Edith Hall at Aeon Magazine:
I’m an Aristotle scholar but also an enthusiast for his ideas. I’ve studied his work in the original Greek, and even made a pilgrimage to his birthplace and the various places he lived. He was the most brilliant philosopher ever to have lived. I believe that his Nicomachean Ethics offers us a guide for how to live good lives and flourish. Oddly, though, for a writer whose thinking was so clear and, in many ways, modern, people with radically different stances have tried to claim him for their own.
He often features as a darling of Right-wing ideologues: his Politics is the first text in Benjamin Wiker’s 10 Books Every Conservative Must Read (2010); his authority is invoked on the Breitbart News website. Yet he is celebrated by Marxists for identifying the importance of economic factors in political history, having been heroised in Hugo Gellert’s Karl Marx’ ‘Capital’ in Lithographs (1934). Over the past decade, Aristotle’s face has appeared in Greek wall-art protesting against austerity along with his statement that poverty engenders revolution and crime. On the other hand, his (misinterpreted) views on elites, women and slavery in his Politics are often censured, especially since the advent of ‘cancel’ culture. Yet he has a significant record and potential as a radical and reforming force. This has been overlooked because his views on constitutional issues, the equality of women and even slavery have often been misrepresented, distorted and downright falsified.
more here.
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