Coordinates	15°48′00″N47°54′00″N
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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Coordinates	15°48′00″N47°54′00″N
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

Coordinates	15°48′00″N47°54′00″N
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

This is a list of people whose names in English are commonly appended with the phrase "''the Great''", or who were called that or an equivalent phrase in their own language. Other languages have their own suffixes such as ''e Bozorg'' and ''e azam'' in Persian and Urdu respectively.

In Persia, the title "the Great" at first seems to be a colloquial version of the Old Persian title "Great King". This title was first used by the conqueror Cyrus II of Persia.

The Persian title was inherited by Alexander III of Macedon (336–323 BC) when he conquered the Persian Empire, and the epithet "Great" eventually became personally associated with him. The first reference (in a comedy by Plautus) assumes that everyone knew who "Alexander the Great" was; however, there is no earlier evidence that Alexander III of Macedon was called "''the Great''".

The early Seleucid kings, who succeeded Alexander in Persia, used "Great King" in local documents, but the title was most notably used for Antiochus the Great (223–187 BC).

Later rulers and commanders began to use the epithet "the Great" as a personal name, like the Roman general Pompey. Others received the surname retrospectively, like the Carthaginian Hanno and the Indian emperor Ashoka the Great. Once the surname gained currency, it was also used as an honorific surname for people without political careers, like the philosopher Albert the Great.

As there are no objective criteria for "greatness", the persistence of later generations in using the designation greatly varies. For example, Louis XIV of France was often referred to as "The Great" in his lifetime but is rarely called such nowadays, while Frederick II of Prussia is still called "The Great". A later Hohenzollern - Wilhelm I - was often called "The Great" in the time of his grandson Wilhelm II, but rarely later.

Rulers

Abbas I of Persia (1571–1629), Shah of Iran

Akbar (1542–1605), ruler of the Mughal Empire of South Asia, mainly India

Alain I of Albret (1440–1522), French aristocrat

Alexander the Great (356-323 BC), King of Macedonia, Persia, Greece, Egypt, and all of Mesopotamia

Alexander I of Georgia (1386–1446), King of Georgia

Alfonso III of León (c. 848-910), King of León, Galicia and Asturias

Alfred the Great (848/849-899), King of Wessex

Antiochus III the Great (c. 241–187 BC), ruler of the Seleucid Empire

Ashoka the Great (c. 304–232 BC), Indian emperor of the Maurya dynasty

Ashot I of Iberia “the Great”(died 826/830), presiding prince of Iberia (modern Georgia),

Askia Mohammad I (c. 1442–1538), ruler of the Songhai Empire

Bhumibol Adulyadej (born 1927), King of Thailand

Bolesław I Chrobry (967-1025), sometimes called "the Great", first King of Poland

Bruno the Great (925–965), Archbishop of Cologne and Duke of Lotharingia (also listed in the following section)

Buddha Yodfa Chulaloke (1736–1809), founder and ruler of the Rattanakosin Kingdom (in what is now Thailand)

Cnut the Great (c. 985 or 995-1035), King of Denmark, England, Norway and parts of Sweden

Casimir III the Great (1310–1370), King of Poland

Catherine the Great (1729–1796), Empress of Russia

Chandragupta II (reigned 375-413/415), also known as Vikramaditya, ruler of the Gupta empire in India

Charlemagne (died 814), King of the Franks and Emperor of the Romans

Chulalongkorn (1853–1910), King of Siam (now Thailand)

Chlothar II (584-629), King of Neustria and King of the Franks

Conrad, Margrave of Meissen (c. 1097-1157), Margrave of Meissen

Constantine I (c. 272-337), Roman emperor

Cyaxares the Great (c. 625-585 BC), third king of Media

Cyrus the Great (c. 600 BC or 576 BC–530 BC), founder and ruler of the Persian or Achaemenid Empire

Darius the Great (550 – 486 BC), third ruler of the Persian Empire

Devapala (died 850), ruler of the Pala Empire in the Indian subcontinent

Dionysius I, Greek tyrant of Syracuse

Ferdinand I of León and Castile (c. 1015–1065), King of León and Count of Castile

Frederick the Great (1712–1786), King of Prussia

Genghis Khan (1162?-1227), founder and Great Khan of the Mongol Empire

Gero (c. 900–965), ruler of Marca Geronis, a very large march in Europe

Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden (1594–1632), King of Sweden, founder of the Swedish Empire, and noted military leader

Gwanggaeto the Great, King of Goguryeo, one of the Three Kingdoms of Korea

Hanno the Great, the name of three leaders of Carthage, in the 4th, 3rd, and 2nd centuries BC

Henry I, Duke of Burgundy (946–1002)

Henry IV of France (1553–1610), King of France and King of Navarre

Herod the Great (73/74 BC-4 BC), King of Judea

Hugh the Great (898-956), Duke of the Franks and Count of Paris

Hugh Magnus of France (1007–1025), co-King of France

Hugh I, Count of Vermandois (1057–1101)

Humphrey I de Bohun (died c. 1123), Anglo-Norman aristocrat

Ivan III of Russia (1440–1505), Tsar of Russia

John I of Portugal (1358–1433), King of Portugal and the Algarve

John II of Aragon (1398–1479), King of Aragon and, through his wife, King of Navarre

Justinian I (483-565), Byzantine Emperor

Kamehameha I (c. 1758-1819), first King of Hawai'i

Kanishka (died c. 127), ruler of the Kushan Empire in Central Asia and parts of India

Kvirike III of Kakheti (1010–1029), King of Kakheti in eastern Georgia

Kublai Khan (1215–1294), Mongol ruler in the 13th century and Emperor of China; founder of the Yuan Dynasty

Llywelyn the Great (c. 1172–1240), Prince of Gwynedd and de facto ruler of most of Wales

Louis I of Hungary (1326–1382), King of Hungary, Croatia and Poland

Mangrai the Great (1238–1317), Lanna, northern Thailand

Emperor Meiji (1852–1912), Emperor of Japan

Mircea I of Wallachia (1355–1418)

Mithridates II of Parthia (died 88 BC), ruler of the Parthian Empire (in present day Iran)

Mithridates VI of Pontus (134 BC–63 BC), ruler of Pontus and the Bosporan Kingdom

Mstislav I of Kiev (1076–1132), Grand Prince of Kievan Rus

Narai (1633–1688), King of Ayutthaya (in what is now modern Thailand)

Naresuan (1555–1605), King of Ayutthaya

Odo the Great (died c. 735), Duke of Aquitaine

Otto I, Holy Roman Emperor (912-973)

K'inich Janaab' Pakal (603-683), ruler of the Mayan city-state of Palenque

Parakramabahu I of Polonnaruwa (1123–1186), King of Sri Lanka

Peter Krešimir IV of Croatia (died 1075), King of Croatia

Peter the Great (1672–1725), Tsar of Russia

Peter III of Aragon (1239–1285), King of Aragon and King of Sicily

Pompey (106 BC-48 BC), military and political leader of the late Roman Republic, rival of Julius Caesar

Radama I (1793–1828), first king of greater Madagascar

Raja Raja Chola I (c. 947-1014), Indian emperor of the Cholas.

Rajendra Chola I (reigned 1014–1044), Tamil King of India

Ramesses II (reigned 1279 BC – 1213 BC), considered the greatest pharaoh of Ancient Egypt

Ram Khamhaeng (around 1237 to 1247-1298), King of Sukhothai (in present day Thailand)

Ramon Berenguer III, Count of Barcelona (1082–1131), also Count of Provence and various other counties

Rhodri the Great (c. 820–878), King of Gwynedd (in present day Wales)

Roman the Great (after 1160-1205), Grand Prince of Kiev

Saladin (c. 1138-1193), Kurdish Sultan of Egypt and Syria, founder of the Ayyubid dynasty, and victor over the Crusaders

Samudragupta (c. 335–375), ruler of the Gupta empire in the Indian subcontinent

Sancho III of Navarre (c. 992-1035), King of Kingdom of Navarre

Sargon of Akkad (died c. 2215 BC), ruler of the Akkadian Empire

Sejong the Great (1397–1450), Korean king

Shapur II (309-379), king of the Sassanid Empire, Persia

Simeon I of Bulgaria (864/865-927), ruler of the First Bulgarian Empire

Stephen III of Moldavia (1433–1504), Prince of Moldavia (Romania)

Stephen Uroš IV Dušan of Serbia (c. 1308-1355), King of Serbia and Emperor of the Serbs and Greeks

Taksin (1734–1782), King of the Thonburi Kingdom (Thailand)

Timur (1336–1405), better known as Tamerlane, founder of the Timurid Dynasty

Theobald II, Count of Champagne (1090–1151), Count of Blois and of Chartres as Theobald IV, Count of Champagne and of Brie

Theodoric the Great (454-526), King of the Ostrogoths, regent of the Visigoths and a viceroy of the Byzantine Empire

Theodosius I (347-395), Roman emperor

Tigranes the Great (140-55 BC), Emperor of Armenia

Tiridates III of Armenia (285-339), King of Armenia

Umar (c. 586 to 590–644), second caliph of the Muslim Empire

Valdemar I of Denmark (1131–1182), King of Denmark

Valentinian I (364-375), Roman Emperor

Vladimir I of Kiev (c. 958-1015), ruler of Kievan Rus

Vytautas (c. 1350-1430), archduke of the Lithuanian Grand Duchy

William I, Count of Burgundy (1020–1087), Count of Burgandy and Mâcon

William V, Duke of Aquitaine (969-1030), also Count of Poitou

Xerxes I (519-465 BC), King of Kings of the Achaemenid Empire (Persia)

Yu the Great (c. 2200-2100 BC), legendary ruler in ancient China

Religious figures

Abraham the Great of Kashkar (ca. 492-586), monk and saint of the Assyrian Church of the East

Abraham Kidunaia (died c. 366, hermit, priest, and Christian saint of Mesopotamia

Albertus Magnus (1193/1206–1280), medieval German philosopher and theologian

Anthony the Great (c. 251–356), early Christian saint of Egypt

Babai the Great (c. 551–628), Assyrian church leader

Basil of Caesarea (330-379), Greek bishop and theologian

Bruno the Great (925–965), Archbishop of Cologne and Duke of Lotharingia (also listed in the previous section)

Euthymius the Great (377-473), abbot and Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox saint

Gertrude the Great (1256-c. 1302), German Benedictine, mystic, theologian and Roman Catholic saint

Pope Gregory I (c. 540-604)

Hiyya the Great, 3rd-century rabbi, Palestine

Pope John Paul II (1920–2005)

Pope Leo I (c. 391 or 400-461)

Macarius of Egypt (c. 300-391), Egyptian hermit

Pope Nicholas I (c. 800-867)

Photius I of Constantinople (c. 810–c. 893), Eastern Orthodox saint and Patriarch of Constantinople

William of Maleval (died 1157), founder of the Catholic congregation of Williamites

Other

Beli Mawr, a figure in medieval Welsh literature and genealogies

Emmy the Great, folk singer

Matteo Rosso the Great, Roman politician and father of Pope Nicholas III

Prokop the Great, Hussite general in Bohemia

See also

Epithet

List of monarchs by nickname

List of nicknames of European Royalty and Nobility: G-I

James, son of Zebedee, also known as James the Greater, one of the twelve apostles of Jesus

Ajax (mythology), called Ajax the Greater

Notes

Category:Monarchs Great, List of people known as The Category:Greatest Nationals Category:Epithets

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