Region	Western philosophy
Era	Ancient philosophy
Color	#B0C4DE
Name	, ''Aristotélēs''
Birth date	384 BCStageira, Chalcidice
Death date	322 BC (age 61 or 62)Euboea
School tradition	Peripatetic schoolAristotelianism
Main interests	Physics, Metaphysics, Poetry, Theatre, Music, Rhetoric, Politics, Government, Ethics, Biology, Zoology
Notable ideas	Golden mean, Reason, Logic, Syllogism, Passion
Influences	Parmenides, Socrates, Plato, Heraclitus, Democritus
Influenced	Virtually all Western philosophy that came after his works; Alexander the Great, Avicenna, Averroes, Maimonides, Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Ptolemy, Copernicus, Galileo, and most of Islamic philosophy, Jewish philosophy, Christian philosophy, science and more.... }}

Aristotle (, ''Aristotélēs'') (384 BC – 322 BC) was a Greek philosopher, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, linguistics, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology. Together with Plato and Socrates (Plato's teacher), Aristotle is one of the most important founding figures in Western philosophy. Aristotle's writings were the first to create a comprehensive system of Western philosophy, encompassing morality and aesthetics, logic and science, politics and metaphysics.

Aristotle's views on the physical sciences profoundly shaped medieval scholarship, and their influence extended well into the Renaissance, although they were ultimately replaced by Newtonian physics. In the zoological sciences, some of his observations were confirmed to be accurate only in the 19th century. His works contain the earliest known formal study of logic, which was incorporated in the late 19th century into modern formal logic. In metaphysics, Aristotelianism had a profound influence on philosophical and theological thinking in the Islamic and Jewish traditions in the Middle Ages, and it continues to influence Christian theology, especially the scholastic tradition of the Catholic Church. His ethics, though always influential, gained renewed interest with the modern advent of virtue ethics. All aspects of Aristotle's philosophy continue to be the object of active academic study today. Though Aristotle wrote many elegant treatises and dialogues (Cicero described his literary style as "a river of gold"), it is thought that the majority of his writings are now lost and only about one-third of the original works have survived.

Life

Aristotle was born in Stageira, Chalcidice, in 384 BC, about east of modern-day Thessaloniki. His father Nicomachus was the personal physician to King Amyntas of Macedon. Aristotle was trained and educated as a member of the aristocracy. At about the age of eighteen, he went to Athens to continue his education at Plato's Academy. Aristotle remained at the academy for nearly twenty years before quitting Athens in 348/47 BC. The traditional story about his departure reports that he was disappointed with the direction the academy took after control passed to Plato's nephew Speusippus upon his death, although it is possible that he feared anti-Macedonian sentiments and left before Plato had died. He then traveled with Xenocrates to the court of his friend Hermias of Atarneus in Asia Minor. While in Asia, Aristotle traveled with Theophrastus to the island of Lesbos, where together they researched the botany and zoology of the island. Aristotle married Hermias's adoptive daughter (or niece) Pythias. She bore him a daughter, whom they named Pythias. Soon after Hermias' death, Aristotle was invited by Philip II of Macedon to become the tutor to his son Alexander the Great in 343 BC.

Aristotle was appointed as the head of the royal academy of Macedon. During that time he gave lessons not only to Alexander, but also to two other future kings: Ptolemy and Cassander. In his ''Politics'', Aristotle states that only one thing could justify monarchy, and that was if the virtue of the king and his family were greater than the virtue of the rest of the citizens put together. Tactfully, he included the young prince and his father in that category. Aristotle encouraged Alexander toward eastern conquest, and his attitude towards Persia was unabashedly ethnocentric. In one famous example, he counsels Alexander to be 'a leader to the Greeks and a despot to the barbarians, to look after the former as after friends and relatives, and to deal with the latter as with beasts or plants'.

By 335 BC he had returned to Athens, establishing his own school there known as the Lyceum. Aristotle conducted courses at the school for the next twelve years. While in Athens, his wife Pythias died and Aristotle became involved with Herpyllis of Stageira, who bore him a son whom he named after his father, Nicomachus. According to the Suda, he also had an eromenos, Palaephatus of Abydus.

It is during this period in Athens from 335 to 323 BC when Aristotle is believed to have composed many of his works. Aristotle wrote many dialogues, only fragments of which survived. The works that have survived are in treatise form and were not, for the most part, intended for widespread publication, as they are generally thought to be lecture aids for his students. His most important treatises include ''Physics'', ''Metaphysics'', ''Nicomachean Ethics'', ''Politics'', ''De Anima (On the Soul)'' and ''Poetics''.

Aristotle not only studied almost every subject possible at the time, but made significant contributions to most of them. In physical science, Aristotle studied anatomy, astronomy, embryology, geography, geology, meteorology, physics and zoology. In philosophy, he wrote on aesthetics, ethics, government, metaphysics, politics, economics, psychology, rhetoric and theology. He also studied education, foreign customs, literature and poetry. His combined works constitute a virtual encyclopedia of Greek knowledge. It has been suggested that Aristotle was probably the last person to know everything there was to be known in his own time.

Near the end of Alexander's life, Alexander began to suspect plots against himself, and threatened Aristotle in letters. Aristotle had made no secret of his contempt for Alexander's pretense of divinity, and the king had executed Aristotle's grandnephew Callisthenes as a traitor. A widespread tradition in antiquity suspected Aristotle of playing a role in Alexander's death, but there is little evidence for this.

Upon Alexander's death, anti-Macedonian sentiment in Athens once again flared. Eurymedon the hierophant denounced Aristotle for not holding the gods in honor. Aristotle fled the city to his mother's family estate in Chalcis, explaining, "I will not allow the Athenians to sin twice against philosophy," a reference to Athens's prior trial and execution of Socrates. He died in Euboea of natural causes within the year (in 322 BC). Aristotle named chief executor his student Antipater and left a will in which he asked to be buried next to his wife.

Logic

With the ''Prior Analytics'', Aristotle is credited with the earliest study of formal logic, and his conception of it was the dominant form of Western logic until 19th century advances in mathematical logic. Kant stated in the ''Critique of Pure Reason'' that Aristotle's theory of logic completely accounted for the core of deductive inference.

History

Aristotle "says that 'on the subject of reasoning' he 'had nothing else on an earlier date to speak of'". However, Plato reports that syntax was devised before him, by Prodicus of Ceos, who was concerned by the correct use of words. Logic seems to have emerged from dialectics; the earlier philosophers made frequent use of concepts like ''reductio ad absurdum'' in their discussions, but never truly understood the logical implications. Even Plato had difficulties with logic; although he had a reasonable conception of a deductive system, he could never actually construct one and relied instead on his dialectic. Plato believed that deduction would simply follow from premises, hence he focused on maintaining solid premises so that the conclusion would logically follow. Consequently, Plato realized that a method for obtaining conclusions would be most beneficial. He never succeeded in devising such a method, but his best attempt was published in his book ''Sophist'', where he introduced his division method.

Analytics and the ''Organon''

What we today call ''Aristotelian logic'', Aristotle himself would have labeled "analytics". The term "logic" he reserved to mean ''dialectics''. Most of Aristotle's work is probably not in its original form, since it was most likely edited by students and later lecturers. The logical works of Aristotle were compiled into six books in about the early 1st century AD: #''Categories'' #''On Interpretation'' #''Prior Analytics'' #''Posterior Analytics'' #''Topics'' #''On Sophistical Refutations''

The order of the books (or the teachings from which they are composed) is not certain, but this list was derived from analysis of Aristotle's writings. It goes from the basics, the analysis of simple terms in the ''Categories,'' the analysis of propositions and their elementary relations in ''On Interpretation'', to the study of more complex forms, namely, syllogisms (in the ''Analytics'') and dialectics (in the ''Topics'' and ''Sophistical Refutations''). The first three treatises form the core of the logical theory ''stricto sensu'': the grammar of the language of logic and the correct rules of reasoning. There is one volume of Aristotle's concerning logic not found in the ''Organon'', namely the fourth book of ''Metaphysics.''

In Aristotle's terminology, "natural philosophy" is a branch of philosophy examining the phenomena of the natural world, and includes fields that would be regarded today as physics, biology and other natural sciences. In modern times, the scope of ''philosophy'' has become limited to more generic or abstract inquiries, such as ethics and metaphysics, in which logic plays a major role. Today's philosophy tends to exclude empirical study of the natural world by means of the scientific method. In contrast, Aristotle's philosophical endeavors encompassed virtually all facets of intellectual inquiry.

In the larger sense of the word, Aristotle makes philosophy coextensive with reasoning, which he also would describe as "science". Note, however, that his use of the term ''science'' carries a different meaning than that covered by the term "scientific method". For Aristotle, "all science (''dianoia'') is either practical, poetical or theoretical" (''Metaphysics'' 1025b25). By practical science, he means ethics and politics; by poetical science, he means the study of poetry and the other fine arts; by theoretical science, he means physics, mathematics and metaphysics.

If logic (or "analytics") is regarded as a study preliminary to philosophy, the divisions of Aristotelian philosophy would consist of: (1) Logic; (2) Theoretical Philosophy, including Metaphysics, Physics and Mathematics; (3) Practical Philosophy and (4) Poetical Philosophy.

In the period between his two stays in Athens, between his times at the Academy and the Lyceum, Aristotle conducted most of the scientific thinking and research for which he is renowned today. In fact, most of Aristotle's life was devoted to the study of the objects of natural science. Aristotle's metaphysics contains observations on the nature of numbers but he made no original contributions to mathematics. He did, however, perform original research in the natural sciences, e.g., botany, zoology, physics, astronomy, chemistry, meteorology, and several other sciences.

Aristotle's writings on science are largely qualitative, as opposed to quantitative. Beginning in the 16th century, scientists began applying mathematics to the physical sciences, and Aristotle's work in this area was deemed hopelessly inadequate. His failings were largely due to the absence of concepts like mass, velocity, force and temperature. He had a conception of speed and temperature, but no quantitative understanding of them, which was partly due to the absence of basic experimental devices, like clocks and thermometers.

His writings provide an account of many scientific observations, a mixture of precocious accuracy and curious errors. For example, in his ''History of Animals'' he claimed that human males have more teeth than females. In a similar vein, John Philoponus, and later Galileo, showed by simple experiments that Aristotle's theory that a heavier object falls faster than a lighter object is incorrect. On the other hand, Aristotle refuted Democritus's claim that the Milky Way was made up of "those stars which are shaded by the earth from the sun's rays," pointing out (correctly, even if such reasoning was bound to be dismissed for a long time) that, given "current astronomical demonstrations" that "the size of the sun is greater than that of the earth and the distance of the stars from the earth many times greater than that of the sun, then...the sun shines on all the stars and the earth screens none of them."

In places, Aristotle goes too far in deriving 'laws of the universe' from simple observation and over-stretched reason. Today's scientific method assumes that such thinking without sufficient facts is ineffective, and that discerning the validity of one's hypothesis requires far more rigorous experimentation than that which Aristotle used to support his laws.

Aristotle also had some scientific blind spots. He posited a geocentric cosmology that we may discern in selections of the ''Metaphysics'', which was widely accepted up until the 16th century. From the 3rd century to the 16th century, the dominant view held that the Earth was the center of the universe (geocentrism).

Since he was perhaps the philosopher most respected by European thinkers during and after the Renaissance, these thinkers often took Aristotle's erroneous positions as given, which held back science in this epoch. However, Aristotle's scientific shortcomings should not mislead one into forgetting his great advances in the many scientific fields. For instance, he founded logic as a formal science and created foundations to biology that were not superseded for two millennia. Moreover, he introduced the fundamental notion that nature is composed of things that change and that studying such changes can provide useful knowledge of underlying constants.

Physics

The five elements

Concerning the make up of matter, Aristotle followed prior Greek philosophy with an adapted theory of elements. He was not an "atomist" like Democritus. In particular he proposed a fifth element, aether, in addition to the more common four.

Fire, which is hot and dry.

Earth, which is cold and dry.

Air, which is hot and wet.

Water, which is cold and wet.

Aether, which is the divine substance that makes up the heavenly spheres and heavenly bodies (stars and planets).

Each of the four earthly elements has its natural place; the earth at the centre of the universe, then water, then air, then fire. When they are out of their natural place they have natural motion, requiring no external cause, which is towards that place; so bodies sink in water, air bubbles rise up, rain falls, flame rises in air. The heavenly element has perpetual circular motion.

Motion

Motion in Aristotle is defined in his Physics in a way which is quite different from modern science, and Aristotle's understanding of motion is closely connected to his actuality-potentiality distinction (see below concerning metaphysics). Taken literally, Aristotle defines motion as the actuality of a potentiality ''as such''. What Aristotle meant is the subject of several different interpretations, but because actuality and potentiality are normally opposites in Aristotle, interpreters either say that the wording which has come down to us is wrong, or that the addition of the "as such" to the definition is critical to understanding it.

===Causality, The Four Causes===

Material cause describes the material out of which something is composed. Thus the material cause of a table is wood, and the material cause of a car is rubber and steel. It is not about action. It does not mean one domino knocks over another domino.

The formal cause is its form, i.e. the arrangement of that matter. It tells us what a thing is, that any thing is determined by the definition, form, pattern, essence, whole, synthesis or archetype. It embraces the account of causes in terms of fundamental principles or general laws, as the whole (i.e., macrostructure) is the cause of its parts, a relationship known as the whole-part causation. Plainly put the formal cause is the idea existing in the first place as exemplar in the mind of the sculptor, and in the second place as intrinsic, determining cause, embodied in the matter. Formal cause could only refer to the essential quality of causation. A more simple example of the formal cause is the blueprint or plan that one has before making or causing a human made object to exist.

The efficient cause is "the primary source", or that from which the change or the ending of the change first starts. It identifies 'what makes of what is made and what causes change of what is changed' and so suggests all sorts of agents, nonliving or living, acting as the sources of change or movement or rest. Representing the current understanding of causality as the relation of cause and effect, this covers the modern definitions of "cause" as either the agent or agency or particular events or states of affairs. More simply again that which immediately sets the thing in motion. So take the two dominos this time of equal weighting, the first is knocked over causing the second also to fall over. This is effectively efficient cause.

The final cause is its purpose, or that for the sake of which a thing exists or is done, including both purposeful and instrumental actions and activities. The final cause or telos is the purpose or end that something is supposed to serve, or it is that from which and that to which the change is. This also covers modern ideas of mental causation involving such psychological causes as volition, need, motivation or motives, rational, irrational, ethical, and all that gives purpose to behavior.

Additionally, things can be causes of one another, causing each other reciprocally, as hard work causes fitness and vice versa, although not in the same way or function, the one is as the beginning of change, the other as the goal. (Thus Aristotle first suggested a reciprocal or circular causality as a relation of mutual dependence or influence of cause upon effect). Moreover, Aristotle indicated that the same thing can be the cause of contrary effects; its presence and absence may result in different outcomes. Simply it is the goal or purpose that brings about an event (not necessarily a mental goal). Taking our two dominos, it requires someone to intentionally knock the dominos over as they cannot fall themselves.

Aristotle marked two modes of causation: proper (prior) causation and accidental (chance) causation. All causes, proper and incidental, can be spoken as potential or as actual, particular or generic. The same language refers to the effects of causes, so that generic effects assigned to generic causes, particular effects to particular causes, operating causes to actual effects. Essentially, causality does not suggest a temporal relation between the cause and the effect.

Optics

Aristotle held more accurate theories on some optical concepts than other philosophers of his day. The earliest known written evidence of a camera obscura can be found in Aristotle's documentation of such a device in 350 BC in ''Problemata''. Aristotle's apparatus contained a dark chamber that had a single small hole, or aperture, to allow for sunlight to enter. Aristotle used the device to make observations of the sun and noted that no matter what shape the hole was, the sun would still be correctly displayed as a round object. In modern cameras, this is analogous to the diaphragm. Aristotle also made the observation that when the distance between the aperture and the surface with the image increased, the image was magnified.

Chance and spontaneity

According to Aristotle, spontaneity and chance are causes of some things, distinguishable from other types of cause. Chance as an incidental cause lies in the realm of accidental things. It is "from what is spontaneous" (but note that what is spontaneous does not come from chance). For a better understanding of Aristotle's conception of "chance" it might be better to think of "coincidence": Something takes place by chance if a person sets out with the intent of having one thing take place, but with the result of another thing (not intended) taking place. For example: A person seeks donations. That person may find another person willing to donate a substantial sum. However, if the person seeking the donations met the person donating, not for the purpose of collecting donations, but for some other purpose, Aristotle would call the collecting of the donation by that particular donator a result of chance. It must be unusual that something happens by chance. In other words, if something happens all or most of the time, we cannot say that it is by chance.

There is also more specific kind of chance, which Aristotle names "luck", that can only apply to human beings, since it is in the sphere of moral actions. According to Aristotle, luck must involve choice (and thus deliberation), and only humans are capable of deliberation and choice. "What is not capable of action cannot do anything by chance".

Metaphysics

Aristotle defines metaphysics as "the knowledge of immaterial being," or of "being in the highest degree of abstraction." He refers to metaphysics as "first philosophy", as well as "the theologic science."

Substance, potentiality and actuality

Aristotle examines the concepts of substance and essence (''ousia'') in his ''Metaphysics'' (Book VII), and he concludes that a particular substance is a combination of both matter and form. As he proceeds to the book VIII, he concludes that the matter of the substance is the substratum or the stuff of which it is composed; ''e.g.'', the matter of the house are the bricks, stones, timbers etc., or whatever constitutes the ''potential'' house, while the form of the substance is the ''actual'' house, namely 'covering for bodies and chattels' or any other differentia (see also predicables). The formula that gives the components is the account of the matter, and the formula that gives the differentia is the account of the form.

With regard to the change (''kinesis'') and its causes now, as he defines in his Physics and On Generation and Corruption 319b-320a, he distinguishes the coming to be from: # growth and diminution, which is change in quantity; # locomotion, which is change in space; and # alteration, which is change in quality.

The coming to be is a change where nothing persists of which the resultant is a property. In that particular change he introduces the concept of potentiality (''dynamis'') and actuality (''entelecheia'') in association with the matter and the form.

Referring to potentiality, this is what a thing is capable of doing, or being acted upon, if the conditions are right and it is not prevented by something else. For example, the seed of a plant in the soil is potentially (''dynamei'') plant, and if is not prevented by something, it will become a plant. Potentially beings can either 'act' (''poiein'') or 'be acted upon' (''paschein''), which can be either innate or learned. For example, the eyes possess the potentiality of sight (innate – being acted upon), while the capability of playing the flute can be possessed by learning (exercise – acting).

Actuality is the fulfillment of the end of the potentiality. Because the end (''telos'') is the principle of every change, and for the sake of the end exists potentiality, therefore actuality is the end. Referring then to our previous example, we could say that an actuality is when a plant does one of the activities that plants do.

"For that for the sake of which a thing is, is its principle, and the becoming is for the sake of the end; and the actuality is the end, and it is for the sake of this that the potentiality is acquired. For animals do not see in order that they may have sight, but they have sight that they may see."

In summary, the matter used to make a house has potentiality to be a house and both the activity of building and the form of the final house are actualities, which is also a final cause or end. Then Aristotle proceeds and concludes that the actuality is prior to potentiality in formula, in time and in substantiality.

With this definition of the particular substance (i.e., matter and form), Aristotle tries to solve the problem of the unity of the beings, for example, "what is it that makes a man one"? Since, according to Plato there are two Ideas: animal and biped, how then is man a unity? However, according to Aristotle, the potential being (matter) and the actual one (form) are one and the same thing.

Universals and particulars

Aristotle's predecessor, Plato, argued that all things have a universal form, which could be either a property, or a relation to other things. When we look at an apple, for example, we see an apple, and we can also analyze a form of an apple. In this distinction, there is a particular apple and a universal form of an apple. Moreover, we can place an apple next to a book, so that we can speak of both the book and apple as being next to each other.

Plato argued that there are some universal forms that are not a part of particular things. For example, it is possible that there is no particular good in existence, but "good" is still a proper universal form. Bertrand Russell is a contemporary philosopher who agreed with Plato on the existence of "uninstantiated universals".

Aristotle disagreed with Plato on this point, arguing that all universals are instantiated. Aristotle argued that there are no universals that are unattached to existing things. According to Aristotle, if a universal exists, either as a particular or a relation, then there must have been, must be currently, or must be in the future, something on which the universal can be predicated. Consequently, according to Aristotle, if it is not the case that some universal can be predicated to an object that exists at some period of time, then it does not exist.

In addition, Aristotle disagreed with Plato about the location of universals. As Plato spoke of the world of the forms, a location where all universal forms subsist, Aristotle maintained that universals exist within each thing on which each universal is predicated. So, according to Aristotle, the form of apple exists within each apple, rather than in the world of the forms.

Biology and medicine

In Aristotelian science, most especially in biology, things he saw himself have stood the test of time better than his retelling of the reports of others, which contain error and superstition. He dissected animals but not humans; his ideas on how the human body works have been almost entirely superseded.

Empirical research program

Aristotle is the earliest natural historian whose work has survived in some detail. Aristotle certainly did research on the natural history of Lesbos, and the surrounding seas and neighbouring areas. The works that reflect this research, such as ''History of Animals'', ''Generation of Animals'', and ''Parts of Animals'', contain some observations and interpretations, along with sundry myths and mistakes. The most striking passages are about the sea-life visible from observation on Lesbos and available from the catches of fishermen. His observations on catfish, electric fish (''Torpedo'') and angler-fish are detailed, as is his writing on cephalopods, namely, ''Octopus'', ''Sepia'' (cuttlefish) and the paper nautilus (''Argonauta argo''). His description of the hectocotyl arm was about two thousand years ahead of its time, and widely disbelieved until its rediscovery in the 19th century. He separated the aquatic mammals from fish, and knew that sharks and rays were part of the group he called Selachē (selachians).

Another good example of his methods comes from the ''Generation of Animals'' in which Aristotle describes breaking open fertilized chicken eggs at intervals to observe when visible organs were generated.

He gave accurate descriptions of ruminants' four-chambered fore-stomachs, and of the ovoviviparous embryological development of the hound shark ''Mustelus mustelus''.

Classification of living things

Aristotle's classification of living things contains some elements which still existed in the 19th century. What the modern zoologist would call vertebrates and invertebrates, Aristotle called 'animals with blood' and 'animals without blood' (he was not to know that complex invertebrates do make use of haemoglobin, but of a different kind from vertebrates). Animals with blood were divided into live-bearing (humans and mammals), and egg-bearing (birds and fish). Invertebrates ('animals without blood') are insects, crustacea (divided into non-shelled – cephalopods – and shelled) and testacea (molluscs). In some respects, this incomplete classification is better than that of Linnaeus, who crowded the invertebrata together into two groups, Insecta and Vermes (worms).

For Charles Singer, "Nothing is more remarkable than [Aristotle's] efforts to [exhibit] the relationships of living things as a ''scala naturae''"

Aristotle believed that intellectual purposes, i.e., final causes, guided all natural processes. Such a teleological view gave Aristotle cause to justify his observed data as an expression of formal design. Noting that "no animal has, at the same time, both tusks and horns," and "a single-hooved animal with two horns I have never seen," Aristotle suggested that Nature, giving no animal both horns and tusks, was staving off vanity, and giving creatures faculties only to such a degree as they are necessary. Noting that ruminants had multiple stomachs and weak teeth, he supposed the first was to compensate for the latter, with Nature trying to preserve a type of balance.

In a similar fashion, Aristotle believed that creatures were arranged in a graded scale of perfection rising from plants on up to man, the ''scala naturae'' or Great Chain of Being. His system had eleven grades, arranged according "to the degree to which they are infected with potentiality", expressed in their form at birth. The highest animals laid warm and wet creatures alive, the lowest bore theirs cold, dry, and in thick eggs.

Aristotle also held that the level of a creature's perfection was reflected in its form, but not preordained by that form. Ideas like this, and his ideas about souls, are not regarded as science at all in modern times.

He placed emphasis on the type(s) of soul an organism possessed, asserting that plants possess a vegetative soul, responsible for reproduction and growth, animals a vegetative and a sensitive soul, responsible for mobility and sensation, and humans a vegetative, a sensitive, and a rational soul, capable of thought and reflection.

Aristotle, in contrast to earlier philosophers, but in accordance with the Egyptians, placed the rational soul in the heart, rather than the brain. Notable is Aristotle's division of sensation and thought, which generally went against previous philosophers, with the exception of Alcmaeon.

Successor: Theophrastus

Aristotle's successor at the Lyceum, Theophrastus, wrote a series of books on botany—the ''History of Plants''—which survived as the most important contribution of antiquity to botany, even into the Middle Ages. Many of Theophrastus' names survive into modern times, such as ''carpos'' for fruit, and ''pericarpion'' for seed vessel.

Rather than focus on formal causes, as Aristotle did, Theophrastus suggested a mechanistic scheme, drawing analogies between natural and artificial processes, and relying on Aristotle's concept of the efficient cause. Theophrastus also recognized the role of sex in the reproduction of some higher plants, though this last discovery was lost in later ages.

Influence on Hellenistic medicine

After Theophrastus, the Lyceum failed to produce any original work. Though interest in Aristotle's ideas survived, they were generally taken unquestioningly. It is not until the age of Alexandria under the Ptolemies that advances in biology can be again found.

The first medical teacher at Alexandria, Herophilus of Chalcedon, corrected Aristotle, placing intelligence in the brain, and connected the nervous system to motion and sensation. Herophilus also distinguished between veins and arteries, noting that the latter pulse while the former do not. Though a few ancient atomists such as Lucretius challenged the teleological viewpoint of Aristotelian ideas about life, teleology (and after the rise of Christianity, natural theology) would remain central to biological thought essentially until the 18th and 19th centuries. Ernst Mayr claimed that there was "nothing of any real consequence in biology after Lucretius and Galen until the Renaissance." Aristotle's ideas of natural history and medicine survived, but they were generally taken unquestioningly.

Practical philosophy

Ethics

Aristotle considered ethics to be a practical rather than theoretical study, i.e., one aimed at doing good rather than knowing for its own sake. He wrote several treatises on ethics, including most notably, the ''Nicomachean Ethics''.

Aristotle taught that virtue has to do with the proper function (''ergon'') of a thing. An eye is only a good eye in so much as it can see, because the proper function of an eye is sight. Aristotle reasoned that humans must have a function specific to humans, and that this function must be an activity of the ''psuchē'' (normally translated as ''soul'') in accordance with reason (''logos''). Aristotle identified such an optimum activity of the soul as the aim of all human deliberate action, ''eudaimonia'', generally translated as "happiness" or sometimes "well being". To have the potential of ever being happy in this way necessarily requires a good character (''ēthikē'' ''aretē''), often translated as moral (or ethical) virtue (or excellence).

Aristotle taught that to achieve a virtuous and potentially happy character requires a first stage of having the fortune to be habituated not deliberately, but by teachers, and experience, leading to a later stage in which one consciously chooses to do the best things. When the best people come to live life this way their practical wisdom (''phronēsis'') and their intellect (''nous'') can develop with each other towards the highest possible human virtue, the wisdom of an accomplished theoretical or speculative thinker, or in other words, a philosopher.

Politics

In addition to his works on ethics, which address the individual, Aristotle addressed the city in his work titled ''Politics''. Aristotle considered the city to be a natural community. Moreover, he considered the city to be prior in importance to the family which in turn is prior to the individual, "for the whole must of necessity be prior to the part". He also famously stated that "man is by nature a political animal." Aristotle conceived of politics as being like an organism rather than like a machine, and as a collection of parts none of which can exist without the others. Aristotle's conception of the city is organic, and he is considered one of the first to conceive of the city in this manner.

The common modern understanding of a political community as a modern state is quite different to Aristotle's understanding. Although he was aware of the existence and potential of larger empires, the natural community according to Aristotle was the city (''polis'') which functions as a political "community" or "partnership" (''koinōnia''). The aim of the city is not just to avoid injustice or for economic stability, but rather to allow at least some citizens the possibility to live a good life, and to perform beautiful acts: "The political partnership must be regarded, therefore, as being for the sake of noble actions, not for the sake of living together." This is distinguished from modern approaches, beginning with social contract theory, according to which individuals leave the state of nature because of "fear of violent death" or its "inconveniences."

Rhetoric and poetics

Aristotle considered epic poetry, tragedy, comedy, dithyrambic poetry and music to be imitative, each varying in imitation by medium, object, and manner. For example, music imitates with the media of rhythm and harmony, whereas dance imitates with rhythm alone, and poetry with language. The forms also differ in their object of imitation. Comedy, for instance, is a dramatic imitation of men worse than average; whereas tragedy imitates men slightly better than average. Lastly, the forms differ in their manner of imitation – through narrative or character, through change or no change, and through drama or no drama. Aristotle believed that imitation is natural to mankind and constitutes one of mankind's advantages over animals.

While it is believed that Aristotle's ''Poetics'' comprised two books – one on comedy and one on tragedy – only the portion that focuses on tragedy has survived. Aristotle taught that tragedy is composed of six elements: plot-structure, character, style, spectacle, and lyric poetry. The characters in a tragedy are merely a means of driving the story; and the plot, not the characters, is the chief focus of tragedy. Tragedy is the imitation of action arousing pity and fear, and is meant to effect the catharsis of those same emotions. Aristotle concludes ''Poetics'' with a discussion on which, if either, is superior: epic or tragic mimesis. He suggests that because tragedy possesses all the attributes of an epic, possibly possesses additional attributes such as spectacle and music, is more unified, and achieves the aim of its mimesis in shorter scope, it can be considered superior to epic.

Aristotle was a keen systematic collector of riddles, folklore, and proverbs; he and his school had a special interest in the riddles of the Delphic Oracle and studied the fables of Aesop.

Loss and preservation of his works

Modern scholarship reveals that Aristotle's "lost" works stray considerably in characterization from the surviving Aristotelian corpus. Whereas the lost works appear to have been originally written with an intent for subsequent publication, the surviving works do not appear to have been so. Rather the surviving works mostly resemble lecture notes unintended for publication. The authenticity of a portion of the surviving works as originally Aristotelian is also today held suspect, with some books duplicating or summarizing each other, the authorship of one book questioned and another book considered to be unlikely Aristotle's at all.

Some of the individual works within the corpus, including the ''Constitution of Athens,'' are regarded by most scholars as products of Aristotle's "school," perhaps compiled under his direction or supervision. Others, such as ''On Colors,'' may have been produced by Aristotle's successors at the Lyceum, e.g., Theophrastus and Straton. Still others acquired Aristotle's name through similarities in doctrine or content, such as the ''De Plantis,'' possibly by Nicolaus of Damascus. Other works in the corpus include medieval palmistries and astrological and magical texts whose connections to Aristotle are purely fanciful and self-promotional.

According to a distinction that originates with Aristotle himself, his writings are divisible into two groups: the "exoteric" and the "esoteric". Most scholars have understood this as a distinction between works Aristotle intended for the public (exoteric), and the more technical works intended for use within the school (esoteric). Modern scholars commonly assume these latter to be Aristotle’s own (unpolished) lecture notes (or in some cases possible notes by his students). However, one classic scholar offers an alternative interpretation. The 5th century neoplatonist Ammonius Hermiae writes that Aristotle's writing style is deliberately obscurantist so that “so that good people may for that reason stretch their mind even more, whereas empty minds that are lost through carelessness will be put to flight by the obscurity when they encounter sentences like these.” Another common assumption is that none of the exoteric works is extant – that all of Aristotle's extant writings are of the esoteric kind. Current knowledge of what exactly the exoteric writings were like is scant and dubious, though many of them may have been in dialogue form. (''Fragments'' of some of Aristotle's dialogues have survived.) Perhaps it is to these that Cicero refers when he characterized Aristotle's writing style as "a river of gold"; it is hard for many modern readers to accept that one could seriously so admire the style of those works currently available to us.

The surviving texts of Aristotle are technical treatises from within Aristotle's school, as opposed to the dialogues and other "exoteric" texts he published more widely during his lifetime. In some cases, the Aristotelian texts were likely left in different versions and contexts (as in the overlapping parts of the ''Eudemian Ethics'' and ''Nicomachean Ethics''), or in smaller units that could be incorporated into larger books in different ways. Because of this, a posthumous compiler and publisher may sometimes have played a significant role in arranging the text into the form we know.

One major question in the history of Aristotle's works, then, is how were the exoteric writings all lost, and how did the ones we now possess come to us? The story of the original manuscripts of the esoteric treatises is described by Strabo in his ''Geography'' and Plutarch in his ''Parallel Lives''. The manuscripts were left from Aristotle to his successor Theophrastus, who in turn willed them to Neleus of Scepsis. Neleus supposedly took the writings from Athens to Scepsis, where his heirs let them languish in a cellar until the 1st century BC, when Apellicon of Teos discovered and purchased the manuscripts, bringing them back to Athens. According to the story, Apellicon tried to repair some of the damage that was done during the manuscripts' stay in the basement, introducing a number of errors into the text. When Lucius Cornelius Sulla occupied Athens in 86 BC, he carried off the library of Apellicon to Rome, where they were first published in 60 BC by the grammarian Tyrannion of Amisus and then by philosopher Andronicus of Rhodes.

Carnes Lord attributes the popular belief in this story to the fact that it provides "the most plausible explanation for the rapid eclipse of the Peripatetic school after the middle of the third century, and for the absence of widespread knowledge of the specialized treatises of Aristotle throughout the Hellenistic period, as well as for the sudden reappearance of a flourishing Aristotelianism during the first century B.C." Lord voices a number of reservations concerning this story, however. First, the condition of the texts is far too good for them to have suffered considerable damage followed by Apellicon's inexpert attempt at repair. Second, there is "incontrovertible evidence," Lord says, that the treatises were in circulation during the time in which Strabo and Plutarch suggest they were confined within the cellar in Scepsis. Third, the definitive edition of Aristotle's texts seems to have been made in Athens some fifty years before Andronicus supposedly compiled his. And fourth, ancient library catalogues predating Andronicus' intervention list an Aristotelian corpus quite similar to the one we currently possess. Lord sees a number of post-Aristotelian interpolations in the ''Politics'', for example, but is generally confident that the work has come down to us relatively intact.

As the influence of the ''falsafa'' grew in the West, in part due to Gerard of Cremona's translations and the spread of Averroism, the demand for Aristotle's works grew. William of Moerbeke translated a number of them into Latin. When Thomas Aquinas wrote his theology, working from Moerbeke's translations, the demand for Aristotle's writings grew and the Greek manuscripts returned to the West, stimulating a revival of Aristotelianism in Europe to the point where Renaissance philosophy could be equated with Aristotelianism.

Legacy

More than twenty-three hundred years after his death, Aristotle remains one of the most influential people who ever lived. According to the philosopher Bryan Magee, "it is doubtful whether any human being has ever known as much as he did". Aristotle was the founder of formal logic, pioneered the study of zoology, and left every future scientist and philosopher in his debt through his contributions to the scientific method. Despite these achievements, the influence of Aristotle's errors is considered by some to have held back science considerably. Bertrand Russell notes that "almost every serious intellectual advance has had to begin with an attack on some Aristotelian doctrine". Russell also refers to Aristotle's ethics as "repulsive", and calls his logic "as definitely antiquated as Ptolemaic astronomy". Russell notes that these errors make it difficult to do historical justice to Aristotle, until one remembers how large of an advance he made upon all of his predecessors.

Later Greek philosophers

The immediate influence of Aristotle's work was felt as the Lyceum grew into the Peripatetic school. Aristotle's notable students included Aristoxenus, Dicaearchus, Demetrius of Phalerum, Eudemos of Rhodes, Harpalus, Hephaestion, Meno, Mnason of Phocis, Nicomachus, and Theophrastus. Aristotle's influence over Alexander the Great is seen in the latter's bringing with him on his expedition a host of zoologists, botanists, and researchers. He had also learned a great deal about Persian customs and traditions from his teacher. Although his respect for Aristotle was diminished as his travels made it clear that much of Aristotle's geography was clearly wrong, when the old philosopher released his works to the public, Alexander complained "Thou hast not done well to publish thy acroamatic doctrines; for in what shall I surpass other men if those doctrines wherein I have been trained are to be all men's common property?"

Influence on Christian theologians

Aristotle is referred to as "The Philosopher" by Scholastic thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas. See ''Summa Theologica'', Part I, Question 3, etc. These thinkers blended Aristotelian philosophy with Christianity, bringing the thought of Ancient Greece into the Middle Ages. It required a repudiation of some Aristotelian principles for the sciences and the arts to free themselves for the discovery of modern scientific laws and empirical methods. The medieval English poet Chaucer describes his student as being happy by having :                     '' at his beddes heed'' :''Twenty bookes, clad in blak or reed,'' :''Of aristotle and his philosophie,'' The Italian poet Dante says of Aristotle in the first circles of hell, :''I saw the Master there of those who know,'' :''Amid the philosophic family,'' :''By all admired, and by all reverenced;'' :''There Plato too I saw, and Socrates,'' :''Who stood beside him closer than the rest.''

Influence on Islamic theologians

Aristotle was one of the most revered Western thinkers in early Islamic theology. Most of the still extant works of Aristotle, as well as a great number of the original Greek commentaries, were translated into Arabic and studied by Muslim polymaths, philosophers, scientists and scholars, whose knowledge of Aristotle thus stretched far beyond that of early Medieval Christian commentators. Oriental interpreters of Aristotle's work followed the Greek interpreters without chronological gap, and the Medieval western tradition was influenced equally by Christian thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas and Muslim theologians such as Averroes, Avicenna and Alpharabius, all of whom wrote on Aristotle in great depth, and frequently compared the teachings of Aristotle with those of the prophets of Islam. Alkindus considered Aristotle as the outstanding and unique representative of philosophy and Averroes spoke of Aristotle as the "exemplar" for all future philosophers. Later Muslim philosophers, like their Christian counterparts, spoke of Aristotle as "the philosopher" and some described him as the "first teacher".

In accordance with the Greek theorists, the Muslims considered Aristotle to be a dogmatic philosopher, the author of a closed system, and believed that Aristotle shared with Plato essential tenets of thought. Some went so far as to credit Aristotle himself with neo-Platonic metaphysical ideas.

Views on women

Aristotle's analysis of procreation is frequently criticized on the grounds that it presupposes an active, ensouling masculine element bringing life to an inert, passive female element; it is on these grounds that Aristotle is considered by some feminist critics to have been a misogynist. On the other hand, Aristotle gave equal weight to women's happiness as he did to men's, and commented in his Rhetoric that a society cannot be happy unless women are happy too: In places like Sparta where the lot of women is bad, there can only be half-happiness in society.

Post-Enlightenment thinkers

The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche has been said to have taken nearly all of his political philosophy from Aristotle. However implausible this is, it is certainly the case that Aristotle's rigid separation of action from production, and his justification of the subservience of slaves and others to the virtue – or ''arete'' – of a few justified the ideal of aristocracy. It is Martin Heidegger, not Nietzsche, who elaborated a new interpretation of Aristotle, intended to warrant his deconstruction of scholastic and philosophical tradition. More recently, Alasdair MacIntyre has attempted to reform what he calls the Aristotelian tradition in a way that is anti-elitist and capable of disputing the claims of both liberals and Nietzscheans.

List of works

The works of Aristotle that have survived from antiquity through medieval manuscript transmission are collected in the Corpus Aristotelicum. These texts, as opposed to Aristotle's lost works, are technical philosophical treatises from within Aristotle's school. Reference to them is made according to the organization of Immanuel Bekker's Royal Prussian Academy edition (''Aristotelis Opera edidit Academia Regia Borussica'', Berlin, 1831–1870), which in turn is based on ancient classifications of these works.

See also

Aristotelianism

Aristotelian ethics

Aristotelian physics

Aristotelian view of God

List of writers influenced by Aristotle

Corpus Aristotelicum

Conimbricenses

Hylomorphism

Philia

Phronesis

Notes and references

Further reading

The secondary literature on Aristotle is vast. The following references are only a small selection.

Ackrill J. L. (2010). Essays on Plato and Aristotle, Oxford University Press, USA.

A popular exposition for the general reader.

Bakalis Nikolaos. (2005). Handbook of Greek Philosophy: From Thales to the Stoics Analysis and Fragments, Trafford Publishing ISBN 1-4120-4843-5

Barnes J. (1995). The Cambridge Companion to Aristotle, Cambridge University Press.

Bolotin, David (1998). ''An Approach to Aristotle's Physics: With Particular Attention to the Role of His Manner of Writing.'' Albany: SUNY Press. A contribution to our understanding of how to read Aristotle's scientific works.

Burnyeat, M. F. ''et al.'' (1979). Notes on Book Zeta of Aristotle's Metaphysics. Oxford: Sub-faculty of Philosophy.

Chappell, V. (1973). Aristotle's Conception of Matter, Journal of Philosophy 70: 679–696.

Code, Alan. (1995). Potentiality in Aristotle's Science and Metaphysics, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 76.

Frede, Michael. (1987). Essays in Ancient Philosophy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Gill, Mary Louise. (1989). Aristotle on Substance: The Paradox of Unity. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Halper, Edward C. (2007). ''One and Many in Aristotle's Metaphysics, Volume 1: Books Alpha — Delta'', Parmenides Publishing, ISBN 978-1-930972-21-6.

Halper, Edward C. (2005). ''One and Many in Aristotle's Metaphysics, Volume 2: The Central Books'', Parmenides Publishing, ISBN 978-1-930972-05-6.

Irwin, T. H. (1988). Aristotle's First Principles. Oxford: Clarendon Press, ISBN 0198242905.

Jori, Alberto. (2003). ''Aristotele'', Milano: Bruno Mondadori Editore (Prize 2003 of the "International Academy of the History of Science") ISBN 88-424-9737-1.

Knight, Kelvin. (2007). ''Aristotelian Philosophy: Ethics and Politics from Aristotle to MacIntyre'', Polity Press.

Lewis, Frank A. (1991). ''Substance and Predication in Aristotle''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lloyd, G. E. R. (1968). ''Aristotle: The Growth and Structure of his Thought''. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Pr., ISBN 0-521-09456-9.

Lord, Carnes. (1984). Introduction to ''The Politics'', by Aristotle. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Loux, Michael J. (1991). Primary Ousia: An Essay on Aristotle's Metaphysics Ζ and Η. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

[Reprinted in J. Barnes, M. Schofield, and R. R. K. Sorabji, eds.(1975). ''Articles on Aristotle'' Vol 1. Science. London: Duckworth 14–34.]

Pangle, Lorraine Smith (2003). ''Aristotle and the Philosophy of Friendship''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Aristotle's conception of the deepest human relationship viewed in the light of the history of philosophic thought on friendship.

Reeve, C. D. C. (2000). Substantial Knowledge: Aristotle's Metaphysics. Indianapolis: Hackett.

A classic overview by one of Aristotle's most prominent English translators, in print since 1923.

Scaltsas, T. (1994). Substances and Universals in Aristotle's Metaphysics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Strauss, Leo (1964). "On Aristotle's ''Politics''", in ''The City and Man'', Chicago; Rand McNally.

For the general reader.

External links

(general article)

Scholarly surveys of focused topics from the ''Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy'': articles on Aristotle, Aristotle in the Renaissance, Biology, Causality, Commentators on Aristotle, Ethics, Logic, Mathematics, Metaphysics, Natural philosophy, Non-contradiction, Political theory, Psychology, Rhetoric

The Catholic Encyclopedia (general article)

Collections of works

Massachusetts Institute of Technology – primarily in English

Project Gutenberg – English texts

Tufts University – at the Perseus Project, in both English and Greek

University of Adelaide – primarily in English

P. Remacle's collection – Greek with French translation

The 11-volume 1837 Bekker edition of ''Aristotle's Works'' in Greek (PDF|DJVU)

Bekker's Prussian Academy of Sciences edition of the complete works of Aristotle at Archive.org: volume 1, volume 2, volume 3, volume 4, volume 5

Other

Timeline of Aristotle's life

Category:384 BC births Category:322 BC deaths Category:Academic philosophers Category:Acting theorists Category:Ancient Greek mathematicians Category:Ancient Greek philosophers Category:Ancient Greek physicists Category:Ancient Greeks in Macedon Category:Ancient Stagirites Category:Attic Greek writers Category:Beekeepers Category:Cosmologists Category:Defenders of slavery Category:Empiricists Category:Greek biologists Category:Greek logicians Category:History of logic Category:History of philosophy Category:History of science Category:Humor researchers Category:Meteorologists Category:Philosophers of ancient Chalcidice Category:Metic philosophers in Classical Athens Category:Peripatetic philosophers Category:Philosophers of language Category:Philosophers of law Category:Philosophers of mind Category:Political philosophers Category:Rhetoric theorists Category:Philosophers and tutors of Alexander the Great Category:4th-century BC philosophers Category:Metaphysicians Category:Trope theorists Category:Virtue ethicists Category:Natural philosophers

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name	Mark Steel
birth date	July 04, 1960
birth place	Swanley, Kent, United Kingdom
medium	Stand-up, Television, Books, Radio
nationality	British
active	1983-present
genre	Political satire
subject	Politics
influences	Paul Merton
influenced	Seann Walsh, Alan Davies
notable work	''The Mark Steel Lectures''''The Mark Steel Revolution'' ''The Mark Steel Solution'' ''Mark Steel's in Town''
website	http://www.marksteelinfo.com/
footnotes	}}

Mark Steel (born 4 July 1960) is a British socialist columnist, author and comedian. He was a member of the Socialist Workers Party from his late teens until 2007.

Early life

Steel grew up in Swanley, Kent. He was expelled from Swanley Comprehensive School for attending a cricket course at the age of 15, and went on to work in a garage. From there he went on to make his first public performance as a poet.

In the late 1970s his father suffered a mental breakdown and was placed into care at Stonehouse Hospital. The shabby conditions of the home reinforced Steel's political beliefs.

Career

Steel has given varying accounts of his early life: he became bored with constantly being asked how he had started in comedy and took to telling the questioner the first thing that came into his head. He is often described as having worked as a television repair man but confesses that he has no technical ability whatsoever. He worked the comedy circuit for several years, and then in 1992 presented a satirical radio show ''The Mark Steel Solution'' on BBC Radio 5, consisting of half-hour monologues which offered solutions to social problems. It ran to four series. ''It's Not a Runner Bean'', a comic autobiography, was published in 1996, and this led to a column in ''The Guardian''.

Steel wrote a column for ''The Guardian'' between 1996 and 1999. He was sacked by that newspaper, according to him because ''The Guardian'' wanted to "realign towards Tony Blair" - though ''The Guardian'' denies this. In 2000 he started writing a weekly column for ''The Independent'', which appears in the Wednesday Opinion Column.

He has written and performed several radio and television series for the BBC, and authored several books, as detailed below.

In 2005 he toured the UK, where he discussed the French revolution from a comic view point.

Personal life

Steel lives in Clapham, London. He is a supporter of Crystal Palace F.C. and Kent County Cricket Club and enjoys watching both play on occasion. He was interviewed by Jonathan Agnew on Test Match Special during the South Africa series, giving an interview on his love of cricket.

He has a son (Elliot) and a daughter (Eloise) from a relationship, but he and his partner separated in 2006.

Politics

During the Thatcher years, when he was in his 20s, Steel developed his left-wing political views. His anger and depression at society's injustices were vented by political protests, punk rock and poetry.

Seeing the Soviet Union as "shit", and state capitalist rather than truly socialist, Steel joined the Socialist Workers Party rather than the Communist Party. He attended marches, strikes and demonstrations, and was present at the death of Blair Peach. In the early '80s he also persuaded his mother to allow striking steelworkers to spend a night in the Steel residence. His political activism continued throughout the decade, from the miners' strike through to the Poll Tax Riots. During this time he moved into a squat with his old friend Mick Hannan, before taking up residence in a flat.

In 2000 Steel took part in the London Assembly elections on behalf of the London Socialist Alliance (part of the Socialist Alliance) in the Croydon and Sutton constituency; he received 1,823 votes (1.5 per cent of the vote).

In 2007 he left the SWP and justified his decision in his book ''Whats Going On?'' In the book he wrote that he left the party because whilst the membership base had become smaller and smaller, the members that remained became increasingly delusional over the size and relevance of the organisation. He also condemned how at a time when there was broad public support for socialist ideals, increasingly bitter and futile in-fighting on the left made political success untenable. Alex Callinicos, International Secretary of the SWP, reviewed the book in the ''Socialist Review'', arguing that it "evinces a kind of grandiose ignorance" and that "the only principle one can detect here is that the SWP is always in the wrong". Literary critic Nicholas Lezard praised the book in ''The Guardian'', particularly for its discussion of the break-up of Steel's relationship, which "gives it a poignancy and depth which at its outset one might not have expected".

Steel is a Palestinian human rights activist, having been a member of the British-based ENOUGH! coalition that seeks to end the "Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip and West Bank."

Radio and television

Radio

''The Mark Steel Solution'' (1992, 1994–1996) BBC Radio 5, BBC Radio 4, repeated BBC 7

''The Mark Steel Revolution'' (1998) BBC Radio 4, (2007) repeated BBC 7 Australia - Radio National 17.30 2009-01-13 to 2009-01-16 and 2009-01-19 to 2009-01-23

''The Mark Steel Lectures'' (1999–2002) BBC Radio 4, (2007) repeated BBC 7

''Dedicated Troublemaker'' (2004) BBC Radio 4

''Mark Steel's in Town'' (2009–2010) BBC Radio 4

He has also contributed to or appeared on the following shows:

''The Good Human Guide'' BBC Radio 2(1985). Contributing writer.

''Extra Time'' BBC Radio 5. Presenter. Sports programme.

''Late Edition'' BBC Radio 4 (1995). Regular panellist on this satirical talk show.

''The News Quiz'' BBC Radio 4 several occasions from the late 1990s onwards. Guest panellist on this satirical news based panel game.

''Loose Ends'' BBC Radio 4. Interviewee.

''Midweek'' BBC Radio 4. Interviewee.

''Excess Baggage'' BBC Radio 4. Interviewee.

''Test Match Special'' BBC Radio 4. Lunchtime interviewee, 1 August 2008 - England vs South Africa, 3rd test, Edgbaston.

''I've Never Seen Star Wars'' BBC Radio 4 (2008). Interviewee

''Heresy'' BBC Radio 4 (2009).

Television

''The Mark Steel Lectures'' BBC Four (2003, 2004, 2006). Writer and Presenter. Television version of his radio programme of the same title. Produced in association with The Open University.

He also appeared in the following shows:

''Red Dwarf'' BBC Two (1989). Playing 'Ski-man' in episode "Timeslides" (non-speaking part).

''Loose Talk'' (1994). Guest.

''The Late Jonathan Ross'' (1996). Guest.

''Does China Exist''. (1997).

''If I Ruled the World'' BBC Two (1998). Guest panellist.

''Lamarr's Attacks'' BBC Two (2000). Guest.

''Never Mind the Buzzcocks'' BBC Two (2000, 2001). Guest panellist on the satirical music based panel game.

''Have I Got News for You'' BBC One (2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009). Guest panellist on this satirical news based panel game.

''Question Time'' BBC One (2003, 2005). Guest panellist on discussion show.

''QI'' BBC Two, BBC Four (2004, 2005, 2006). Guest panellist.

''Mock the Week'', BBC Two (2005, 2006). Guest panellist.

''Room 101'' BBC Two, (2006). Guest

Bibliography

Printed

*''Vive La Revolution'' (2003) ISBN 0-7432-0805-6, (2004) ISBN 0-7432-0806-4 History of the French Revolution.

*''Reasons To Be Cheerful'' (2001) ISBN 0-7432-0803-X, (2002) ISBN 0-7432-0804-8 Autobiography concentrating on political activism.

*''It's Not A Runner Bean'' (1996) ISBN 1-899344-12-8, (2004) ISBN 1-904316-43-3 Autobiography concentrating on his comedy career.

*''What's Going On? The Meanderings of a Comic Mind in Confusion'' (2008) ISBN 1-847372-81-9 Autobiography charting changes to his own personal life and the politics of the left.

Audiobooks

*''Reasons to Be Cheerful: From Punk to New Labour Through the Eyes of a Dedicated Troublemaker'' (2001) cassette ISBN 0-7435-0062-8

See also

List of newspaper columnists

References

External links

Mark Steel's official website

Off the Kerb Comedy Agency

Mark Steel's article archive at ''The Independent''

Open University site dedicated to the television version of ''The Mark Steel Lectures''.

Chortle profile.

Information about ''It’s Not A Runner Bean'' (including extract).

Interview with Jared Wilson for LeftLion.

Interview with ''The Third Estate''.

Interview with ''Socialist Review''.

BBC Comedy Guide - Mark Steel Lectures Includes a clip of one of the shows

Reviews of his book ''Reasons to be Cheerful''.

Audio Files

*The Russian Revolution: Was It A Coup? - Lecture at Marxism 1999 (MP3)

*Karl Marx - Part 2 - Lecture at Marxism 2002 (MP3)

*The French Revolution - Part 2 - Lecture at Marxism 2002 (MP3)

*Viva La Revolution A Stand Up History Of The French Revolution - Part 2 - Lecture at Marxism 2003 (MP3)

*Albert Einstein - Part 2 - Lecture at Marxism 2005 (MP3)

*Large selection of audio (mp3) and video (mp4) files available at www.marksteelinfo.com/audiovideo/

Category:1960 births Category:Living people Category:British republicans Category:English atheists Category:English columnists Category:English comedians Category:British Trotskyists Category:People from Swanley Category:Socialist Workers Party (UK) members Category:English socialists

Region	Western Philosophy
Era	20th-century philosophy
Color	lightsteelblue
Name	Martha Nussbaum
Birth date	May 06, 1947
Birth place	New York City
School tradition	Analytic
Main interests	Political philosophy, Ethics
Notable ideas	Capability approachFeminism
Influences	AristotleStanley CavellCatharine MacKinnonJohn Stuart MillAdam SmithG. E. L. OwenJohn RawlsAmartya SenBernard Williams
Signature	}}

Martha Nussbaum (born Martha Craven on May 6, 1947), is an American philosopher with a particular interest in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, political philosophy and ethics.

Nussbaum, though not a lawyer, is currently Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, a chair that includes appointments in the Philosophy Department, the Law School, and the Divinity School. She also holds Associate appointments in Classics and Political Science, is a member of the Committee on Southern Asian Studies, and a Board Member of the Human Rights Program. She previously taught at Harvard and Brown.

Biography

Nussbaum was born in New York City, the daughter of George Craven, a Philadelphia lawyer, and Betty Warren, an interior designer and homemaker; during her teenage years, Nussbaum attended the Baldwin School in Bryn Mawr. She described her upbringing as "East Coast WASP elite...very sterile, very preoccupied with money and status." She would later credit her impatience with "mandarin philosophers" as the "repudiation of my own aristocratic upbringing. I don't like anything that sets itself up as an in-group or an elite, whether it is the Bloomsbury group or Derrida."

She studied theatre and classics at New York University, getting a B.A. in 1969, and gradually moved to philosophy while at Harvard University, where she received an M.A. in 1972 and a Ph.D. in 1975, studying under G. E. L. Owen. This period also saw her marriage to Alan Nussbaum (divorced in 1987), conversion to Judaism, and the birth of her daughter Rachel, who is currently a history professor at Evergreen State College. Her interest in Judaism has continued and deepened: on August 16, 2008 she became a ''bat mitzvah'' in a service at Temple K. A. M. Isaiah Israel in Chicago's Hyde Park, chanting from the ''Parasha Va-etchanan'' and the ''Haftarah Nahamu'', and delivering a ''D'var Torah'' about the connection between genuine, non-narcissistic consolation and the pursuit of global justice.

Nussbaum claims that during her studies at Harvard, she encountered a tremendous amount of discrimination, including sexual harassment, and problems getting childcare for her daughter . When she became the first woman to hold the Junior Fellowship at Harvard, Nussbaum received a congratulatory note from a "prestigious classicist" who suggested that since "female fellowess" was an awkward name, she should be called ''hetaira'', for in Greece these educated courtesans were the only women who participated in philosophical symposia.

She taught philosophy and classics at Harvard in the 1970s and early 1980s, where she was denied tenure by the Classics Department in 1982. Nussbaum then moved to Brown University, where she taught until the mid-1990s. Her 1986 book ''The Fragility of Goodness'', on ancient Greek ethics, made her a well-known figure throughout the humanities. More recent work (''Frontiers of Justice'') establishes Nussbaum as a theorist of global justice.

Nussbaum's work on capabilities has often focused on the unequal freedoms and opportunities of women, and she has developed a distinctive type of feminism, drawing inspiration from the liberal tradition, but emphasizing that liberalism, at its best, entails radical rethinking of gender relations and relations within the family.

Nussbaum's other major area of philosophical work is the emotions. She has defended a ''neo-Stoic'' account of emotions that holds that they are appraisals that ascribe to things and persons, outside the agent's own control, great significance for the person's own flourishing. On this basis she has proposed analyses of grief, compassion, and love, and, in a later book, of disgust and shame.

Nussbaum has engaged in many spirited debates with other intellectuals, in her academic writings as well as in the pages of semi-popular magazines and book reviews and, in one instance, when testifying as an expert witness in court. She testified in the Colorado bench trial for ''Romer v. Evans'', arguing against the claim that the history of philosophy provides the state with a "compelling interest" in favor of a law denying gays and lesbians the right to seek passage of local non-discrimination laws. A portion of this testimony, dealing with the potential meanings of the term ''tolmêma'' in Plato's work, was the subject of controversy, and was called misleading and even perjurious by critics. She responded to these charges in a lengthy article, "Platonic Love and Colorado Law." The debate continued with a reply by one of her sternest critics, Robert P. George. Nussbaum has criticized Noam Chomsky as being among the "leftist intellectuals" who hold the belief that "one should not criticize one’s friends, that solidarity is more important than ethical correctness." She suggests that one can "trace this line to an old Marxist contempt for bourgeois ethics, but it is loathsome whatever its provenance." Among the people whose books she has reviewed critically are Allan Bloom, Harvey Mansfield, and Judith Butler. Her more serious and academic debates have been with figures such as John Rawls, Richard Posner, and Susan Moller Okin.

Nussbaum is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (elected 1988) and the American Philosophical Society. In 2008 she was elected a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. She is a Founding President and Past President of the Human Development and Capability Association and a Past President of the American Philosophical Association, Central Division.

Major works

''The Fragility of Goodness''

''The Fragility of Goodness'' confronts the ethical dilemma that individuals strongly committed to justice are nevertheless vulnerable to external factors that may deeply compromise or even negate their human flourishing. Discussing literary as well as philosophical texts, Nussbaum seeks to determine the extent to which reason may enable self-sufficiency. She eventually rejects the Platonic notion that human goodness can fully protect against peril, siding with the tragic playwrights and Aristotle in treating the acknowledgment of vulnerability as a key to realizing the human good.

Her interpretation of Plato's ''Symposium'' in particular drew considerable attention. Under Nussbaum's consciousness of vulnerability, the re-entrance of Alcibiades at the end of the dialogue undermines Diotima's account of the ladder of love in its ascent to the non-physical realm of the forms. Alcibiades's presence deflects attention back to physical beauty, sexual passions, and bodily limitations, hence highlighting human fragility.

''Fragility'' made Nussbaum famous throughout the humanities. It garnered wide praise in academic reviews, and even drew acclaim in the popular media. Camille Paglia credited ''Fragility'' with matching "the highest academic standards" of the twentieth century, and The Times Higher Education called it "a supremely scholarly work." Nussbaum's fame extended her influence beyond print and into television programs like PBS's Bill Moyers.

''Cultivating Humanity''

''Cultivating Humanity'' appeals to classical Greek texts as a basis for defense and reform of the liberal education. Noting the Greek cynic philosopher Diogenes' aspiration to transcend "local origins and group memberships" in favor of becoming "a citizen of the world," Nussbaum traces the development of this idea through the Stoics, Cicero, and eventually modern liberalism of Adam Smith and Immanuel Kant. Nussbaum champions multiculturalism in the context of ethical universalism (utilitarianism), defends scholarly inquiry into race, gender, and human sexuality, and further develops the role of literature as narrative imagination into ethical questions.

At the same time, Nussbaum also censured certain scholarly trends. She excoriated deconstructionist Jacques Derrida as "simply not worth studying" and labels his analysis of Chinese culture "pernicious" and without "evidence of serious study." More broadly, Nussbaum criticized Michel Foucault for his "historical incompleteness and lack of conceptual clarity," but nevertheless singled him out for providing "the only truly important work to have entered philosophy under the banner of "postmodernism."" Nussbaum is even more critical of figures like Allan Bloom, Roger Kimball, and George Will for what she considers their "shaky" knowledge of non-Western cultures and inaccurate caricatures of today's humanities departments.

''The New York Times'' praised ''Cultivating Humanity'' as "a passionate, closely argued defense of multiculturalism" and hailed it as "a formidable, perhaps definitive defense of diversity on American campuses" Nussbaum was the 2002 recipient of the University of Louisville Grawmeyer Award in Education.

In 2010, Nussbaum published "Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities," which extends the analysis of "Cultivating Humanity" to schools and universities in many different countries, arguing that liberal arts education, currently under threat all over the world, supplies skills without which democracies are unlikely to remain stable.

''Sex & Social Justice''

''Sex and Social Justice'' sets out to demonstrate that sex and sexuality are morally irrelevant distinctions that have been artificially enforced as sources of social hierarchy; thus feminism and social justice are fused by common concerns. Rebutting anti-universalist objections, Nussbaum proposes functional freedoms, or central human capabilities, as a rubric of social justice.

Nussbaum discusses at length the feminist critiques of liberalism itself, including the charge advanced by Alison Jaggar that liberalism demands "ethical egoism." Nussbaum notes that liberalism emphasizes respect for ''others'' as individuals, and further argues that Jaggar has elided the distinction between individualism and self-sufficiency. Nussbaum accepts Catharine MacKinnon's critique of abstract liberalism, assimilating the salience of history and context of group hierarchy and subordination, but concludes that this appeal is rooted in liberalism rather than a critique of it.

Addressing the practice of female genital mutilation, Nussbaum condemns the practice, citing deprivation of normative human functioning in its risks to health, impact on sexual functioning, violations of dignity, and conditions of non-autonomy. Emphasizing that female genital mutilation is carried out by brute force, its irreversibility, its non-consensual nature, and its links to customs of male domination, Nussbaum urges feminists to confront female genital mutilation as an issue of injustice.

Nussbaum also refines the concept of "objectification" as originally advanced by Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin. Nussbaum defines the idea of treating as an object with seven qualities: instrumentality, denial of autonomy, inertness, fungibility, violability, ownership, and denial of subjectivity. Her characterization of pornography as a tool of objectification puts Nussbaum at odds with sex-positive feminism. At the same time, Nussbaum argues in support of the legalization of prostitution, a position she reiterated in a 2008 essay following the Spitzer scandal, writing "the idea that we ought to penalize women with few choices by removing one of the ones they do have is grotesque".

''Sex and Social Justice'' was lauded by critics in the press. Salon declared, "She shows brilliantly how sex is used to deny some people – i.e., women and gay men – social justice." The New York Times praised the work as "elegantly written and closely argued." Kathryn Trevenen praised Nussbaum's effort to shift feminist concerns toward interconnected transnational efforts, and for explicating a set of universal guidelines to structure an agenda of social justice. Patrick Hopkins singled out for praise Nussbaum's "masterful" chapter on sexual objectification. Radical feminist Andrea Dworkin faulted Nussbaum for "consistent over-intellectualisation of emotion, which has the inevitable consequence of mistaking suffering for cruelty."

''Hiding from Humanity''

''Hiding from Humanity'' extends Nussbaum's work in moral psychology to probe the arguments for including two emotions — shame and disgust — as legitimate bases for legal judgments. Nussbaum argues that individuals tend to repudiate their bodily imperfection or animality through the projection of fears about contamination. This cognitive response is in itself irrational, because we cannot transcend the animality of our bodies. Noting how projective disgust has wrongly justified group subordination (mainly of women, Jews, and homosexuals), Nussbaum ultimately discards disgust as a reliable basis of judgment.

Turning to shame, Nussbaum argues that shame takes too broad a target, attempting to inculcate humiliation on a scope that is too intrusive and limiting on human freedom. Nussbaum sides with John Stuart Mill in narrowing legal concern to acts that cause a distinct and assignable harm.

In an interview with ''Reason'' magazine, Nussbaum elaborated, "Disgust and shame are inherently hierarchical; they set up ranks and orders of human beings. They are also inherently connected with restrictions on liberty in areas of non-harmful conduct. For both of these reasons, I believe, anyone who cherishes the key democratic values of equality and liberty should be deeply suspicious of the appeal to those emotions in the context of law and public policy."

Nussbaum's work was received with wide praise. The ''Boston Globe'' called her argument "characteristically lucid" and hailed her as "America's most prominent philosopher of public life." Her reviews in national newspapers and magazines garnered unanimous praise. In academic circles, Stefanie A. Lindquist of Vanderbilt University lauded Nussbaum's analysis as a "remarkably wide ranging and nuanced treatise on the interplay between emotions and law."

A prominent exception was Roger Kimball's review published in the ''New Criterion'', in which he accused Nussbaum of "fabricating" the renewed prevalence of shame and disgust in public discussions and says she intends to "undermine the inherited moral wisdom of millennia." He rebukes her for "contempt for the opinions of ordinary people" and ultimately accuses Nussbaum herself of "hiding from humanity."

Nussbaum has recently drawn on and extended her work on disgust to produce a new analysis of the legal issues regarding sexual orientation and same-sex conduct. Her book ''From Disgust to Humanity: Sexual Orientation and the Constitution'' was published by Oxford University Press in 2009, as part of their "Inalienable Rights" series, edited by Geoffrey Stone.

''From Disgust to Humanity: Sexual Orientation & Constitutional Law''

In the 2010 book ''From Disgust to Humanity: Sexual Orientation & Constitutional Law'' Martha Nussbaum analyzes the role that disgust plays in law and public debate in the United States. The book primarily analyzes constitutional legal issues facing gay and lesbian Americans but also analyzes issues such as anti-miscegenation statutes, segregation, antisemitism and the caste system in India as part of its broader thesis regarding the "politics of disgust".

Nussbaum posits that the fundamental motivations of those advocating legal restrictions against gay and lesbian Americans is a "politics of disgust". These legal restrictions include blocking sexual orientation being protected under anti-discrimination laws (See: Romer v. Evans), sodomy laws against consenting adults (See: Lawrence v. Texas) and constitutional bans against same-sex marriage (See: California Proposition 8 (2008)).

She identifies the "politics of disgust" closely with Lord Devlin and his famous opposition to the Wolfenden report that recommended decriminalizing private consensual homosexual acts on the basis that those things would "disgust the average man". To Devlin, the mere fact some people or act may produce popular emotional reactions of disgust provides an appropriate guide for legislating. She also identifies the 'wisdom of repugnance' as advocated by Leon Kass as another "politics of disgust" school of thought as it claims that disgust "in crucial cases...repugnance is the emotional expression of deep wisdom, beyond reason's power fully to articulate it."

Martha Nussbaum goes on to explicitly oppose the concept of a disgust-based morality as an appropriate guide for legislating. Nussbaum notes that popular disgust has been used throughout history as a justification for persecution. Drawing upon her earlier work on the relationship between disgust & shame, Nussbaum notes that at various times racism, antisemitism, sexism, have all been driven by popular revulsion.

In place of this "politics of disgust", Nussbaum argues for the Harm principle from John Stuart Mill as the proper basis for limiting individual liberties. Nussbaum argues the harm principle, which supports the legal ideas of consent, the age of majority and privacy, protects citizens while the "politics of disgust" is merely an unreliable emotional reaction with no inherent wisdom. Furthermore Nussbaum argues this "politics of disgust" has denied and continues to deny citizens humanity and equality before the law on no rational grounds and causes palpable social harms to the groups affected.

''From Disgust to Humanity'' earned acclaim in major U.S. publications, and prompted interviews in the ''New York Times'' and other magazines. One conservative magazine, The American Spectator, offered a dissenting view, writing, "[H]er account of the "politics of disgust" lacks coherence, and "the politics of humanity" betrays itself by not treating more sympathetically those opposed to the gay rights movement. The article also argues that book is marred by factual errors and inconsistencies.

The Capability approach

During the 1980s Nussbaum began a collaboration with economist Amartya Sen on issues of development and ethics which culminated in ''The Quality of Life'', published in 1993 by Oxford University Press. Together with Sen and a group of younger scholars, Nussbaum founded the Human Development and Capability Association in 2003. With Sen, she promoted the "capabilities approach" to development, which views capabilities ("substantial freedoms", such as the ability to live to old age, engage in economic transactions, or participate in political activities) as the constitutive parts of development, and poverty as capability-deprivation. This contrasts with traditional utilitarian views that see development purely in terms of economic growth, and poverty purely as income-deprivation. It is also universalist, and therefore contrasts with relativist approaches to development. Much of the work is presented from an Aristotelian perspective.

Nussbaum furthered the capabilities approach in ''Frontiers of Justice'' (2006), to expand upon social contractarian explanations of justice, as developed most extensively by John Rawls' in his ''Theory of Justice'', ''Political Liberalism'', ''The Law of Peoples'', and related works. Nussbaum argues that standard social contractarianism, while far better than utilitarianism in providing a satisfactory framework for justice, relies on the belief and assumption that cooperation is pursued for the purpose of securing mutual advantage. Views deriving from the classical tradition of the social contract, she argues, have great difficulty dealing with issues of basic justice and substantial freedom in situations where there are great asymmetries of power between the parties. As such, Nussbaum argues that the procedural justice-based approach of contractarianism therefore fails to address areas in which symmetrical advantage does not exist, namely, in the context of justice for the disabled, transnational justice, and justice for non-human animals ("the three frontiers").

Noting that Rawls himself acknowledged the failure of his theory of justice to comprehensively address these three frontiers, Nussbaum claims that Rawls's attempt to expand his theory to address one of these areas — transnational justice — is "ultimately unsatisfying" because he fails to follow through with the essential elements developed in ''A Theory of Justice'', namely, by relaxing some of the key assumptions about the parties to the original contract. Nussbaum argues that the contractarian approach cannot explain justice in the absence of free, equal and independent parties in an original position in which "all have something with which to bargain and none have too much" (with reference to Rousseau and Hume), concluding that the procedural perspective alone cannot provide an adequate theory of justice.

To address this perceived problem, Nussbaum introduces the capabilities approach, an outcome-oriented view that seeks to determine what basic principles, and adequate measure thereof, would fulfill a life of human dignity. She frames these basic principles in terms of ten capabilities, i.e. real opportunities based on personal and social circumstance. Nussbaum posits that justice demands the pursuit, for all citizens, of a minimum threshold of these ten capabilities. She further developed the idea of the threshold, with reference to constitutional law, in her Foreword to the 2007 Supreme Court issue of the ''Harvard Law Review'', "Constitutions and Capabilities: 'Perception' Against Lofty Formalism," which would ultimately appear in revised form as the book ''Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach'' (2011). ''Creating Capabilities'' presents the approach in a brief and accessible form for a general audience. Her book, ''Liberty of Conscience: In Defense of America's Tradition of Religious Equality'' (Basic Books 2008) explores the constitutional requirements of justice in the area of religious liberty. Nussbaum's major current work-in-progress, projected in the final chapter of ''Frontiers of Justice'', is a book on the moral psychology of the capabilities approach, which will bring together her work on the emotions with the analysis of social justice. This book is under contract to Harvard University Press. The book entitled ''The Cosmopolitan Tradition'' is also under contract to Harvard University Press.

Bibliography

''Aristotle's De Motu Animalium'' (1978)

''The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy'' (1986), ISBN 0521257689; Second edition (2001), ISBN 052179126X.

''Love's Knowledge'' (1990)

Nussbaum, Martha, and Amelie Oksenberg Rorty. ''Essays on Aristotle's'' De Anima (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992)

Nussbaum, Martha, and Amartya Sen. ''The Quality of Life''. (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1993)

''The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics'' (1994); Second edition with a new introduction by the author (2009), ISBN 9780691141312.

''Poetic Justice'' (1996)

''For Love of Country'' (1996)

''Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education'' (1997)

''Sex and Social Justice'' (1998)

''Plato's ''Republic'': The Good Society and The Deformation of Desire'' (1998)

''Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach'' (2000)

''Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions'' (2001)

''Hiding From Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law'' (2004) (Trad. esp.: ''El ocultamiento de lo humano. Repugnancia, vergüenza y ley'', Buenos Aires/Madrid, Katz editores S.A, 2006, ISBN 9788460983545).

''Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions'' (edited with Cass Sunstein) (2004)

''Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership'' (2006)

''The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India's Future'', (2007) ISBN 0-674-02482-6.

*Reviewed in Pankaj Mishra, "Impasse in India" ''The New York Review of Books'' 54/11 (28 June 2007) : 48-51

''Liberty of Conscience: In Defense of America's Tradition of Religious Equality'' (2008)

"From Disgust to Humanity: Sexual Orientation and Constitutional Law" (2010).

''Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities'', Princeton University Press, 2010. ISBN 9780691140643 (Trad. esp.: ''Sin fines de lucro. Por qué la democracia necesita de las humanidades'', Buenos Aires/Madrid, Katz editores S.A, 2010, ISBN 9788492946174).

Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach," Harvard University Press, 2011.

Awards and honors

Honorary degrees

She has 40 honorary degrees from colleges and universities in North America, Europe, and Asia, including from:

Mount Holyoke College,

Emory University,

Grinnell College,

Williams College,

The College of William and Mary,

The University of St Andrews (Scotland),

The University of Edinburgh (Scotland),

The Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium),

The University of Toronto (Canada),

The Ecole Normale Supérieure (Paris, France),

The New School University (New York City),

The University of Haifa (Israel),

Ohio State University,

Emory University,

Bielefeld University (Germany),

and Georgetown University (Washington, D.C.).

The Institute of Social Studies (ISS) awarded its honorary doctorate to her in 2006.

Awards

1990: Brandeis Creative Arts Award in Non-Fiction

1991: PEN Spielvogel-Diamondstein Award for the best collection of essays

1998: Ness Book Award of the Association of American Colleges and Universities (''Cultivating Humanity'')

2000: Book award of the North American Society for Social Philosophy (''Sex and Social Justice'')

2002: Grawemeyer Award in Education (''Cultivating Humanity'')

2003: Barnard College Medal of Distinction

2004: Association of American University Publishers Professional and Scholarly Book Award for Law (''Hiding From Humanity'')

2005: listed among the world's Top 100 intellectuals by ''Foreign Policy'' (as well as in 2008 and 2010) and ''Prospect'' magazines.

2007: Radcliffe Alumnae Recognition Award

2009: American Philosophical Society's Henry M. Phillips Prize in Jurisprudence.

See also

American philosophy

List of American philosophers

References

External links

"We need the Sting of Critical Reasoning" A Conversation with Martha Nussbaum

University of Chicago biography

Nussbaum bibliographies

Q&A; with Martha Nussbaum from ''The Guardian''

In depth with Martha Nussbaum on C-SPAN

Radio interview on ''Philosophy Talk''

Nussbaum on Islamic liberalism under fire in India in the ''Boston Review'

Profile at The International Institute of Social Studies

Interview with Martha C. Nussbaum: “If citizens are not independent, then what we have is not democracy, but instead some sort of fascism or totalitarianism”", Barcelona Metropolis, 2011.

Category:1947 births Category:Living people Category:20th-century philosophers Category:21st-century philosophers Category:American philosophers Category:Analytic philosophers Category:Scholars of Greek philosophy Category:Jewish feminists Category:Jewish philosophers Category:Converts to Judaism Category:Women philosophers Category:New York University alumni Category:Harvard University alumni Category:Brown University faculty Category:Harvard University faculty Category:American Jews Category:Grawemeyer Award winners Category:Guggenheim Fellows Category:University of Chicago faculty Category:People from New York City Category:Virtue ethicists

ca:Martha Nussbaum de:Martha Nussbaum es:Martha Nussbaum fr:Martha Craven Nussbaum is:Martha Nussbaum it:Martha Nussbaum he:מרתה נוסבאום la:Martha Nussbaum nl:Martha Nussbaum ja:マーサ・ヌスバウム no:Martha Nussbaum pl:Martha Nussbaum pt:Martha Nussbaum ru:Нуссбаум, Марта fi:Martha Nussbaum sv:Martha Nussbaum

name	Maria Callas
alt	Maria Callas
birth name	Sophia Cecelia Kalos
birth date	December 02, 1923
birth place	Fifth Avenue, Manhattan, New York City, New York metropolitan area, United States
disappeared date
death date	September 16, 1977
death cause	Myocardial infarction
resting place	Père Lachaise Cemetery
resting place coordinates
ethnicity
occupation	Soprano, opera singer
years active	19421974
height
weight
religion
denomination
criminal charge
spouse	Giovanni Battista Meneghini (19491959)
parents	George Kalogeropoulos (father)Evangelia Dimitriadou (mother)
relatives	Louise Caselotti (vocal coach)Elvira de Hidalgo (vocal coach)
website

Maria Callas () (December 2, 1923September 16, 1977) was an American-born Greek soprano and one of the most renowned opera singers of the 20th century. She combined an impressive bel canto technique, a wide-ranging voice and great dramatic gifts. An extremely versatile singer, her repertoire ranged from classical opera seria to the bel canto operas of Donizetti, Bellini and Rossini; further, to the works of Verdi and Puccini; and, in her early career, to the music dramas of Wagner. Her remarkable musical and dramatic talents led to her being hailed as ''La Divina''.

Born in New York City and raised by an overbearing mother, she received her musical education in Greece and established her career in Italy. Forced to deal with the exigencies of wartime poverty and with myopia that left her nearly blind onstage, she endured struggles and scandal over the course of her career. She turned herself from a heavy woman into a svelte and glamorous one after a mid-career weight loss, which might have contributed to her vocal decline and the premature end of her career. The press exulted in publicizing Callas's allegedly temperamental behaviour, her supposed rivalry with Renata Tebaldi and her love affair with Aristotle Onassis. Her dramatic life and personal tragedy have often overshadowed Callas the artist in the popular press. However, her artistic achievements were such that Leonard Bernstein called her "The Bible of opera"; and her influence was so enduring that, in 2006, ''Opera News'' wrote of her: "Nearly thirty years after her death, she's still the definition of the diva as artist—and still one of classical music's best-selling vocalists."

Early life

Family life, childhood and move to Greece

According to her birth certificate, Maria Callas was born Sophia Cecelia Kalos at Flower Hospital (now the Terence Cardinal Cooke Health Care Center), at 1249 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, on December 2, 1923 to Greek parents George Kalogeropoulos and Evangelia "Litsa" (sometimes "Litza") Dimitriadou, though she was christened Anna Maria Sofia Cecilia Kalogeropoulou – the genitive of the patronymic Kalogeropoulos – (). Callas's father had shortened the surname Kalogeropoulos first to "Kalos" and subsequently to "Callas" in order to make it more manageable.

George and Evangelia were an ill-matched couple from the beginning; he was easy-going and unambitious, with no interest in the arts, while his wife was vivacious and socially ambitious, and had held dreams of a life in the arts for herself. The situation was aggravated by George's philandering and was improved neither by the birth of a daughter, named Yakinthi (later called Jackie), in 1917 nor the birth of a son, named Vassilis, in 1920. Vassilis's death from meningitis in the summer of 1922 dealt another blow to the marriage. In 1923, after realizing that Evangelia was pregnant again, George made the unilateral decision to move his family to America, a decision which Yakinthi recalled was greeted with Evangelia "shouting hysterically" followed by George "slamming doors". The family left for New York in July 1923, moving first into an apartment in Astoria, Queens. When Maria was 4, George Callas opened his own pharmacy, settling the family in Manhattan on 192nd Street in Washington Heights where Callas grew up.

Evangelia was convinced that her third child would be a boy; her disappointment at the birth of another daughter was so great that she refused to even look at her new baby for four days. Around the age of three, Maria's musical talent began to manifest itself, and after Evangelia discovered that her youngest daughter also had a voice, she began pressing "Mary" to sing. Callas would later recall, "I was made to sing when I was only five, and I hated it." George was unhappy with his wife favouring their elder daughter, as well as the pressure put upon young Mary to sing and perform. The marriage continued to deteriorate and in 1937 Evangelia decided to return to Athens with her two daughters.

Deteriorating relationship with mother

Callas's relationship with Evangelia continued to erode during the years in Greece, and in the prime of her career, it became a matter of great public interest, especially after a 1956 cover story in ''Time'' magazine which focused on this relationship and later, by Evangelia's book ''My Daughter – Maria Callas''. In public, Callas blamed the strained relationship with Evangelia on her unhappy childhood spent singing and working at her mother's insistence, saying,

My sister was slim and beautiful and friendly, and my mother always preferred her. I was the ugly duckling, fat and clumsy and unpopular. It is a cruel thing to make a child feel ugly and unwanted... I'll never forgive her for taking my childhood away. During all the years I should have been playing and growing up, I was singing or making money. Everything I did for them was mostly good and everything they did to me was mostly bad.

In 1957, she told Norman Ross, "Children should have a wonderful childhood. I have not had it – I wish I had." On the other hand, biographer Pestalis-Diomidis asserts that it was actually Evangelia's hateful treatment of George in front of their young children which led to resentment and dislike on Callas's part. However, according to both Callas' husband and her close friend Giulietta Simionato, Callas related to them that her mother, who did not work, pressed her to "go out with various men", mainly Italian and German soldiers, to bring home money and food during the Axis occupation of Greece during World War II. Simionato was convinced that Callas "managed to remain untouched", but Callas never forgave Evangelia for what she perceived as a kind of prostitution forced on her by her mother. In an attempt to patch things up with her mother, Callas took Evangelia along on her first visit to Mexico in 1950, but this only reawakened the old frictions and resentments, and after leaving Mexico, the two never met again. After a series of angry and accusatory letters from Evangelia lambasting Callas's father and husband, Callas ceased communication with her mother altogether.

Education

Callas received her musical education in Athens. Initially, her mother tried to enrol her at the prestigious Athens Conservatoire, without success. At the audition, her voice, still untrained, failed to impress, while the conservatoire's director Filoktitis Oikonomidis refused to accept her without her satisfying the theoretic prerequisites (solfege). In the summer of 1937, her mother visited Maria Trivella at the younger Greek National Conservatoire, asking her to take Mary as a student for a modest fee. In 1957, Trivella recalled her impression of "Mary, a very plump young girl, wearing big glasses for her myopia":

The tone of the voice was warm, lyrical, intense; it swirled and flared like a flame and filled the air with melodious reverberations like a carillon. It was by any standards an amazing phenomenon, or rather it was a great talent that needed control, technical training and strict discipline in order to shine with all its brilliance.

Trivella agreed to tutor Callas completely, waiving her tuition fees, but no sooner had Callas started her formal lessons and vocal exercises than Trivella began to feel that Mary was not a contralto, as she had been told, but a dramatic soprano. Subsequently, they began working on raising the tessitura of Mary's voice and to lighten its timbre. Trivella recalled Mary as "A model student. Fanatical, uncompromising, dedicated to her studies heart and soul. Her progress was phenomenal. She studied five or six hours a day. ...Within six months, she was singing the most difficult arias in the international opera repertoire with the utmost musicality". On April 11, 1938, in her public debut, Callas ended the recital of Trivella's class at the Parnassos music hall with a duet from ''Tosca''. Callas recalled that Trivella "had a French method, which was placing the voice in the nose, rather nasal... and I had the problem of not having low chest tones, which is essential in ''bel canto''... And that's where I learned my chest tones." However, when interviewed by Pierre Desgraupes on the French program ''L'Invitee Du Dimanche'', Callas attributed the development of her chest voice not to Trivella, but to her next teacher, the well-known Spanish coloratura soprano Elvira de Hidalgo.

Callas studied with Trivella for two years before her mother secured another audition at the Athens Conservatoire with de Hidalgo. Callas auditioned with "Ocean, Thou Mighty Monster." De Hidalgo recalled hearing "tempestuous, extravagant cascades of sounds, as yet uncontrolled but full of drama and emotion". She agreed to take her as a pupil immediately, but Callas's mother asked de Hidalgo to wait for a year, as Callas would be graduating from the National Conservatoire and could begin working. On April 2, 1939, Callas undertook the part of Santuzza in a student production of Mascagni's ''Cavalleria rusticana'' at the Olympia Theatre, and in the fall of the same year she enrolled at the Athens Conservatoire in Elvira de Hidalgo's class.

In 1968, Callas told Lord Harewood,

De Hildalgo had the real great training, maybe even the last real training of the ''real'' ''bel canto''. As a young girl—thirteen years old—I was immediately thrown into her arms, meaning that I learned the secrets, the ways of this ''bel canto'', which of course as you well know, is not just beautiful singing. It is a very hard training; it is a sort of a straight-jacket that you're supposed to put on, whether you like it or not. You have to learn to read, to write, to form your sentences, how far you can go, fall, hurt yourself, put yourself back on your feet continuously. De Hidalgo had one method, which was the real ''bel canto'' way, where no matter how heavy a voice, it should always be kept light, it should always be worked on in a flexible way, never to weigh it down. It is a method of keeping the voice light and flexible and pushing the instrument into a certain zone where it might not be too large in sound, but penetrating. And teaching the scales, trills, all the ''bel canto'' embellishments, which is a whole vast language of its own.

De Hidalgo would later recall Callas as "a phenomenon... She would listen to all my students, sopranos, mezzos, tenors... She could do it all." Callas herself said that she would go to "the ''conservatoire'' at 10 in the morning and leave with the last pupil ... devouring music" for 10 hours a day. When asked by her teacher why she did this, her answer was that even "with the least talented pupil, ''he'' can teach you something that you, the most talented, might not be able to do."

Early operatic career in Greece

After several appearances as a student, Callas began appearing in secondary roles at the Greek National Opera. De Hidalgo was instrumental in securing roles for her, allowing Callas to earn a small salary, which would help her and her family get through the difficult war years.

Callas made her professional debut in February 1942 in the small role of Beatrice in Franz von Suppé's ''Boccaccio''. Soprano Galatea Amaxopoulous, who sang in the chorus, later recalled, "Even in rehearsal, Mary's fantastic performing ability had been obvious, and from then on, the others started trying to find ways of preventing her from appearing." Fellow singer Maria Alkeou similarly recalled that the established sopranos Nafiska Galanou and Anna (Zozó) Remmoundou "used to stand in the wings while Mary was singing and make remarks about her, muttering, laughing, and point their fingers at her". Despite these hostilities, Callas managed to continue and made her debut in a leading role in August 1942 as Tosca, going on to sing the role of Marta in Eugen d'Albert's ''Tiefland'' at the Olympia Theatre. Callas's performance as Marta received glowing reviews. Critic Spanoudi declared Callas "an extremely dynamic artist possessing the rarest dramatic and musical gifts", and Vangelis Mangliveras evaluated Callas's performance for the weekly ''To Radiophonon'':

The singer who took the part of Marta, that new star in the Greek firmament, with a matchless depth of feeling, gave a theatrical interpretation well up to the standard of a tragic actress. About her exceptional voice with its astonishing natural fluency, I do not wish to add anything to the words of Alexandra Lalaouni: 'Kaloyeropoulou is one of those God-given talents that one can only marvel at.'

Following these performances, even Callas's detractors began to refer to her as ''"The God-Given".'' Some time later, watching Callas rehearse Beethoven's ''Fidelio'', rival soprano Remoundou asked a colleague, "Could it be that there ''is'' something divine and we haven't realized it?" Following ''Tiefland'', Callas sang the role of Santuzza in ''Cavalleria rusticana'' again and followed it with ''O Protomastoras'' at the ancient Odeon of Herodes Atticus theatre at the foot of the Acropolis.

During August and September 1944, Callas performed the role of Leonore in a Greek language production of ''Fidelio'', again at the Odeon of Herodes Atticus. German critic Friedrich Herzog, who witnessed the performances, declared Leonore Callas's "greatest triumph":

When Maria Kaloyeropoulou's Leonore let her soprano soar out radiantly in the untrammelled jubilation of the duet, she rose to the most sublime heights.... Here she gave bud, blossom and fruit to that harmony of sound that also ennobled the art of the prima donne.

After the liberation of Greece, de Hidalgo advised Callas to establish herself in Italy. Callas proceeded to give a series of concerts around Greece, and then, against her teacher's advice, she returned to America to see her father and to further pursue her career. When she left Greece on September 14, 1945, two months short of her 22nd birthday, Callas had given 56 performances in seven operas and had appeared in around 20 recitals. Callas considered her Greek career as the foundation of her musical and dramatic upbringing, saying, "When I got to the big career, there were no surprises for me."

Main operatic career

After returning to the United States and reuniting with her father in September 1945, Callas made the round of auditions. In December of that year, she auditioned for Edward Johnson, general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, and was favourably received: "Exceptional voice—ought to be heard very soon on stage". Callas maintained that the Met offered her ''Madama Butterfly'' and ''Fidelio'', to be performed in Philadelphia and sung in English, both of which she declined, feeling she was too fat for ''Butterfly'' and did not like the idea of opera in English. Although no written evidence of this offer exists in the Met's records, in a 1958 interview with ''The New York Post'', Johnson corroborated Callas's story: "We offered her a contract, but she didn't like it—because of the contract, not because of the roles. She was right in turning it down—it was frankly a beginner's contract."

Italy, Meneghini, and Serafin

In 1946, Callas was engaged to re-open the opera house in Chicago as ''Turandot'', but the company folded before opening. Basso Nicola Rossi-Lemeni, who also was to star in this opera, was aware that Tullio Serafin was looking for a dramatic soprano to cast as ''La Gioconda'' at the Arena di Verona. He would later recall the young Callas as being "amazing—so strong physically and spiritually; so certain of her future. I knew in a big outdoor theatre like Verona's, this girl, with her courage and huge voice, would make a tremendous impact." Subsequently he recommended Callas to retired tenor and impresario Giovanni Zenatello. During her audition, Zenatello became so excited that he jumped up and joined Callas in the Act 4 duet. It was in this role that Callas made her Italian debut.

Upon her arrival in Verona, Callas met Giovanni Battista Meneghini, an older, wealthy industrialist, who began courting her. They married in 1949, and he assumed control of her career until 1959, when the marriage dissolved. It was Meneghini's love and support that gave Callas the time needed to establish herself in Italy, and throughout the prime of her career, she went by the name Maria Meneghini Callas.

After ''La Gioconda'', Callas had no further offers, and when Serafin, looking for someone to sing Isolde, called on her, she told him that she already knew the score, even though she had looked at only the first act out of curiosity while at the conservatory. She sight-read the opera's second act for Serafin, who praised her for knowing the role so well, whereupon she admitted to having bluffed and having sight-read the music. Even more impressed, Serafin immediately cast her in the role. Serafin thereafter served as Callas's mentor and supporter.

According to Lord Harewood, "Very few Italian conductors have had a more distinguished career than Tullio Serafin, and perhaps none, apart from Toscanini, more influence". In 1968, Callas would recall that working with Serafin was the "really lucky" opportunity of her career, because "he taught me that there must be an expression; that there must be a justification. He taught me the depth of music, the justification of music. That's where I really really drank all I could from this man".

''I puritani'' and path to ''bel canto''

The great turning point in Callas's career occurred in Venice in 1949. She was engaged to sing the role of Brünnhilde in ''Die Walküre'' at the Teatro la Fenice, when Margherita Carosio, who was engaged to sing Elvira in ''I puritani'' in the same theatre, fell ill. Unable to find a replacement for Carosio, Maestro Serafin told Callas that she would be singing Elvira in six days; when Callas protested that she not only did not know the role, but also had three more Brünnhildes to sing, he told her "I guarantee that you can." In Michael Scott's words, "the notion of any one singer embracing music as divergent in its vocal demands as Wagner's Brünnhilde and Bellini's Elvira in the same career would have been cause enough for surprise; but to attempt to essay them both in the same season seemed like ''folie de grandeur''". Before the performance actually took place, one incredulous critic would snort, "We hear that Serafin has agreed to conduct ''I puritani'' with a dramatic soprano... When can we expect a new edition of ''La traviata'' with [baritone] Gino Bechi's Violetta?" After the performance, critics would write, "Even the most sceptical had to acknowledge the miracle that Maria Callas accomplished... the flexibility of her limpid, beautifully poised voice, and her splendid high notes. Her interpretation also has a humanity, warmth and expressiveness that one would search for in vain in the fragile, pellucid coldness of other Elviras." Franco Zeffirelli recalled, "What she did in Venice was really incredible. You need to be familiar with opera to realize the enormity of her achievement. It was as if someone asked Birgit Nilsson, who is famous for her great Wagnerian voice, to substitute overnight for Beverly Sills, who is one of the great coloratura sopranos of our time."

Scott asserts that "Of all the many roles Callas undertook, it is doubtful if any had a more far-reaching effect." This initial foray into the bel canto repertoire changed the course of Callas's career and set her on a path leading to ''Lucia di Lammermoor'', ''La traviata'', ''Armida'', ''La sonnambula'', ''Il pirata'', ''Il turco in Italia'', ''Medea'' and ''Anna Bolena'', and reawakened interest in the long-neglected operas of Cherubini, Bellini, Donizetti and Rossini. In the words of soprano Montserrat Caballé,

She opened a new door for us, for all the singers in the world, a door that had been closed. Behind it was sleeping not only great music but great idea of interpretation. She has given us the chance, those who follow her, to do things that were hardly possible before her. That I am compared with Callas is something I never dared to dream. It is not right. I am much smaller than Callas.

As with ''I puritani'', Callas also learned and performed Cherubini's ''Medea'', Giordano's ''Andrea Chénier'' and Rossini's ''Armida '' on a few days' notice. Throughout her career, Callas displayed her vocal versatility in recitals that pitched dramatic soprano arias alongside coloratura pieces, including in a 1952 RAI recital in which she opened with Lady Macbeth's "letter scene", followed by the "Mad Scene" from ''Lucia di Lammermoor'', then Abigaile's treacherous recitative and aria from ''Nabucco'', finishing with the "Bell Song" from ''Lakmé'' capped by a ringing high E ''in alt'' (E6).

Important debuts

Although by 1951 Callas had sung at all the major theatres in Italy, she had not yet made her official debut at Italy's most prestigious opera house, Teatro alla Scala in Milan. According to composer Gian-Carlo Menotti, Callas had substituted for Renata Tebaldi in the role of ''Aida'' in 1950, and La Scala's general manager, Antonio Ghiringhelli, had taken an immediate dislike to Callas. Menotti recalls that Ghiringhelli had promised him any singer he wanted for the premiere of ''The Consul'', but when he suggested Callas, Ghiringhelli said that he would never have Callas at La Scala except as a guest artist. However, as Callas's fame grew, and especially after her great success in ''I vespri siciliani'' in Florence, Ghiringhelli had to relent: Callas made her official debut at La Scala in Verdi's ''I vespri siciliani'' on opening night in December 1951, and this theatre became her artistic home throughout the 1950s. La Scala mounted many new productions specially for Callas by directors such as Herbert von Karajan, Margherita Wallmann, Franco Zeffirelli and, most importantly, Luchino Visconti. Visconti stated later that he began directing opera only because of Callas, and he directed her in lavish new productions of ''La vestale'', ''La traviata'', ''La sonnambula'', ''Anna Bolena'' and ''Iphigénie en Tauride''. Callas was notably instrumental in arranging Franco Corelli's debut at La Scala in 1954, where he sang Licinio in Spontini's ''La vestale'' opposite Callas's Julia. The two had sung together for the first time the year previously in Rome in a production of ''Norma''. Anthony Tommasini wrote that Corelli had "earned great respect from the fearsomely demanding Callas, who, in Mr Corelli, finally had someone with whom she could act." The two collaborated several more times at La Scala, singing opposite each other in productions of ''Fedora'' (1956), ''Il pirata'' (1958) and ''Poliuto'' (1960). Their partnership continued throughout the rest of Callas's career.

Callas made her American debut in Chicago in 1954, and "with the Callas ''Norma'', Lyric Opera of Chicago was born." Her Metropolitan Opera debut, opening the Met's seventy-second season on October 29, 1956, was again with ''Norma'', but was preceded with an unflattering cover story in ''Time'' magazine, which rehashed all of the Callas clichés, including her temper, her supposed rivalry with Renata Tebaldi and especially her difficult relationship with her mother. As she had done with Lyric Opera of Chicago, on November 21, 1957, Callas gave a concert to inaugurate what then was billed as the Dallas Civic Opera, and helped establish that company with her friends from Chicago, Lawrence Kelly and Maestro Nicola Rescigno. She further consolidated this company's standing when, in 1958, she gave "a towering performance as Violetta in ''La Traviata'', and that same year, in her only American performances of ''Medea'', gave an interpretation of the title role worthy of Euripides."

In 1958 a feud with Rudolf Bing led to Callas's Metropolitan Opera contract being cancelled. Impresario Allen Oxenburg realised that this situation provided him with an opportunity to hire Callas for his own company, the American Opera Society, and he accordingly approached Callas with a contract to perform Imogene in ''Il pirata''. She accepted and sang the role in a January 1959 performance that according to opera critic Allan Kozinn "quickly became legendary in operatic circles". Bing and Callas later reconciled their differences and she returned to the house in 1965 to sing the title role in two performances as Tosca opposite Franco Corelli as Cavaradossi for one performance (March 19, 1965) and Richard Tucker (March 25, 1965) with Tito Gobbi as Scarpia for her final performances at the Met.

In 1952, she made her London debut at the Royal Opera House in ''Norma'' with veteran mezzo soprano Ebe Stignani as Adalgisa, a performance which survives on record and also features the young Joan Sutherland in the small role of Clotilde. Callas and the London public had what she herself called "a love affair", and she returned to the Royal Opera House in 1953, 1957, 1958, 1959, and 1964 to 1965. It was at the Royal Opera House where, on July 5, 1965, Callas ended her stage career in the role of ''Tosca'', in a production designed and mounted for her by Franco Zeffirelli and featuring her friend and colleague Tito Gobbi.

Weight loss

In the early years of her career, Callas was a heavy and full-figured woman; in her own words, " Heavy—one can say—yes I was; but I'm also a tall woman, 5' 8½" [174 centimeters], and I used to weigh no more than 200 pounds [91 kilograms]." Tito Gobbi relates that during a lunch break while recording ''Lucia'' in Florence, Serafin commented to Callas that she was eating too much and allowing her weight to become a problem. When she protested that she wasn't ''so'' heavy, Gobbi suggested she should "put the matter to test" by stepping on the weighing machine outside the restaurant. The result was "somewhat dismaying, and she became rather silent." In 1968, Callas told Edward Downes that during her initial performances in Cherubini's ''Medea'' in May 1953, she realized that she needed a leaner face and figure to do dramatic justice to this as well as the other roles she was undertaking. She adds,

I was getting so heavy that even my vocalizing was getting heavy. I was tiring myself, I was perspiring too much, and I was really working too hard. And I wasn't really well, as in health; I couldn't move freely. And then I was tired of playing a game, for instance playing this beautiful young woman, and I was heavy and uncomfortable to move around. In any case, it was uncomfortable and I didn't like it. So I felt now if I'm going to do things right—I've studied all my life to put things right musically, so why don't I diet and put myself into a certain condition where I'm presentable.

During 1953 and early 1954, she lost almost 80 pounds (36 kg), turning herself into what Maestro Rescigno called "possibly the most beautiful lady on the stage". Sir Rudolf Bing, who remembered Callas as being "monstrously fat" in 1951, stated that after the weight loss, Callas was an "astonishing, svelte, striking woman" who "showed none of the signs one usually finds in a fat woman who has lost weight: she looked as though she had been born to that slender and graceful figure, and had always moved with that elegance." Various rumours spread regarding her weight loss method; one had her swallowing a tapeworm, while Rome's Pantanella Mills pasta company claimed she lost weight by eating their "physiologic pasta", prompting Callas to file a lawsuit. Callas stated that she lost the weight by eating a sensible low-calorie diet of mainly salads and chicken.

Some believe that the loss of body mass made it more difficult for her to support her voice, triggering the vocal strain that became apparent later in the decade (see vocal decline), while others believed the weight loss effected a newfound softness and femininity in her voice, as well as a greater confidence as a person and performer. Tito Gobbi said, "Now she was not only supremely gifted both musically and dramatically—she was a beauty too. And her awareness of this invested with fresh magic every role she undertook. What it eventually did to her vocal and nervous stamina I am not prepared to say. I only assert that she blossomed into an artist unique in her generation and outstanding in the whole range of vocal history." Walter Legge stated that Callas possessed that most essential ingredient for a great singer: an instantly recognizable voice. During "The Callas Debate", Italian critic Rodolfo Celletti stated, "The timbre of Callas's voice, considered purely as sound, was essentially ugly: it was a thin sound, which gave the impression of dryness, of aridity. It lacked those elements which, in a singer's jargon, are described as velvet and varnish... yet I really believe that part of her appeal was precisely due to this fact. Why? Because for all its natural lack of varnish, velvet and richness, this voice could acquire such distinctive colours and timbres as to be unforgettable." However, in his review of Callas's 1951 live recording of ''I vespri siciliani'', Ira Siff writes, "Accepted wisdom tells us that Callas possessed, even early on, a flawed voice, unattractive by conventional standards — an instrument that signaled from the beginning vocal problems to come. Yet listen to her entrance in this performance and one encounters a rich, spinning sound, ravishing by any standard, capable of delicate dynamic nuance. High notes are free of wobble, chest tones unforced, and the middle register displays none of the "bottled" quality that became more and more pronounced as Callas matured."

Nicola Rossi-Lemeni relates that Callas's mentor Tullio Serafin used to refer to her as ''"Una grande vociaccia"''; he continues, "''Vociaccia'' is a little bit pejorative—it means an ugly voice—but ''grande'' means a big voice, a great voice. A great ugly voice, in a way." Callas herself did not like the sound of her own voice; in one of her last interviews, answering whether or not she was able to listen to her own voice, she replies,

Yes, but I don't like it. I have to do it, but I don't like it at all because I don't like the kind of voice I have. I really hate listening to myself! The first time I listened to a recording of my singing was when we were recording ''San Giovanni Battista'' by Stradella in a church in Perugia in 1949. They made me listen to the tape and I cried my eyes out. I wanted to stop everything, to give up singing... Also now even though I don't like my voice, I've become able to accept it and to be detached and objective about it so I can say, "Oh, that was really well sung," or "It was nearly perfect."

Maestro Carlo Maria Giulini has described the appeal of Callas's voice:

It is very difficult to speak of the voice of Callas. Her voice was a very special instrument. Something happens sometimes with string instruments—violin, viola, cello—where the first moment you listen to the sound of this instrument, the first feeling is a bit strange sometimes. But after just a few minutes, when you get used to, when you become friends with this kind of sound, then the sound becomes a magical quality. This was Callas.

Vocal category

Callas's voice has been difficult to place in the modern vocal classification or fach system, especially since in her prime, her repertoire contained the heaviest dramatic soprano roles as well as roles usually undertaken by the highest, lightest and most agile coloratura sopranos. Regarding this versatility, Maestro Tullio Serafin said, "This woman can sing anything written for the female voice". Michael Scott argues that Callas's voice was a natural high soprano, and going by evidence of Callas's early recordings, Rosa Ponselle likewise felt that "At that stage of its development, her voice was a pure but sizable dramatic coloratura––that is to say, a sizable coloratura voice with dramatic capabilities, not the other way around." On the other hand, music critic John Ardoin has argued that Callas was the reincarnation of the nineteenth century ''soprano sfogato'' or "unlimited soprano", a throwback to Maria Malibran and Giuditta Pasta, for whom many of the famous bel canto operas were written. He avers that like Pasta and Malibran, Callas was a natural mezzo-soprano whose range was extended through training and willpower, resulting in a voice which "lacked the homogeneous color and evenness of scale once so prized in singing. There were unruly sections of their voices never fully under control. Many who heard Pasta, for example, remarked that her uppermost notes seemed produced by ventriloquism, a charge which would later be made against Callas". Ardoin points to the writings of Henry Fothergill Chorley about Pasta which bear an uncanny resemblance to descriptions of Callas:

"There was a portion of the scale which differed from the rest in quality and remained to the last 'under a veil.' ...out of these uncouth materials she had to compose her instrument and then to give it flexibility. Her studies to acquire execution must have been tremendous; but the volubility and brilliancy, when acquired, gained a character of their own... There were a breadth, an expressiveness in her roulades, an evenness and solidity in her shake, which imparted to every passage a significance totally beyond the reach of lighter and more spontaneous singers... The best of her audience were held in thrall, without being able to analyze what made up the spell, what produced the effect--as soon as she opened her lips".

Callas herself appears to have been in agreement not only with Ardoin's assertions that she started as a natural mezzo-soprano, but also saw the similarities between herself and Pasta and Malibran. In 1957, she described her early voice as: "The timbre was dark, almost black—when I think of it, I think of thick molasses", and in 1968 she added, "They say I was not a true soprano, I was rather toward a mezzo". Regarding her ability to sing the heaviest as well as the lightest roles, she told James Fleetwood,

"It's study; it's Nature. I’m doing nothing special, you know. Even ''Lucia'', ''Anna Bolena'', ''Puritani'', all these operas were created for one type of soprano, the type that sang ''Norma'', ''Fidelio'', which was Malibran of course. And a funny coincidence last year, I was singing ''Anna Bolena'' and ''Sonnambula'', same months and the same distance of time as Giuditta Pasta had sung in the Nineteenth Century... So I’m really not doing anything extraordinary. You wouldn’t ask a pianist ''not'' to be able to play everything; he ''has'' to. This is Nature and also because I had a wonderful teacher, the old kind of teaching methods... I was a very heavy voice, that is my nature, a dark voice shall we call it, and I was always kept on the light side. She always trained me to keep my voice limber".

Vocal size and range

Regarding the sheer size of Callas's instrument, Celletti says, "Her voice was penetrating. The volume as such was average: neither small nor powerful. But the penetration, allied to this incisive quality (which bordered on the ugly because it frequently contained an element of harshness) ensured that her voice could be clearly heard anywhere in the auditorium." Yet, paradoxically enough, in "Le Grande voci", Celletti states that Callas had not a mere penetrating voice but "a voluminous, resonant and dark" one ("una voce voluminosa, squillante e di timbro scuro"). After her first performance of Medea in 1953, the critic for ''Musical Courier'' would write, "she displayed a vocal generosity that was scarecely believable for its amplitude and resilience.". In a 1982 ''Opera News'' interview with Joan Sutherland and Richard Bonynge, Bonynge stated, "But before she slimmed down, I mean this was such a colossal voice. It just poured out of her, the way Flagstad's did... Callas had a huge voice. When she and Stignani sang Norma, at the bottom of the range you could barely tell who was who... Oh it was colossal. And she took the big sound right up to the top." In his book, Michael Scott makes the distinction that whereas Callas's pre-1954 voice was a "dramatic soprano with an exceptional top", after the weight loss, it became, as one Chicago critic described the voice in ''Lucia'', a "huge soprano leggiero".

In performance, Callas's range was just short of three octaves, from F-sharp (F3) below middle C (C4) heard in "Arrigo! Ah parli a un core" from ''I vespri siciliani'' to E-natural (E6) above high C (C6), heard in the aria "Mercè, dilette amiche" in the final act of the same opera, as well as in Rossini's ''Armida'' and ''Lakmé''s Bell Song. Whether or not Callas ever sang a high F-natural in performance has been open to debate. After her June 11, 1951 concert in Florence, Rock Ferris of ''Musical Courier'' said, "Her high E's and F's are taken full voice." Although no definite recording of Callas singing high F's have surfaced, the presumed E-natural at the end of Rossini's ''Armida''—a poor-quality bootleg recording of uncertain pitch—has been referred to as a high F by Italian musicologists and critics Eugenio Gara and Rodolfo Celletti. Callas expert Dr. Robert Seletsky, however, stated that since the finale of ''Armida'' is in the key of E, the final note could not have been an F, as it would have been dissonant. Author Eve Ruggieri has referred to the penultimate note in "Mercè, dilette amiche" from the 1951 Florence performances of ''I vespri siciliani'' as a high F; however, this claim is refuted by John Ardoin's review of the live recording of the performance as well as by the review of the recording in ''Opera News'', both of which refer to the note as a high E-natural. In a 1969 French television interview with Pierre Desgraupes on the program ''L'invitée du dimanche'', maestro Francesco Siciliani speaks of Callas's voice going to a high F, but within the same program, Callas's teacher, Elvira de Hidalgo, speaks of the voice soaring to a high E-natural, but does not mention a high F; meanwhile, Callas herself remains silent on the subject, neither agreeing nor disagreeing with either claim.

Vocal registers

Callas's voice was noted for its three distinct registers: Her low or chest register was extremely dark and almost baritonal in power, and she used this part of her voice for dramatic effect, often going into this register much higher on the scale than most sopranos. Her middle register had a peculiar and highly personal sound—"part oboe, part clarinet", as Claudia Cassidy described it—and was noted for its veiled or "bottled" sound, as if she were singing into a jug. Walter Legge attributed this sound to the "extraordinary formation of her upper palate, shaped like a Gothic arch, not the Romanesque arch of the normal mouth". The upper register was ample and bright, with an impressive extension above high C, which—in contrast to the light flute-like sound of the typical coloratura, "she would attack these notes with more vehemence and power—quite differently therefore, from the very delicate, cautious, 'white' approach of the light sopranos." Legge adds, "Even in the most difficult fioriture there were no musical or technical difficulties in this part of the voice which she could not execute with astonishing, unostentatious ease. Her chromatic runs, particularly downwards, were beautifully smooth and staccatos almost unfailingly accurate, even in the trickiest intervals. There is hardly a bar in the whole range of nineteenth century music for high soprano that seriously tested her powers." And as she demonstrated in the finale of ''La sonnambula'' on the commercial EMI set and the live recording from Cologne, she was able to execute a diminuendo on the stratospheric high E-flat, which Scott describes as "a feat unrivaled in the history of the gramophone."

Regarding Callas's soft singing, Celletti says, "In these soft passages, Callas seemed to use another voice altogether, because it acquired a great sweetness. Whether in her florid singing or in her ''canto spianato'', that is, in long held notes without ornamentation, her ''mezza-voce'' could achieve such moving sweetness that the sound seemed to come from on high. . . I don't know, it seemed to come from the skylight of La Scala."

This combination of size, weight, range and agility was a source of amazement to Callas's own contemporaries. One of the choristers present at her La Scala debut in ''I vespri siciliani'' recalled, "My God! She came on stage sounding like our deepest contralto, Cloe Elmo. And before the evening was over, she took a high E-flat. And it was twice as strong as Toti Dal Monte's!" In the same vein, mezzo-soprano Giulietta Simionato said: "The first time we sang together was in Mexico in 1950, where she sang the top E-flat in the second-act finale of ''Aida''. I can still remember the effect of that note in the opera house—it was like a star!" For Italian soprano Renata Tebaldi, "the most fantastic thing was the possibility for her to sing the soprano coloratura with this ''big'' voice! This was something really special. ''Fantastic'' absolutely!"

Callas's vocal registers, however, were not seamlessly joined; Walter Legge writes, "Unfortunately, it was only in quick music, particularly descending scales, that she completely mastered the art of joining the three almost incompatible voices into one unified whole, but until about 1960, she disguised those audible gear changes with cunning skill." Rodolfo Celletti states,

In certain areas of her range her voice also possessed a guttural quality. This would occur in the most delicate and troublesome areas of a soprano's voice—for instance where the lower and middle registers merge, between G and A. I would go so far as to say that here her voice had such resonances as to make one think at times of a ventriloquist. . .or else the voice could sound as though it were resonating in a rubber tube. There was another troublesome spot. . . between the middle and upper registers. Here, too, around the treble F and G, there was often something in the sound itself which was not quite right, as though the voice were not functioning properly.

As to whether these troublesome spots were due to the nature of the voice itself or to technical deficiencies, Celletti says: "Even if, when passing from one register to another, Callas produced an unpleasant sound, the technique she used for these transitions was perfect." Musicologist and critic Fedele D'Amico adds, "Callas's 'faults' were in the voice and not in the singer; they are so to speak, faults of departure but not of arrival. This is precisely Celletti's distinction between the natural quality of the voice and the technique." In 2005, Ewa Podles said of Callas, "Maybe she had three voices, maybe she had three ranges, I don’t know — I am professional singer. Nothing disturbed me, nothing! I bought everything that she offered me. Why? Because all of her voices, her registers, she used how they should be used — just to tell us something!"

Eugenio Gara states, "Much has been said about her voice, and no doubt the discussion will continue. Certainly no one could in honesty deny the harsh or "squashed" sounds, nor the wobble on the very high notes. These and others were precisely the accusations made at the time against Pasta and Malibran, two geniuses of song (as they were then called), sublime, yet imperfect. Both were brought to trial in their day. . . Yet few singers have made history in the annals of opera as these two did."

Artistry

Callas's own thoughts regarding music and singing can be found at Wikiquote.

The musician

Though adored by many opera enthusiasts, Callas was a controversial artist. While Callas was the great singer often dismissed simply as an actress she considered herself first and foremost "a musician, that is, the first instrument of the orchestra." Grace Bumbry states, "If I followed the musical score when she was singing, I would see every tempo marking, every dynamic marking, everything being adhered to, and at the same time, it was not antiseptic; it was something that was very beautiful and moving." Maestro Victor de Sabata confided to Walter Legge, "If the public could understand, as we do, how deeply and utterly musical Callas is, they would be stunned", and Maestro Tullio Serafin assessed Callas's musicality as "extraordinary, almost frightening." Callas possessed an innate architectural sense of line-proportion and an uncanny feel for timing and for what one of her colleagues described as "a sense of the rhythm within the rhythm".

Regarding Callas's technical prowess, Celletti says, "We must not forget that she could tackle the whole gamut of ornamentation: staccato, trills, half-trills, gruppetti, scales, etc." D'Amico adds, "The essential virtue of Callas's technique consists of supreme mastery of an extraordinarily rich range of tone colour (that is, the fusion of dynamic range and timbre). And such mastery means total freedom of choice in its use: not being a slave to one's abilities, but rather, being able to use them at will as a means to an end." While reviewing the many recorded versions of "perhaps Verdi's ultimate challenge", the aria "D'amor sull'ali rosee" from ''Il Trovatore'', Richard Dyer writes,

"Callas articulates all of the trills, and she binds them into the line more expressively than anyone else; they are not an ornament but a form of intensification. Part of the wonder in this performance is the chiaroscuro through her tone -- the other side of not singing full-out all the way through. One of the vocal devices that create that chiaroscuro is a varying rate of vibrato; another is her portamento, the way she connects the voice from note to note, phrase to phrase, lifting and gliding. This is never a sloppy swoop, because its intention is as musically precise as it is in great string playing. In this aria, Callas uses more portamento, and in greater variety, than any other singer. . . Callas is not creating "effects", as even her greatest rivals do. She sees the aria as a whole, "as if in an aerial view", as Sviatoslav Richter's teacher observed of his most famous pupil; simultaneously, she is on earth, standing in the courtyard of the palace of Aliaferia, floating her voice to the tower where her lover lies imprisoned."

In addition to her musical skills, Callas had a particular gift for language and the use of language in music. In recitatives, she always knew which word to emphasize and which syllable in that word to bring out. Michael Scott notes, "If we listen attentively, we note how her perfect legato enables her to suggest by musical means even the exclamation marks and commas of the text." Technically, not only did she have the capacity to perform the most difficult florid music effortlessly, but also she had the ability to use each ornament as an expressive device rather than for mere fireworks. Soprano Martina Arroyo states, "What interested me most was how she gave the runs and the cadenzas ''words''. That always floored me. I always felt I heard her saying something – it was never just singing notes. That alone is an art." Walter Legge states that,

Most admirable of all her qualities, however, were her taste, elegance and deeply musical use of ornamentation in all its forms and complications, the weighting and length of every appoggiatura, the smooth incorporation of the turn in melodic lines, the accuracy and pacing of her trills, the seemingly inevitable timing of her portamentos, varying their curve with enchanting grace and meaning. There were innumerable exquisite felicities – minuscule portamentos from one note to its nearest neighbor, or over widespread intervals – and changes of color that were pure magic. In these aspects of bel canto she was supreme mistress of that art.

The actress

Regarding Callas's acting ability, vocal coach Ira Siff remarked, "When I saw the final two ''Tosca''s she did in the old [Met], I felt like I was watching the actual story on which the opera had later been based." Callas was not, however, a realistic or verismo style actress: her physical acting was merely "subsidiary to the heavy ''Kunst'' of developing the psychology of the roles under the supervision of the music, of ''singing'' the acting... Suffering, delight, humility, hubris, despair, rhapsody—all this was musically appointed, through her use of the voice flying the text upon the notes." Seconding this opinion, verismo specialist soprano Augusta Oltrabella said, "Despite what everyone says, [Callas] was an actress in the expression of the music, and not vice versa." Mathew Gurewitsch adds,

In fact the essence of her art was refinement. The term seems odd for a performer whose imagination and means of expression were so prodigious. She was eminently capable of the grand gesture; still, judging strictly from the evidence of her recordings, we know (and her few existing film clips confirm) that her power flowed not from excess but from unbroken concentration, unfaltering truth in the moment. It flowed also from irreproachable musicianship. People say that Callas would not hesitate to distort a vocal line for dramatic effect. In the throes of operatic passion plenty of singers snarl, growl, whine, and shriek. Callas was not one of them. She found all she needed in the notes.

Ewa Podles likewise stated that "It's enough to hear her, I’m positive! Because she could say everything only with her voice! I can imagine everything, I can see everything in front of my eye." Opera director Sandro Sequi, who witnessed many Callas performances close-up, states, "For me, she was extremely stylized and classic, yet at the same time, human—but humanity on a higher plane of existence, almost sublime. Realism was foreign to her, and that is why she was the greatest of opera singers. After all, opera is the least realistic of theater forms... She was wasted in verismo roles, even ''Tosca'', no matter how brilliantly she could act such roles." Scott adds, "Early nineteenth-century opera... is not merely the antithesis of reality, it also requires highly stylized acting. Callas had the perfect face for it. Her big features matched its grandiloquence and spoke volumes from a distance."

In regard to Callas's physical acting style, Nicola Rescigno states, "Maria had a way of even transforming her body for the exigencies of a role, which is a great triumph. In ''La traviata'', everything would slope down; everything indicated sickness, fatigue, softness. Her arms would move as if they had no bones, like the great ballerinas. In ''Medea'', everything was angular. She’d never make a soft gesture; even the walk she used was like a tiger’s walk." Sandro Sequi recalls, "She was never in a hurry. Everything was very paced, proportioned, classical, precise... She was extremely powerful but extremely stylized. Her gestures were not many... I don't think she did more than 20 gestures in a performance. But she was capable of standing 10 minutes without moving a hand or finger, compelling everyone to look at her." Edward Downes recalled Callas watching and observing her colleagues with such intensity and concentration as to make it seem that the drama was all unfolding in her head. Sir Rudolf Bing similarly recalled that in ''Il trovatore'' in Chicago, "it was Callas' quiet listening, rather than Björling's singing that made the dramatic impact... He didn't know what he was singing, but she knew."

Callas herself stated that, in Opera, ''Acting'' must be based on the ''Music'', quoting Maestro Tullio Serafin's advice to her:

"When one wants to find a gesture, when you want to find how to act onstage, all you have to do is ''listen'' to the music. The composer has already seen to that. If you take the trouble to really listen with your Soul and with your Ears – and I say 'Soul' and 'Ears' because the Mind must work, but not ''too'' much also – you will find every gesture there."

The artist

Callas's most distinguishing quality was her ability to breathe life into the characters she portrayed, or in the words of Matthew Gurewitsch, "Most mysterious among her many gifts, Callas had the genius to translate the minute particulars of a life into tone of voice." Italian critic Eugenio Gara adds:

Her secret is in her ability to transfer to the musical plane the suffering of the character she plays, the nostalgic longing for lost happiness, the anxious fluctuation between hope and despair, between pride and supplication, between irony and generosity, which in the end dissolve into a superhuman inner pain. The most diverse and opposite of sentiments, cruel deceptions, ambitious desires, burning tenderness, grievous sacrifices, all the torments of the heart, acquire in her singing that mysterious truth, I would like to say, that psychological sonority, which is the primary attraction of opera.

Ethan Mordden writes, "It was a flawed voice. But then Callas sought to capture in her singing not just beauty but a whole humanity, and within her system, the flaws feed the feeling, the sour plangency and the strident defiance becoming aspects of the canto. They were literally defects of her voice; she bent them into advantages of her singing." Maestro Giulini believes, "If melodrama is the ideal unity of the trilogy of words, music, and action, it is impossible to imagine an artist in whom these three elements were more together than Callas." He recalls that during Callas's performances of ''La traviata'', "reality was onstage. What stood behind me, the audience, auditorium, La Scala itself, seemed artifice. Only that which transpired on stage was truth, life itself." Sir Rudolf Bing expressed similar sentiments:

Once one heard and saw Maria Callas—one can't really distinguish it—in a part, it was very hard to enjoy any other artist, no matter how great, afterwards, because she imbued every part she sang and acted with such incredible personality and life. One move of her hand was more than another artist could do in a whole act.

To Maestro Antonino Votto, Callas was

The last great artist. When you think this woman was nearly blind, and often sang standing a good 150 feet from the podium. But her sensitivity! Even if she could not see, she sensed the music and always came in exactly with my downbeat. When we rehearsed, she was so precise, already note-perfect... She was not just a singer, but a complete artist. It's foolish to discuss her as a voice. She must be viewed totally—as a complex of music, drama, movement. There is no one like her today. She was an esthetic phenomenon.

Callas-Tebaldi controversy

During the early 1950s, controversy arose regarding a supposed rivalry between Callas and Renata Tebaldi, an Italian lyrico spinto soprano renowned for the ravishing beauty of her voice. The contrast between Callas's often unconventional vocal qualities and Tebaldi's classically beautiful sound resurrected an argument as old as opera itself, namely, beauty of sound versus the expressive use of sound.

This "rivalry" reached a fever pitch in the mid-1950s, at times even engulfing the two women themselves, who were said by their more fanatical followers to have engaged in verbal barbs in each other's direction. Tebaldi was quoted as saying, "I have one thing that Callas doesn't have: a heart" while Callas was quoted in ''Time'' magazine as saying that comparing her with Tebaldi was like "comparing Champagne with Cognac. No, with Coca Cola." However, witnesses to the interview stated that Callas only said "champagne with cognac", and it was a bystander who quipped, "No, with Coca-Cola", but the ''Time'' reporter attributed the latter comment to Callas.

According to John Ardoin, however, these two singers should never have been compared. Tebaldi was trained by Carmen Melis, a noted verismo specialist, and she was rooted in the early 20th century Italian school of singing just as firmly as Callas was rooted in 19th century bel canto. Callas was a dramatic soprano, whereas Tebaldi considered herself essentially a lyric soprano. Callas and Tebaldi generally sang a different repertoire: in the early years of her career, Callas concentrated on the heavy dramatic soprano roles and later in her career on the bel canto repertoire, whereas Tebaldi concentrated on late Verdi and verismo roles, where her limited upper extension and her lack of a florid technique were not issues. They shared a few roles, including Tosca in Puccini's opera and ''La Gioconda'', which Tebaldi performed only late in her career.

The alleged rivalry aside, Callas made remarks appreciative of Tebaldi, and vice versa. During an interview with Norman Ross in Chicago, Callas said, "I admire Tebaldi's tone; it's beautiful—also some beautiful phrasing. Sometimes, I actually wish I had her voice." Francis Robinson of the Met wrote of an incident in which Tebaldi asked him to recommend a recording of ''La Gioconda'' in order to help her learn the role. Being fully aware of the alleged rivalry, he recommended Zinka Milanov's version. A few days later, he went to visit Tebaldi, only to find her sitting by the speakers, listening intently to Callas's recording. She then looked up at him and asked, "Why didn't you tell me Maria's was the best?"

Callas visited Tebaldi after a performance of ''Adriana Lecouvreur'' at the Met in the late 1960s, and the two were reunited. In 1978, Tebaldi spoke warmly of her late colleague and summarized this rivalry:

This rivality was really building from the people of the newspapers and the fans. But I think it was very good for both of us, because the publicity was so big and it created a very big interest about me and Maria and was very good in the end. But I don’t know why they put this kind of rivality, because the voice was very different. She was really something unusual. And I remember that I was very young artist too, and I stayed near the radio every time that I know that there was something on radio by Maria.

Vocal decline

Several singers have opined that the heavy roles undertaken in her early years damaged Callas's voice. The mezzo-soprano Giulietta Simionato, Callas's close friend and frequent colleague, stated that she told Callas that she felt that the early heavy roles led to a weakness in the diaphragm and subsequent difficulty in controlling the upper register.

Louise Caselotti, who worked with Callas in 1946 and 1947, prior to her Italian debut, felt that it was not the heavy roles that hurt Callas's voice, but the lighter ones. Several singers have suggested that the heavy use of Callas's chest voice led to stridency and unsteadiness with the high notes. In his book, Callas's husband Meneghini wrote that Callas suffered an unusually early onset of menopause, which could have affected her voice. Soprano Carol Neblett once said, "A woman sings with her ovaries – you're only as good as your hormones."

Critic Henry Pleasants has stated that it was a loss of physical strength and breath-support that led to Callas's vocal problems, saying,

Singing, and especially opera singing, requires physical strength. Without it, the singer's respiratory functions can no longer support the steady emissions of breath essential to sustaining the production of focused tone. The breath escapes, but it is no longer the power behind the tone, or is only partially and intermittently . The result is a breathy sound—tolerable but hardly beautiful—when the singer sings lightly, and a voice spread and squally when under pressure.

In the same vein, Joan Sutherland, who heard Callas throughout the 1950s, said in a BBC interview,

[Hearing Callas in Norma in 1952] was a shock, a wonderful shock. You just got shivers up and down the spine. It was a bigger sound in those earlier performances, before she lost weight. I think she tried very hard to recreate the sort of “fatness” of the sound which she had when she was as fat as she was. But when she lost the weight, she couldn’t seem to sustain the great sound that she had made, and the body seemed to be too frail to support that sound that she was making. Oh, but it was oh so exciting. It was thrilling. I don’t think that anyone who heard Callas after 1955 really heard the Callas voice.

Michael Scott has proposed that Callas's loss of strength and breath support was directly caused by her rapid and progressive weight-loss, something that was noted even in her prime. Of her 1958 recital in Chicago, Robert Detmer would write, "There were sounds fearfully uncontrolled, forced beyond the too-slim singer's present capacity to support or sustain."

Photos and videos of Callas during her heavy era show a very upright posture with the shoulders relaxed and held back. On all videos of Callas from the period after her weight loss, "we watch... the constantly sinking, depressed chest and hear the resulting deterioration". This continual change in posture has been cited as visual proof of a progressive loss of breath support.

Commercial and bootleg recordings of Callas from the late 1940s to 1953—the period during which she sang the heaviest dramatic soprano roles—show no decline in the fabric of the voice, no loss in volume and no unsteadiness or shrinkage in the upper register. Of her December 1952 Lady Macbeth—coming after five years of singing the most strenuous dramatic soprano repertoire—Peter Dragadze would write for ''Opera'', "Callas's voice since last season has improved a great deal, the second passagio on the high B-Natural and C has now completely cleared, giving her an equally colored scale from top to bottom." And of her performance of Medea a year later, John Ardoin writes, "The performance displays Callas in as secure and free a voice as she will be found at any point in her career. The many top B's have a brilliant ring, and she handles the treacherous tessitura like an eager thoroughbred."

In recordings from 1954 (immediately after her 80-pound weight loss) and thereafter, "not only would the instrument lose its warmth and become thin and acidulous, but the altitudinous passages would to her no longer come easily." It is also at this time that unsteady top notes first begin to appear. Walter Legge, who produced nearly all of Callas's EMI/Angel recordings, states that Callas "ran into a patch of vocal difficulties as early as 1954": during the recording of ''La forza del destino'', done immediately after the weight loss, the "wobble had become so pronounced" that he told Callas they "would have to give away seasickness pills with every side". When asked whether he felt the weight loss affected Callas's voice, Richard Bonynge stated, "I don't feel it, I ''know'' it did. I heard her Norma in 1953, before she lost all that weight, and then again afterward, and the difference was incredible. Even more incredible was that the critics didn't write about it. When Callas was at her best vocally, she was fat, but she got only a quarter of the recognition that she got after she had become thin and was a great star."

There were others, however, who felt that the voice had benefitted from the weight loss. Of her performance of ''Norma'' in Chicago in 1954, Claudia Cassidy would write, "there is a slight unsteadiness in some of the sustained upper notes. but to me her voice is more beautiful in color, more even through the range, than it used to be". And at her performance of the same opera in London in 1957 (her first performance at Covent Garden after the weight loss), critics again felt her voice had changed for the better, that it had now supposedly become a more precise instrument, with a new focus. Many of her most critically acclaimed appearances are from the period 1954–1958 (''Norma'', ''La Traviata'', ''Sonnambula'' and ''Lucia'' of 1955, ''Anna Bolena'' of 1957, ''Medea'' of 1958, to name a few).

Callas's close friend and colleague Tito Gobbi thought that her vocal problems all stemmed from her state of mind:

I don’t think anything happened to her voice. I think she only lost confidence. She was at the top of a career that a human being could desire, and she felt enormous responsibility. She was obliged to give her best every night, and maybe she felt she wasn't [able] any more, and she lost confidence. I think this was the beginning of the end of this career.

In support of Gobbi's assertion, a bootleg recording of Callas rehearsing Beethoven's aria "Ah! Perfido" and parts of Verdi's ''La forza del destino'' shortly before her death shows her voice to be in much better shape than much of her 1960s recordings and far healthier than the 1970s concerts with Giuseppe Di Stefano.

Soprano Renée Fleming has stated that videos of Callas in the late 1950s and early 1960s reveal a posture that betrays breath-support problems:

I have a theory about what caused her vocal decline, but it's more from watching her sing than from listening. I really think it was her weight loss that was so dramatic and so quick. It's not the weight loss ''per se''... But if one uses the weight for support, and then it's suddenly gone and one doesn't develop another musculature for support, it can be very hard on the voice. And you can't estimate the toll that emotional turmoil will take as well. I was told, by somebody who knew her well, that the way Callas held her arms to her solar plexus [allowed her] to push and create some kind of support. If she were a soubrette, it would never have been an issue. But she was singing the most difficult repertoire, the stuff that requires the most stamina, the most strength.

Dramatic soprano Deborah Voigt, who lost 135 pounds after gastric bypass surgery, expressed similar thoughts concerning her own voice and body:

Much of what I did with my weight was very natural, vocally. Now I've got a different body—there's not as much of me around. My diaphragm function, the way my throat feels, is not compromised in any way. But I do have to think about it more now. I have to remind myself to keep my ribs open. I have to remind myself, if my breath starts to stack. When I took a breath before, the weight would kick in and give it that extra ''Whhoomf''! Now it doesn't do that. If I don’t remember to get rid of the old air and re-engage the muscles, the breath starts stacking, and that's when you can't get your phrase, you crack high notes.

Callas herself attributed her problems to a loss of confidence brought about by a loss of breath support, even though she does not make the connection between her weight and her breath support. In an April 1977 interview with journalist Philippe Caloni, she stated,

"My best recordings were made when I was skinny, and I say ''skinny'', not slim, because I worked a lot and couldn't gain weight back; I became even too skinny. . . I had my greatest successes--Lucia, Sonnambula, Medea, Anna Bolena--when I was skinny as a nail. Even for my first time here in Paris in 1958 when the show was broadcast through Eurovision, I was skinny. Really skinny."

And shortly before her death, Callas confided her own thoughts on her vocal problems to Peter Dragadze:

I never lost my voice, but I lost strength in my diaphragm. ... Because of those organic complaints, I lost my courage and boldness. My vocal cords were and still are in excellent condition, but my 'sound boxes' have not been working well even though I have been to all the doctors. The result was that I overstrained my voice, and that caused it to wobble. (''Gente'', October 1, 1977)

Whether Callas's vocal decline was due to ill health, early menopause, over-use and abuse of her voice, loss of breath-support, loss of confidence, or weight loss will continue to be debated. Whatever the cause may have been, her singing career was effectively over by age 40, and even at the time of her death at age 53, according to Walter Legge, "she ought still to have been singing magnificently".

Scandals and later career

The latter half of Callas's career was marked by a number of scandals. During performances of ''Madama Butterfly'' in Chicago, Callas was confronted by a process server who handed her papers about a lawsuit brought by Eddy Bagarozy, who claimed he was her agent. Callas was photographed with her mouth turned in a furious snarl. The photo was sent around the world and gave rise to the myth of Callas as a temperamental prima donna and a "Tigress". In 1956, just before her debut at the Metropolitan Opera, ''Time'' ran a damaging cover story about Callas, with special attention paid to her difficult relationship with her mother and some unpleasant exchanges between the two.

In 1957, Callas was starring as Amina in ''La sonnambula'' at the Edinburgh International Festival with the forces of La Scala. Her contract was for four performances, but due to the great success of the series, La Scala decided to put on a fifth performance. Callas told the La Scala officials that she was physically exhausted and that she had already committed to a previous engagement, a party thrown for her by her friend Elsa Maxwell in Venice. Despite this, La Scala announced a fifth performance, with Callas billed as Amina. Callas refused to stay and went on to Venice. Despite the fact that she had fulfilled her contract, she was accused of walking out on La Scala and the festival. La Scala officials did not defend Callas or inform the press that the additional performance was not approved by Callas. Renata Scotto took over the part, which was the start of her international career.

In January 1958, Callas was to open the Rome Opera House season with ''Norma'', with Italy's president in attendance. The day before the opening night, Callas alerted the management that she was not well and that they should have a standby ready. She was told "No one can double Callas". After being treated by doctors, she felt better on the day of performance and decided to go ahead with the opera. A survived bootleg recording of the first act reveals Callas sounding ill. Feeling that her voice was slipping away, she felt that she could not complete the performance, and consequently, she cancelled after the first act. She was accused of walking out on the president of Italy in a fit of temperament, and pandemonium broke out. Press coverage aggravated the situation. A newsreel included file footage of Callas from 1955 sounding well, intimating the footage was of rehearsals for the Rome Norma, with the voiceover narration, "Here she is in rehearsal, sounding perfectly healthy", followed by "If you want to hear Callas, don't get all dressed up. Just go to a rehearsal; she usually stays to the end of those." The scandal became notorious as the "Rome Walkout". Callas brought a lawsuit against the Rome Opera House, but by the time the case was settled thirteen years later and the Rome Opera was found to be at fault for having refused to provide an understudy, Callas's career was already over.

Callas's relationship with La Scala had also started to become strained after the Edinburgh incident, and this effectively severed her major ties with her artistic home. Later in 1958, Callas and Rudolf Bing were in discussion about her season at the Met. She was scheduled to perform in Verdi's ''La traviata'' and in ''Macbeth'', two very different operas which almost require totally different singers. Callas and the Met could not reach an agreement, and before the opening of ''Medea'' in Dallas, Bing sent a telegram to Callas terminating her contract. Headlines of "Bing Fires Callas" appeared in newspapers around the world. Maestro Nicola Rescigno later recalled, "That night, she came to the theater, looking like an empress: she wore an ermine thing that draped to the floor, and she had every piece of jewellery she ever owned. And she said, 'You all know what's happened. Tonight, for me, is a very difficult night, and I will need the help of ''every'' one of you.' Well, she proceeded to give a performance [of ''Medea''] that was historical."

Bing would later say that Callas was the most difficult artist he ever worked with, "because she was so much more intelligent. Other artists, you could get around. But Callas you could not get around. She knew ''exactly'' what she wanted, and ''why'' she wanted it." Despite this, Bing's admiration for Callas never wavered, and in September 1959, he sneaked into La Scala in order to listen to Callas record ''La Gioconda'' for EMI. Callas and Bing reconciled in the mid 1960s, and Callas returned to the Met for two performances of Tosca with her friend Tito Gobbi.

In her final years as a singer, she sang in ''Medea'', ''Norma'', and ''Tosca'', most notably her Paris, New York, and London Toscas of January–February 1964, and her last performance on stage, on July 5, 1965, at Covent Garden. A television film of Act 2 of the Covent Garden ''Tosca'' of 1964 was broadcast in Britain on February 9, 1964, giving a rare view of Callas in performance and, specifically, of her on-stage collaboration with Tito Gobbi.

In 1969, the Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini cast Callas in her only non-operatic acting role, as the Greek mythological character of Medea, in his film by that name. The production was grueling, and according to the account in Ardoin's ''Callas, the Art and the Life'', Callas is said to have fainted after a day of strenuous running back and forth on a mudflat in the sun. The film was not a commercial success, but as Callas's only film appearance, it documents her stage presence.

From October 1971 to March 1972, Callas gave a series of master classes at the Juilliard School in New York. These classes later formed the basis of Terrence McNally's 1995 play ''Master Class''. Callas staged a series of joint recitals in Europe in 1973 and in the U.S., South Korea, and Japan in 1974 with the tenor Giuseppe Di Stefano. Critically, this was a musical disaster owing to both performers' worn-out voices. However, the tour was an enormous popular success. Audiences thronged to hear the two performers, who had so often appeared together in their prime. Her final public performance was on November 11, 1974, in Sapporo, Japan.

Onassis and the final years

In 1957, while still married to husband Giovanni Battista Meneghini, Callas was introduced to Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis at a party given in her honour by Elsa Maxwell after a performance in Donizetti's ''Anna Bolena''. The affair that followed received much publicity in the popular press, and in November 1959, Callas left her husband. Michael Scott asserts that Onassis was not why Callas largely abandoned her career, but that he offered her a way out of a career that was made increasingly difficult by scandals and by vocal resources that were diminishing at an alarming rate. Franco Zeffirelli, on the other hand, recalls asking Callas in 1963 why she had not practiced her singing, and Callas responding that "I have been trying to fulfill my life as a woman." According to one of her biographers, Callas and Onassis had a child, a boy, who died hours after he was born on March 30, 1960. In his book about his wife, Meneghini states categorically that Maria Callas was unable to bear children. As well, various sources dismiss Gage's claim, as they note that the birth certificates Gage used to prove of this "secret child" were issued in 1998, twenty-one years after Callas's death. Still other sources claim that Callas had at least one abortion while involved with Onassis. The relationship ended nine years later in 1968, when Onassis left Callas in favour of Jacqueline Kennedy. However, the Onassis family's private secretary, Kiki, writes in her memoir that even while Aristotle was with Jackie, he frequently met up with Maria in Paris, where they resumed what had now become a clandestine affair.

Callas spent her last years living largely in isolation in Paris and died at age 53 on September 16, 1977, of a myocardial infarction (heart attack). A funerary liturgy was held at Agios Stephanos (St. Stephen's) Greek Orthodox Cathedral on rue Georges-Bizet, Paris, on September 20, 1977, and her ashes were interred at the Père Lachaise Cemetery. After being stolen and later recovered, they were scattered over the Aegean Sea, off the coast of Greece, according to her wish.

During a 1978 interview, upon being asked "Was it worth it to Maria Callas? She was a lonely, unhappy, often difficult woman," music critic and Callas's friend John Ardoin replied,

That is such a difficult question. There are times when certain people are blessed--and cursed--with an extraordinary gift, in which the gift is almost greater than the human being. Callas was one of these people. It was as if her own wishes, her life, her own happiness were all subservient to this incredible, incredible gift that she was given, this gift that reached out and taught us things about music that we knew very well, but showed us new things, things we never thought about, new possibilities. I think that is why singers admire her so. I think that’s why conductors admire her so. I know it’s why I admire her so. And she paid a tremendously difficult and expensive price for this career. I don’t think she always understood what she did or why she did it. She usually had a tremendous effect on audiences and on people. But it was not something she could always live with gracefully or happily. I once said to her “It must be a very enviable thing to be Maria Callas.” And she said, “No, it’s a very terrible thing to be Maria Callas, because it’s a question of trying to understand something you can never really understand.” She couldn’t really explain what she did. It was all done by instinct. It was something embedded deep within her.

Legacy

In late 2004, opera and film director Franco Zeffirelli made what many consider a bizarre claim that Callas may have been murdered by her confidant, Greek pianist Vasso Devetzi, in order to gain control of Callas's United States $9,000,000 estate. A more likely explanation is that Callas's death was due to heart failure brought on by (possibly unintentional) overuse of Mandrax (methaqualone), a sleeping aid.

According to biographer Stelios Galatopoulos, Devetzi insinuated herself into Callas's trust and acted virtually as her agent. This claim is corroborated by Iakintha (Jackie) Callas in her book ''Sisters,'' wherein she asserts that Devetzi conned Maria out of control of half of her estate, while promising to establish the Maria Callas Foundation to provide scholarships for young singers. After hundreds of thousands of dollars had allegedly vanished, Devetzi finally did establish the foundation.

In 2002, filmmaker Zeffirelli produced and directed a film in Callas's memory. ''Callas Forever'' was a highly fictionalized motion picture in which Callas was played by Fanny Ardant. It depicted the last months of Callas's life, when she was seduced into the making of a movie of ''Carmen'', lip-synching to her 1964 recording of that opera.

Terrence McNally's play Master Class, which premiered in 1995, presents Callas as a glamorous, commanding, larger-than-life, caustic, and surprisingly drop-dead funny pedagogue holding a voice master class. Alternately dismayed and impressed by the students who parade before her, she retreats into recollections about the glories of her own life and career, culminating in a monologue about sacrifice taken for art. Several selections of Callas actually singing are played during the recollections.

In 2007, Callas was posthumously awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. In the same year, she was voted the greatest soprano of all time by BBC Music Magazine.

The 30th anniversary of the death of Maria Callas was selected as main motif for a high value euro collectors' coins; the €10 Greek Maria Callas commemorative coin, minted in 2007. Her image is shown in the obverse of the coin, while on the reverse the National Emblem of Greece with her signature is depicted.

On December 2, 2008, on the 85th anniversary of Callas's birth, a group of Greek and Italian officials unveiled a plaque in her honor at Flower Hospital (now the Terence Cardinal Cooke Health Care Center) where she was born. Made of Carrara marble and engraved in Italy, the plaque reads, ''"Maria Callas was born in this hospital on December 2, 1923. These halls heard for the first time the musical notes of her voice, a voice which has conquered the world. To this great interpreter of universal language of music, with gratitude."''

Gus Van Sant's 2008 movie ''Milk'' features selected recordings of Callas' rendition of ''Tosca'', which, it is suggested, was an opera of which Harvey Milk was particularly fond. Similarly, Jonathan Demme's 1993 movie ''Philadelphia'' features a recording by Callas.

A number of musical artists including Linda Ronstadt, Patti Smith and Emmylou Harris have mentioned Callas as a great musical influence, and some have paid tribute to Callas in their own music:

R.E.M. mention Callas in their song "E-Bow the Letter" from the album ''New Adventures in Hi-Fi''.

Enigma named a song which featured samples of Callas's voice, on their 1991 album ''MCMXC a.D.'', "Callas Went Away".

Buffalo Tom's 2007 album ''Three Easy Pieces'' contains the song "C.C. and Callas", which appears to be about songwriter Chris Colbourn's reflections on Callas.

The Fatima Mansions's 1994 release ''Lost in the Former West'' featured the single "The Loyaliser", where a passing reference is made to Callas.

La Diva, on Celine Dion's 2007 French language album ''D'elles'' is about Maria Callas. The track samples the 1956 recording of ''La Boheme''.

Singer/songwriter Rufus Wainwright mentions Callas in his song "Beauty Mark", from his album ''Rufus Wainwright''. Rufus is known to be an opera fan, particularly passionate about Callas's work. In an interview to the Spanish newspaper ''El País'', he declared that one of the things anyone should do at least once in a lifetime was to listen to a Maria Callas album after a night out, if possible during sunrise. On Jonathan Ross' Radio 2 show he stated that Lord Harewood's interview of Callas is part of the inspiration for his opera ''Prima Donna''.

Jason Mraz lists her performance of "O mio babbino caro" as a romantic musical influence for him.

Ben Sollee mentions her in his song "Mute with a Bullhorn."

Band Faithless sampled her voice on the intro to one of their songs on ''Reverence'', "Drifting Away".

The Mountain Goats mention Callas in their song "Horseradish Road" from the album ''The Coroner's Gambit''.

Tom Stoppard's 1982 play ''The Real Thing'' includes the line, 'I was taken once to Covent Garden to hear a woman called Callas in a sort of foreign musical with no dancing which people were donating kidneys to get tickets for... Not even close. That woman would have had a job getting into the top thirty if she was hyped.'

She can be heard singing selections from ''Norma'' at several points in ''Lorenzo's Oil''.

Notable recordings

All recordings are in mono unless otherwise indicated. Live performances are typically available on multiple labels.

Verdi, ''Nabucco'', conducted by Vittorio Gui, live performance, Napoli, 20 December 1949

Verdi, ''Il trovatore'', conducted by Guido Picco, live performance, Mexico City, June 20, 1950

Verdi, ''Aida'', conducted by Oliviero De Fabritiis, live performance, Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City, July 3, 1951

Ponchielli, ''La Gioconda'', conducted by Antonino Votto, studio recording for Fonit Cetra, September 1952

Bellini, ''Norma'', conducted by Vittorio Gui, live performance, Covent Garden, London, November 18, 1952

Verdi, ''Macbeth'', conducted by Victor de Sabata, live performance, La Scala, Milan, December 7, 1952

Bellini, ''I puritani'', conducted by Tullio Serafin, studio recording for EMI, March–April 1953

Mascagni, ''Cavalleria rusticana'', conducted by Tullio Serafin, studio recording for EMI, August 1953

Puccini, ''Tosca'', conducted by Victor de Sabata, studio recording for EMI, August 1953.

Verdi, ''La traviata'', conducted by Gabriele Santini, studio recording for Fonit Cetra, September 1953

Cherubini, ''Medea'', conducted by Leonard Bernstein, live performance, La Scala, Milan, December 10, 1953

Leoncavallo, ''Pagliacci'', conducted by Tullio Serafin, studio recording for EMI, June 1954

Spontini, ''La vestale'', conducted by Antonino Votto, live performance, La Scala, Milan, December 7, 1954

Verdi, ''La traviata'', conducted by Carlo Maria Giulini, live performance, La Scala, Milan, May 28, 1955

Puccini, ''Madama Butterfly'', conducted by Herbert von Karajan, studio recording for EMI, August 1955

Verdi, ''Aida'', conducted by Tullio Serafin, studio recording for EMI, August 1955

Verdi, ''Rigoletto'', conducted by Tullio Serafin, studio recording for EMI, September 1955

Donizetti, ''Lucia di Lammermoor'', conducted by Herbert von Karajan, live performance, Berlin, September 29, 1955

Bellini, ''Norma'', conducted by Antonino Votto, live performance, La Scala, Milan, December 7, 1955.

Verdi, ''Il trovatore'', conducted by Herbert von Karajan, studio recording for EMI, August 1956

Puccini, ''La bohème'', conducted by Antonino Votto, studio recording for EMI, August–September 1956. Like her later recording of Carmen, this was her only performance of the complete opera, as she never appeared onstage in it.

Verdi, ''Un ballo in maschera'', conducted by Antonino Votto, studio recording for EMI, September 1956

Rossini, ''The Barber of Seville'', conducted by Alceo Galliera, studio recording for EMI in stereo, February 1957

Bellini, ''La sonnambula'', conducted by Antonino Votto, studio recording for EMI, March 1957

Donizetti, ''Anna Bolena'', conducted by Gianandrea Gavazzeni, live performance, La Scala, Milan, April 14, 1957

Bellini, ''La sonnambula'', conducted by Antonino Votto, live performance, Cologne, July 4, 1957

Puccini, ''Turandot'', conducted by Tullio Serafin, studio recording for EMI, July 1957

Cherubini, ''Medea'', conducted by Tullio Serafin, studio recording for Ricordi in stereo, September 1957

Verdi, ''Un ballo in maschera'', conducted by Gianandrea Gavazzeni, live performance, La Scala, Milan, December 7, 1957

Verdi, ''La traviata'', conducted by Franco Ghione, live performance, Lisbon, March 27, 1958

''Mad Scenes'' (excerpts from ''Anna Bolena'', Bellini's ''Il pirata'' and Ambroise Thomas's ''Hamlet''), conducted by Nicola Rescigno, studio recording for EMI in stereo, September 1958

Cherubini, ''Medea'' conducted by Nicola Rescigno, live performance at the Dallas Civic Opera in 1958; considered to be Callas's most notable performance of Cherubini's opera.

Ponchielli, ''La Gioconda'', conducted by Antonino Votto, studio recording for EMI in stereo, September 1959

Puccini, ''Tosca'', conducted by Carlo Felice Cillario, live performance, London, January 1964

Bizet, ''Carmen'', conducted by Georges Prêtre, studio recording for EMI in stereo, 1964. It is her only performance of the role, and her only performance of the complete opera; she never appeared in it onstage. The recording used the recitatives added after Bizet's death. Callas's performance caused critic Harold C. Schonberg to speculate in his book ''The Glorious Ones'' that Callas perhaps should have sung mezzo roles instead of simply soprano ones.

Puccini, ''Tosca'', conducted by Georges Prêtre, studio recording for EMI in stereo, December 1964.

References

In "All love (Solo amore)" cd - June 2010,Santeramo Musica Release - by Giovanni Tangorra composer, a track her dedicated: "Rainha Maria (Onassis story)": singer Marika Spadafino, guitar Nicola Albano

Bibliography

Stassinopoulos, Arianna, ''Maria Callas: The Woman Behind The Legend'', New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981, ISBN 0-671-25583-5

External links

Category:1923 births Category:1977 deaths Category:Burials at Père Lachaise Cemetery Category:Cardiovascular disease deaths in France Category:Deaths from myocardial infarction Category:Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award winners Category:Greek artists Category:Greek female singers Category:Greek opera singers Category:Greek sopranos Category:Operatic sopranos

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Name	Aristotle Socrates Onassis
Birth date	January 15, 1906
Birth place	Smyrna, Ottoman Empire
Origin	Greece
Death date	March 15, 1975
Death place	Neuilly-sur-Seine, France
Occupation	Shipping
Nationality	Greek, Argentine
Spouse
Children	Alexander Christina
Step-children	Caroline Kennedy John F. Kennedy, Jr.
Relations	Socrates Onassis(father)Penelope Onassis(mother)Artemis Garoufalidi (sister)Kalliroi (half-sister)Merope (half-sister) }}

Aristotle Sokratis Onassis (, ''Aristotelis Onasis''; 15 January 1906 – 15 March 1975), commonly called Ari or Aristo Onassis, was a prominent Greek shipping magnate. Some sources claim he was born in 1900 but that he later changed his date of birth so as to avoid deportation from Turkey.

Early life

Onassis was born in Karatass, a suburb of Smyrna (now İzmir, Turkey) to Socrates and Penelope Onassis (née Dologu). Onassis had one full-sister, Artemis, and two half-sisters, Kalliroi and Merope, by his father's second marriage following Penelope's death. Socrates Onassis came from the village of Moutalasski (now named Talas), near Cappadocia in Asia Minor, which is the present-day Kayseri province, in central Turkey. A successful shipping entrepreneur, he was able to send his children to prestigious schools. At the age of 16, Aristotle Onassis spoke three foreign languages: English, Spanish and Turkish, when he graduated from the local Evangelical Greek School .

After being briefly administered by Greece (1919–1922) in the aftermath of the allied victory in World War I, Smyrna was re-taken by Turkey and the Onassis family's substantial property holdings were lost, causing them to become refugees fleeing to Greece after the Great Fire of Smyrna. During this period Aristotle Onassis lost three uncles, an aunt and her husband Chrysostomos Konialidis and their daughter, who were burned to death on fire in a church in Thyatira where 500 Christians were seeking shelter from the Great Fire of Smyrna.

In 1923, Aristotle Onassis left for Buenos Aires, Argentina by Nansen passport, reportedly carrying just $60 in his pocket, and got his first job with the British United River Plate Telephone Company.

Business

Argentina

Onassis imported tobacco from Turkey with help from his father. The tobacco was softer than the Cuban variety, and he was sure it would appeal to women more. After the failure of a contract with Juan Gaona, the director of a major Argentine company, Onassis turned to making his own cigarettes. After some time managing this business and holding a job with British United River, he made a considerable amount of money. His power and influence increased rapidly; he frequently attended important social events, and in 1925 he received both Argentine and Greek citizenship. According to Peter Evans and Christian Cafarakis (a former employee) a considerable part of the tobacco was smuggled, helping him to rapidly accrue his first million dollars. In 1928, Onassis traded with Greece to the value of US$2,800,000 just four years after his arrival in Argentina. This was due in part to other illegitimate activities such as sabotaging his competitors and fraudulently using the name of a famous cigarette company: Bis. This last enterprise was profitable but ended when the real Bis company sued him.

The 1000% increase in tax on imported products from countries with no Greek trade agreement, announced in 1929, threatened Onassis' South American business. Argentina had few commercial relationships with Greece. With the help of his confidante, Costa Gratsos, Onassis corresponded the prime minister of Greece Eleutherios Venizelos and met with the foreign minister Andreas Michalakopoulos to discuss the tax position, finally winning support with the help of extensive bribes. In 1931, again with Michalakopoulos' help, Onassis was granted tax exemptions for his freight ships and the title of Vice Consul. This position greatly increased the status of Onassis as well as his business. The biographer Evans states that Onassis exchanged vast sums of Greek currency on the black market, in spite of Gratsos' disapproval.

In 1954, the FBI investigated Onassis for fraud against the U.S. government. He was charged with violating the citizenship provision of the shipping laws which require that all ships displaying the U.S. flag be owned by U.S. citizens. Onassis entered a guilty plea and paid $7 million.

Onassis founded Olympic Airways (today Olympic Air), the Greek national carrier, in 1957. To finance his ships he used a method that he, in his own words, described as utilizing OPM ('Other People's Money'). He contracted to transport ore in ships he did not yet have, and closed several contracts to transport oil with tankers that had not yet been built. Onassis made large profits when the big oil companies like Mobil, Socony, and Texaco signed long-term contracts at fixed prices with him for the use of his fleet, while having trouble managing their own fleet which operated under US flags and thus at high cost. Onassis' fleet had Panamanian flags and sailed tax-free while operating at low cost. Because of this, Onassis could turn a profit in every transaction, even though he charged one of the lowest prices in the merchant navy market. He could recoup the cost of a tanker with a six-month contract. The rest of the service life of the tanker, usually 20 years, yielded high profits.

Onassis' owned a fleet of freighters and tankers that exceeded the seventy vessels. Stocks accounted for one-third of his capital, held in oil companies in the USA, the Middle East, and Venezuela. He also owned additional shares that secured his control of ninety-five multinational businesses on five continents. He owned gold processing plants in Argentina and Uruguay and a large share in an airline in Latin America and $4 million dollars worth of investments in Brazil. Also, he owned companies like Olympic Maritime and Olympic Tourist, a chemical company in Persia, apartments in Paris, London, Monte Carlo, Athens, Acapulco, a castle in South France, the Olympic Tower, a fifty-two story high-rise in Manhattan, another building in Sutton Place, Olympic Airways and Air Navigation, the islands Scorpios and Sparta, the yacht "Christina" and, finally, deposit accounts and accounts in treasuries in two hundred and seventeen banks in the whole world.

Whaling

Between 1950 and 1956, Onassis had success whale hunting off the Peruvian coast. His first expedition made a net profit of US$4.5 million. That business ended when the ''Norwegian Whales Gazette'' made accusations based on sailors' testimonials, such as one given by Bruno Schalaghecke who worked on the whaler Olympic Challenger: "Pieces of fresh meat from the 124 whales we killed yesterday still remains on the deck. Among them all, just one could be considered adult. All animals that pass within the range of the harpoon are killed in cold blood". The venture came to an end after the business was sold to Kyokuyo Hogei Kaisha Whaling Company, one of the biggest Japanese whaling companies, for $8.5 million

The Greek Colonel affair

According to the Evans biography, four days after his marriage with Jacqueline, Onassis was in close discussions with Colonel George Papadopoulos, who Evans states was on Onassis' extensive bribery list. Onassis and Papadopoulos were planning what they referred to as the "greatest business" in Greece. This project involved building an oil refinery, shipyards, power plants, and several aluminum facilities. The project was officially named the Omega Project. The project was heavily criticized by people such as Helen Vlachos, a journalist from Athens.

The Omega Project negotiations with the Papadopoulos government ended with Onassis losing part of the project to his competitor Stavros Niarchos. The failure was due partly to opposition from influential people within the military junta, such as Ioannis-Orlandos Rodinos, Deputy Minister of the National Economy, who opposed Onassis' offers in preference to Niarchos.

Relationships and family

Athina Livanos

Onassis married Athina Livanos, daughter of shipping magnate Stavros Livanos and Arietta Zafrikakis, on December 28, 1946. Their son, Alexander (April 30, 1948 – January 23, 1973), and daughter Christina (December 11, 1950 – November 19, 1988) after whom Onassis named his legendary super-yacht, were both born in New York City.

To Onassis his marriage to Athina was more than the fulfillment of his ambitions. He also felt that the marriage dealt a blow to his father in law and the old-money Greek traditionalists who held Onassis in very low esteem. She divorced him when she discovered her husband having sex in the saloon of her daughter's namesake yacht, the Christina, with the opera singer Maria Callas.

Maria Callas

Despite the fact they were both married, Onassis and opera diva Maria Callas embarked on an affair. They had met in 1957 during a party in Venice promoted by Elsa Maxwell. After this first encounter, Onassis commented to Spyros Skouras: "There [was] just a natural curiosity; after all, we were the most famous Greeks alive in the world".

Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy

Onassis ended his relationship with Callas to marry Jacqueline Kennedy, widow of U.S. President John F. Kennedy, on October 20, 1968. They married on Onassis's privately owned island of Skorpios.

According to Peter Evans, Onassis offered Mrs. Kennedy US$3 million for herself and $1m for each son in return for marriage. After Onassis' death she would receive US$150,000 each year for the rest of her life. The whole marital contract was discussed with Ted Kennedy and later reviewed by André Meyer, her financial consultant.

Onassis' daughter Christina made clear that she did not like Jacqueline Kennedy, and after Alexander's death, she convinced Onassis that Jacqueline had some kind of curse due to John and Robert Kennedy's murders. The already strained relationship between Aristotle and Jacqueline soon came to an end.

During their marriage, the couple resided in a home they rented in Bernardsville, New Jersey.

Death and legacy

Onassis died at age 69, on March 15, 1975 at the American Hospital of Paris in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, of respiratory failure, a complication of the myasthenia gravis that he had been suffering from during the last years of his life. According to his will, his daughter Christina was to inherit 55% of the Onassis fortune while the other 45% were used as funds for the Alexander S. Onassis Foundation set up to honor his son Alexander Onassis. This 45% was the share that his son Alexander would have inherited, had he not died in 1973. Jackie Kennedy also received her share of the estate settling for a reported $10,000,000 ($26 million according to other sources) which was negotiated by her brother-in-law Ted Kennedy (this amount would later grow to several hundred million under the financial stewardship of her companion Maurice Tempelsman). Christina's share has since passed to her only child Athina, making her one of the wealthiest women in the world.

See also

Greek shipping

Skorpios

''Christina O''

Stavros Niarchos

Notes

References

"Onassis: Pioneer in Shipping", by George M. Foustanos, 2006.

External links

Aristotle Onassis: The Golden Greek (documentary on the life of Onassis, in english language with greek subtitles)

FBI file on Aristotle Onassis

Onassis: The Richest Man in the World at imdb.com

Category:1906 births Category:1975 deaths Category:Aviation in Greece Category:Bouvier family Category:Businesspeople in aviation Category:Businesspeople in shipping Category:Businesspeople in the tobacco industry Category:Deaths from myasthenia gravis Category:Deaths from pneumonia Category:Disease-related deaths in France Category:Greek billionaires Category:Greek businesspeople Category:Greek diplomats Category:Greek Orthodox Christians Category:Greek refugees Category:Infectious disease deaths in France Category:Livanos family Aristotle Category:People from Bernardsville, New Jersey Category:Smyrniote Greeks Category:Stateless persons

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