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A Note to the Reader
- State University of New York Press
- Chapter
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A Note to the Reader Like Aristotle, I begin many a sentence with “we.” This pronoun is meant to refer to the reader and myself. I use it on two occasions. First, I often discuss what I take to be experiences we all share. So, for example, we experience physical bodies as having three dimensions and time as being constituted by a past, present, and future. Second, sometimes “we” refers to us as residents of contemporary culture who hold certain views and general conceptions that have been taken for granted since the advent of the modern period (conceived as around 1600). So, for example, we know that the earth orbits the sun. My use of the pronoun may sometimes seem presumptuous. If so, the reader is invited to challenge it. Indeed, a goal of this book is precisely to make us wonder who “we” are. The genius of Aristotle’s thought is found in its comprehensiveness and its coherence. He thinks through the entire world from top (the stars) to bottom (the earth). As a result, no part of his work, no individual argument or theoretical bit, can be fully appreciated without an understanding of where it fits in the whole. For this reason, this book must, at least in summary fashion, address the entirety of his worldview. I urge readers to defer judgment on any particular item that is discussed until they are able to locate it within the context of the whole thought. As a guide to doing this, I will frequently point to later sections of the book by using the symbol (>). So, for example, to refer ahead to chapter 3, section 5, the reader will see (>III.5). To offer reminders of what has already been discussed, I will use the symbol (<). As Aristotle scholars will quickly realize, I sometimes devote a short section to a topic that would require a long book to be fully addressed. To compensate for such brevity, in the endnotes I often cite scholarly works that offer accounts far more elaborate than my own. I also point the reader to background material and occasionally discuss textual points that are parix x / A Note to the Reader ticularly controversial. It is not necessary, however, to turn to these endnotes in order to follow the book’s argument. The body of the text can stand on its own, and a knowledge of Aristotelian scholarship is not required to understand it. Unless otherwise noted, translations of Aristotle are my own. Included in the Bibliography are the Greek texts that were used as well as English translations that I have consulted. I have consistently rendered the titles of Aristotle’s works into English, rather than into Latin. So, for example, instead of De Caelo I opt for On the Heavens. All spellings of Greek words are phonetical. The Greek h (êta) is rendered by “ê” and w (omega) by “ô.” All lexical information comes from the Liddell-Scott Greek-English Lexicon. Quotations are typically followed by a parenthesis containing the standard pagination and line numbering of the 1831 edition of Immanuel Bekker. This book builds on and borrows its title from an earlier work, Retrieving the Ancients: An Introduction to Greek Philosophy (Blackwell, 2004). Even though its chapter on Aristotle was but one of four, it became clear to me in writing it that the entire book was Aristotelian in spirit. The present book substantially elaborates much of what was asserted in chapter 4 of that work. As a result, there are a few pages of overlap between them, all of which are noted. ...