I think the "it is said" comes from two things: the Greek tendency toward the passive voice ("legetai") and Aristotle's and the Greeks' in general belief in doxa, opinion, as being an indication of the truth. IIRC Aristotle also shows this a lot in the first book of the Physics where he is considering the views of previous philosophers, where the mere fact that a lot of people people in something is evidence for its being true. I'm going to display my Heideggerian roots here and say that this is because the Greeks viewed truth as being on the "surface" of reality, even in the case of Plato, accessible through pure contemplation of it, and to some extent already known by everyone.
I think this is really evident in the Nicomachean Ethics, in which Aristotle does very little arguing but rather explicates the worldview dominate in the Athens of his time, which he does not question. It is, speaking broadly, a phenomenological work.
Anyway, the point is that Aristotle, and the Ancients in general, did not regard death as being the complete end of the person, because even if they did not believe in an afterlife they did not identify the person with the self, and they did not believe "happiness" ("fortunate," like I said, would be a better translation I think) was a subjective trait, but something objective, correlating with the "worth" of the person.
Being Heideggerian again, I'm not sure they had a notion of a subject at all.
--- andie nachgeborenen <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> Ah well, as I said, it's been a while. I even
> remember
> the first passage, now that you call my attention to
> it. I should have looked it up, but I had to run to
> work. In that case I should have kept my mouth shut.
> However, Aristotle acknowledges in the second
> passage
> the doubts (some have) that the dead share in any
> good
> or evil, while he says in the first passage that
> "both
> good and evil are thought to exist for a dead man"
> --
> compounding my negligence by not doing further
> research, I see a certain tension between these
> passages. Aristotle also has a way of talking about
> what is "thought" (widely by the Greeks? by people
> in
> general? by philosophers?) without always being
> entirely clear about whether he agrees or not, even
> where he registers an argument. So in the first
> passage he gives an argument that the good and bad
> can
> befall the dead because they are objective, just as
> good and bad can befall the living whether or not
> they
> know about it, but in the quoted passage he falls
> short of saying that he endorses the argument rather
> than just noting that some (many?) people accept it.
> And the uncertainty is magnified in the second
> passage
> where Aristotle takes not of the doubt, and then
> seems
> to suggest that "even if anything good or evil
> penetrates to [the dead]" it must be weak or
> negligible," not such as to change whether the dead
> are happy or not which sounds on one hand less
> noncommittal than the observation "it is thought,"
> but
> it's not clear from the passage as quoted whether
> Aristotle is saying that the (mis)fortunes of our
> friends have little or no effect on our well-being
> when we are dead because they are not ours, or
> because
> when we are dead, it's doubtful that anything good
> or
> evil penetrates far enough to us to reverse the
> happiness or unhappiness that characterized our
> lives.
> These passages are, in short, rife enough with
> ambiguity to generate many more millennia of
> interpretive discussion.
>
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