To most readers, Aristotle's many references to nature throughout the first book of thePoliticsimply a foundational role for nature outside and prior to politics. Aristotle, they claim, pairs nature with necessity and, thus, sets nature as a standard that fixes the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion in political life. Through readings of Aristotle on the nature of citizens, slaves, and foreigners in thePolitics, this essay argues, in contrast, that, to Aristotle, nature, especially human nature, is changeable and shaped by politics. Through an analysis of Aristotle's philosophical and scientific treatments of nature in theMetaphysicsandPhysics, this essay demonstrates that in order to preserve what he takes to be characteristic and also constitutive of a distinctively human way of living—prohaireticactivity—Aristotle is especially keen to guard against any assimilation of nature to necessity.
This article explores the conception of political theory in classical Greece. It discusses the works of classical political theorists Homer, Plato, and Aristotle and suggests that their works provide the best answers to the fundamental questions of politics. Modern and contemporary political theorists, like the Greeks, are also concerned with the possibilities, responsibilities, and the limitations of a political life. However, while modern theorists orient their analyses of the political to one particular axis of inquiry, the Greeks theorized politics by drawing all of these axes together.
This essay argues that the Republic is, among other things, a meditation by Plato on the proximity of philosophy and war and on the dangers of that proximity for philosophy and politics. It is also Plato's reflection on the conduct, execution, and impact of a particular war, the panHellenic Peloponnesian War, in whose aftermath the dialogue was written and against whose backdrop it is set. Destabilizing settled rules of engagement and categories of identification, that war made especially urgent the practice of independent judgment and its virtues, whose inculcation, I show, amount to the education to philosophy that is the dialogue as a whole.
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