Aristotle's Politics

Living Well and Living Together

Bibliographic Data

ID10691647
AuthorsFred D Miller (University of Arizona, corresponding author)
Year2014
Volume64
Issue254
Pages195-198
Publication date2014-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe Philosophical Quarterly (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0031-8094 • E-ISSN: 1467-9213
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/pq/pqt029
OpenAlexW2323245472
LanguageEN
Citations received7

This is the final instalment of a trilogy by Eugene Garver published by the University of Chicago Press. The preceding volumes were Aristotle's Rhetoric: An Art of Character (1994) and Confronting Aristotle's Ethics: Ancient and Modern Morality (2006). In this one, Garver discusses the thesis that ‘man is a political animal’ in terms of two closely related themes: living well and living together. He contends that Aristotle's politics differs in important ways from his ethics, especially in that ‘philosophy. ...plays a different role in understanding how to live well together than it does in an individual's understanding of how to live well—not only, I will argue, a different role but a greater role’ (p. 1). The book's six chapters concern the different parts of the Politics. Chapter 1 presents Politics I as posing the ‘practical problem of politics’, i.e. how to form a community that aims at a common good out of people capable of aiming at despotism instead. Chapter 2 presents Politics II as addressing Aristotle's ‘central question for the ideal state’, i.e. ‘What do people need to have in common in order to live together in a political community?’ Chapter 3 addresses a puzzle in Politics III, viz why doesn't the knowledge of the best life lead directly to a single best form of politics? The answer, he maintains, is that the statesman is never in a position to avail himself of the political philosopher's knowledge of the best life. Chapter 4 represents Politics IV as showing the statesman ‘how to construct a constitution and a way of life ethically superior to the citizens who comprise the state’ (p. 3). Chapter 5 finds in Politics V the thesis that in dealing with factions the statesman alone is able to improve common life and he does so by aiming at stability. Chapter 6 identifies as the point of Politics VII and VIII not as to depict a completely just constitution but instead to illustrate practical political reasoning about how a polis can realize the good life.

Aesthetics · Art · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Ideal (ethics) · Literature · Morality · Order (exchange) · Political philosophy · Political science · Politics · Rhetoric · Sociology · State (computer science) · Theology · Trilogy · Computer Science · Law · Philosophy · Political Philosophy and Ethics

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