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INTRODUCTION
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INTRODUCTION Lenn E. Goodman and Robert B. Talisse A well-known philosopher who lived through almost all of the twentieth century used to remark on the penchant some philosophers have for announcing the death of their own discipline. That bad habit isn’t confined to philosophers, of course. We’ve often seen premature obituaries about art in general or figural art in particular, or lyric poetry, or music, or melody, the novel, or religion. It was even thought, around the end of the nineteenth century, that physics was about finished and nothing was left but to fill in the last few decimal places in the key Newtonian constants. That was just on the eve of the Michaelson-Morely experiment, which paved the way for Einstein’s work and opened the door to the expanding universe of quantum mechanics, the nuclear age, and string theory. Our philosopher, however, had lived long enough to see metaphysics, political philosophy, aesthetics, normative ethics and normative epistemology, among other branches of philosophical inquiry, revive more than once from the overhasty and sometimes overeager death announcements. His observation was that before it had even become trite to say that this or that variety of philosophy was washed up some young kid would start reading Aristotle, and everything began anew and fresh. It was Aristotle who said that philosophy begins in wonder. He was too much a believer in cycles of history, too much Plato’s student, and too ready to probe the views of the many and the wise to think that he had started anything from scratch. But he did lay out in plain terms, without the cloak of dialogue or a thick veil of poetic tropes, many of the lasting questions and inviting answers that have put philosophers to work from his time down to our own. Nowhere was that more true than in political philosophy. But is it true that Aristotle’s thoughts on politics have any life left in them for today? What, we might ask, have we to learn about politics from an ancient thinker who wrote in Greek and lived at Athens but was not even an Athenian, let alone a committed democrat? What have we to learn in political philosophy from a man who could accept slavery as an institution, who did not see women as men’s equals, who had a lively interest in historical and political traditions but nothing much to say about the politics of group identity? 1 2 LENN E. GOODMAN AND ROBERT B. TALISSE A common answer, we suspect, is that Aristotle has little to teach us modern liberal democrats. Aren’t Aristotle’s views on the nature and purpose of the state, the meaning of citizenship, and the ordering of political institutions not only archaic, because they rest on an exploded metaphysics, but unacceptable, because they slight the modern staples of political legitimacy: formal equality, individual rights, negative liberty, moral neutrality, and democratic rule. For those who find these fundamentals of normative discourse about politics insufficient today, and who call for more robust commitments to differential equality, group rights, and identity claims, Aristotle’s vision of a polity whose purpose is to promote virtue seems even more remote. The chapters collected in this volume aim to challenge the commonplace perception of Aristotle as a thinker as planted firmly in the “liberty of the ancients”—and therefore irrelevant to those who seek to theorize the “liberty of the moderns,” as Benjamin Constant framed the contrast. The chapters represent different methodological and conceptual foci. But they all endeavor to bring Aristotle into conversation with contemporary theorists. In most instances, they find that Aristotle indeed has much to say to us. Consider the question of equality. Aristotle is a valuable companion in our discussions here, precisely for his openness. He does not share our familiar sayisms about equality. He does not assume that all humans are equal in talent, skill, intellect, or ability. He does not even assume that we are all moral equals. His views here jangle our sensibilities, schooled in the sacredness of human dignity and the rhetoric of democracy. And yet, Aristotle’s freedom from the commitments we hold dear makes him a pluralist about the varieties of equality, as he is about so many other topics, from the marks of substantiality to the dimensions of human virtue. He can review the Pythagorean reduction of justice to reciprocity, dismiss the mechanical equation of justice with simply making “a man suffer what he did...