This is a Renaissance man who lived

me David Edmonds and me Nigel Warton.

Philosophy Bites is available at

www philosophy Bites.com

Aristotle was a Renaissance man who lived almost 2 millennia before the Renaissance.

He wrote on many many subjects, politics, rhetoric, biology, logic, music, poetry and

much more. But none of his writings attract more interest than those

on ethics. Terry Irwin has spent most of his career at Cornell University, but is now professor

of ancient philosophy at Oxford.

Terence Irwin, welcome to Philosophy Bites.

Thank you for coming.

The topic we're focusing on today is Aristotle's ethics. Could you just tell us a bit about who

Aristotle was? Well some of the bare bones about what we know he was born in

384 BC, he was son of a Macedonian and that's significant in that from the

point of view of Athenians he was barely a Greek. He spent 20 years as a member of Plato's Academy and then he left Athens on

Plato's death in 347. He travelled around the Eastern Aegean a wee bit and among other things he engaged in natural history.

He returned to Athens in 338 and set up his own philosophical school, the Lyceum.

And he organized a large program of research,

not only in philosophy, as we would think of it now,

but also in biology and in constitutional history, chronology and many other things.

And he died in 322 just a year after Alexander the Great died, whom Aristotle was supposed to have taught.

And one of the things he taught at the Lyceum was ethics, how to live.

...