


--- andie nachgeborenen <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> wrote:

I guess this underlines the subjective nature of the word "profound." If Aristotle isn't profound, I don't know what the word means. I'm not a classical scholar and don't know Greek, though I have had classes in Aristotle, and had the privilege of working through some of the Nicomachean Ethics with Michael Frede, one of the great classical scholars of our time. Tht was long ago, of course. I used to teach the NE in ethics classes when I was a professor. My tentative conclusion is that Aristitle is the greatest mind that ever existed, at least that I am aware of. But I guess he's not profound.

---

I agree with your assessment of Aristotle. He was Da Man. What I meant was that reading Aristotle is not going to radically change the way anybody perceives the world, like say Kant or Hegel or Berkeley or Plato or Hume can do (the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics rocked my world when I first read it when I was 20). It's pretty commensensical. The Ethics is almost banal, a flat-out description of what Athenians in Aristotles time believed virtue to be. It contains almost no argumentation whatsoever.

===== Nu, zayats, pogodi!

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