Endangered Excellence

Pierre Pellegrin, Anthony Preus

Description

In Endangered Excellence, Pierre Pellegrin provides a fresh interpretation of Aristotle's Politics, revealing the extent to which Aristotle diverged from other ancient writers on politics, and the extent to which many of his positions resemble modern attitudes in political philosophy. Pellegrin highlights a number of strikingly original positions in his thought. Aristotle took humans to be inherently political, for example, even as he believed this characteristic developed more completely in men than in women, and in Greeks more than in barbarians. He maintained a nuanced and flexible conception of the way that cities ought to develop their constitutions, one that would be responsive to their particular social and historical contexts. Realist enough to recognize that virtuous men are rare and that class conflict is inevitable, Aristotle envisioned a political system that would be resilient in navigating the choppy waters of civic life. With this original approach to Aristotle's Politics, and incorporating key developments in European and English-language scholarship on the subject, Pellegrin demonstrates Aristotle's important and often unrecognized innovations in understanding political life.
Translator's Note
Abbreviations

Introduction: "Our Ancestors the Greeks"

1. The Philosopher in Politics

2. A Biological Politics?

3. The Endangered Happiness of the City

4. Citizen, City, Constitution

5. On the Positive Use of Deviance

6. The Legislator

7. The Theoretical Tools of the Legislator

8. Political Matter

Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Ancient philosophy

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 01 septembre 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438479583
• Langue: English

Extrait

ENDANGERED EXCELLENCE
SUNY series in Ancient Greek Philosophy

Anthony Preus, editor
ENDANGERED EXCELLENCE
ON THE POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF ARISTOTLE
PIERRE PELLEGRIN
Translated by Anthony Preus
Cover art © Virginie Berthemet
Original French edition: L’Excellence menacée: Sur la philosophie politique d’Aristote © Classiques Garnier, 2017
Published by State University of New York Press
© 2020 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Pellegrin, Pierre, author. | Preus, Anthony, translator.
Title: Endangered excellence : on the political philosophy of Aristotle / Pierre Pellegrin ; translated by Anthony Preus.
Description: Albany : State University of New York, 2020. | Series: SUNY series in Ancient Greek Philosophy | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020000968 (print) | LCCN 2020000969 (ebook) | ISBN 9781438479576 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438479583 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Aristotle—Political and social views. | Democracy. | Political science.
Classification: LCC JC75.D36 P45 2020 (print) | LCC JC75.D36 (ebook) | DDC 320.01—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020000968
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020000969
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Translator’s Note
Abbreviations
Introduction: “Our Ancestors the Greeks”
Chapter 1 The Philosopher in Politics
Chapter 2 A Biological Politics?
Chapter 3 The Endangered Happiness of the City
Chapter 4 Citizen, City, Constitution
Chapter 5 On the Positive Use of Deviance
Chapter 6 The Legislator
Chapter 7 The Theoretical Tools of the Legislator
Chapter 8 Political Matter
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
Translator’s Note
I have tried to capture the spirit of Pierre Pellegrin’s French in my English version; that effort has been considerably assisted by his careful reading of the translation, and his many suggestions for improvement. Translations of Aristotle and of other ancient texts have often been assisted by standard translations but amended to cohere with Pellegrin’s excellent translations of these same passages into French. I have tried to find translations of modern authors into English, and to use those where possible. They are noted in the footnotes and bibliography. Otherwise, I have translated the originals into English, again very often with Pellegrin’s advice and suggestions.
It should also be noted that Pierre Pellegrin has written a totally new conclusion for the present volume; the conclusion is translated from this new text, not from the original French edition.
Abbreviations
APo Posterior Analytics
APr Prior Analytics
DA De Anima
DC De Caelo
EE Eudemian Ethics
EN Nicomachean Ethics
Eum. Eumenides
GA Generation of Animals
HA History of Animals
IA Progression of Animals
Met. Metaphysics
PA Parts of Animals
Phys. Physics
Rep. Republic
Introduction
“Our Ancestors the Greeks”
S tudying ancient Greek political philosophy goes to the very root of our relations with the Greeks, that is to say, to the root of a peculiar and fertile mystification. It is said that the fantasized tie that the West today maintains with ancient Greece, that has taken five centuries, maybe eight, to construct, has become remarkably distorted in the last several decades. The retreat of classical studies should be in fact both the cause and a result of this weakening, but after all the number of people knowing Greek was never that great. This distancing involves so to speak every domain. Our new approach to the history of knowledge probably played an important, perhaps fundamental, role, in the divorce between the Greeks and us. For a long time, in fact, historians of science have accepted the illusion of a direct descent from ancient speculations to modern disciplines. The fact that our sciences use, even for their names, many Greek terms has contributed to that illusion. In fact, it is tempting to think that there, as almost everywhere else, the same words refer to the same realities and that, therefore, modern physics directly follows ancient physikē . This is a matter of a historical problem of first importance, opposing a continuist vision of the progress of the human spirit, which thinks that all scientists over the centuries have been dedicated to the same tasks, posing to themselves the same questions, and that science would then be the structure that they have built together, to which each has contributed his or her stones, and the discontinuist conception developed by the French school of the history of science, founded by Gaston Bachelard, which simultaneously refuses to consider the progress of science as a simple addition of discoveries and insists on the new and irreducible character of the sciences in relation to previous intellectual constructions. Thus, it is necessary to recognize that there is hardly more than a relationship of homonymy between ancient physics and that of Galileo and Newton, and in any case these two do not belong to the same history.
Greek, and more generally Greco-Roman, antiquity provides first-class material for thinking about the complex relationships between historical continuity and discontinuity, one of the subjects of the magnificent and somewhat forgotten 1969 work of Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge . 1 It’s exceptional material because the Greeks and Romans have left us an impressive number of texts that have been continuously edited, translated, analyzed, imitated, and invoked. Our relationship to classical antiquity has also long been privileged because the West, like its cultural ancestors before them, the Byzantines and Islamics, has thought of Greek and Roman thinkers as direct participants in their theoretical debates. An exceptional fate, because despite attempts to revive “the spirit of medieval philosophy” by Christians trying to slow the irreversible decline of Christianity, the Medieval Latin world, for example, has not had that sort of survival—it has for a long time been relegated to the category of obsolete intellectual universes.
What would be the basis of a continuity between us and the Greeks, when important elements of their cultural constructions and ours do not belong to the same history? Foucault has been especially sensitive to these discontinuities that are like the material of historical continuity: “In short, the history of thought, of knowledge, of philosophy, of literature seems to be seeking, and discovering, more and more discontinuities, whereas history itself appears to be abandoning the irruption of events in favour of stable structures.” 2 We will return to Foucault in our conclusion. Michel Foucault and The Archaeology of Knowledge form the frame of this study.
Nevertheless, even staying within the history of the sciences this Bachelardian position needs to be modified on several points; I will mention the three most important. First, the Greeks have left us theoretical constructions that we cannot simply delete from the history of science. Obviously, in mathematics no one would dream of expelling the Hellenic and Hellenistic contributions from the discipline, but the same goes for speculations based upon mathematics, the hydrostatics of Archimedes as well as astronomy, even though geocentric, based on the hypothesis of orbits composed of circular movements: the hypotheses of Eudoxus and Calippus, as well as those of Ptolemy, based on a system of homocentric spheres, as false as they are, are still part of the same history of science. Next, there are other fields involved that we have sometimes thrown too hastily into the bitter abyss of pre-science. That is true of Aristotle’s biology, something that I have studied for a very long time. From the start I was sensitive to its aspect that is radically strange from the point of view of modern science, notably as it takes positions dictated by metaphysical or ideological prejudices. How should we understand, for example that Aristotle has “observed” that women have fewer sutures in their skulls than men? Today I would be much more inclined to consider Aristotle as a “true” biologist. We must recognize that the Bachelardian schema functions much less well in biology than in physics. 3 Finally, if we consider only the most impressive physics of antiquity, that of Aristotle, we must surely recognize that it has posed problems that subsequently required a scientific treatment. Thus the “law” of falling bodies posited by Aristotle that establishes a relationship between the weight of the body and the speed of its fall, or more generally large sections of Aristotelian kinematics fall under a physical theory that happens to be false rather than under an alleged physical theory. That was also the case with the homocentric spheres mentioned above.
Also, the various “human sciences,” even if they don’t belong to the same history as their Greek equivalents, even when they bear the same name, nevertheless have all or nearly all a Greek, even Aristotelian, prehistory or “archaeology.” That’s one of the bases of the extraor