[ChocMontePy]

I think Aristotle had the greatest mind of any human who ever lived.

The older I get the more I realize that there are a thousand true and intelligent things you can say about any topic. Magazines, journals, and libraries are full to the brim of intelligent people writing intelligent things. But an extremely minuscule portion of that huge mass is made of writing that gets right to the heart of the matter.

And Aristotle is the writer I've encountered the most who constantly gets right to the essence or core of what he's discussing, moving past the trivialities and the unessential to illuminate deep truths in a logical way. It's why a short essay like his Poetics--which in many ways is a limited work for the modern day because it deals wiih a very specific type of ancient literature--is still pored over by modern writers and screenwriters because of the deep dramatic truths it lays out.

[tokai]

On the other hand deification of Aristotle's intellect and thought hampered the development of physics for almost 1500 years.

[geye1234]

This is not (really) true. Well there's an element of truth in it, but only an element.

European philosophy was not really Aristotelian until the re-arrival of his work in the 12C, so it's hardly fair to 'blame' him for the lack of scientific development that period. When it did arrive, it was extremely controversial, and it took the genius of Aquinas (and even then, only just) for Aristotle to be accepted in Christian thought.

In the 17C, there was a much greater interest in quantitative methods than there had been previously. And some of his physics was obviously found to be wrong. But there was no discovery (and remains no discovery) that falsified broad swathes of his work. The change of interest and focus was far more important in the progress of what we now call science than the supposed rejection of Aristotle.

This is described in E.A. Burtt's Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science.

Pre-modern people were far more interested in living a morally good life (a happy life, in the Aristotelian sense of the word) than they were in controlling nature. That changed in the 17C.

[hackandthink]

You may be interested in:

"Aristotle's Physics: a Physicist's Look"

My take is that it was hard to find a better theory, the usual explanation of scholastical dogmatism is to shallow.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1312.4057

[samatman]

Insofar as that's true, it isn't a fact about Aristotle, it's a fact about the mindset of scholars who came after him.

[mykowebhn]

I agree. Look, for example, at his work on Logic, especially Categories, On Interpretation, and the Prior and Posterior Analytics.

Of course, the fields of Philosophical and Mathematical Logic have advanced since Aristotle, especially starting with the work of Frege, but that took approximately 2000 years. And before Aristotle, no work on Logic came close to what Aristotle discovered and developed. Aristotle's work on Logic was sui generis and hardly any advancement in logic occurred until Frege 2000 years later.

I feel his work in Logic alone makes him one of the greatest minds who ever lived. That doesn't take into account his contributions in other areas of philosophy, which were also significant.

[optimalsolver]

Great mind? I don't think so.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_slavery

[mbivert]

Most contemporary people can't freely dispose of their time. Their ability to move in space is restricted likewise. Aren't they essentially [part-time] slaves? That is, by comparison with people who can dispose of themselves freely.

Note that I'm assuming an objective/neutral definition of "slavery", and not the usual "slavery=bad thing".

Now, we could argue that it's a matter of education, circumstances, etc. But surely you must have met people who would obstinately refuse to listen to reason, entertaining their own misery. At least IME, it's sadly a common trait.

[aspenmayer]

By that metric, Jesus didn’t free the slaves, either, and he said slaves should obey their masters.

[cgh]

This is addressed in the article.