Aristotle sets the example that Thomas Aquinas follows in the Summa. We are reading chapters viii and ix of Book IX of the Nicomachean Ethics. The Philosopher makes the best case against two positions that he ultimately argues for:
In “Sanity” I used a photo of the same skeletal building from the other side
Does this sound like Aristotle?
It might seem like it’s easier to love others than to love yourself, but it’s tough to build healthy relationships if you don’t love yourself first.
The sentence is from a WikiHow page, “How to Love Yourself: Treat Yourself Like Your Own Best Friend.” Back in in the 1970s, I thought something like it was an excuse for self-indulgence.
Atatürk City Forest
Wednesday, April 10, 2024
Wealth can keep you from going to hell. At least, that’s what a rich old man tells Socrates, in Book I of the Republic of Plato. Cephalus gives us a prime example of an assertion made not because it is true, but because the speaker fears it might not be true.
One of the few moments of the year when the rising sun crosses our living room and reaches the kitchen.
Monday, April 8, 2024
According to the last three chapters of Book VIII of the Nicomachean Ethics:
There’s a trashbag nearby, but the people who drank beer here (in small cans, but a high proportion of alcohol, 9%): I assume they are boys, and they are used to being cleaned up after by their mothers
Şalcıkır Parkı, Tarabya
Sunday, April 7, 2024
Since there was a total solar eclipse over North America recently, I am posting here what I wrote in 2006 about an eclipse over Turkey. I did not have a camera then, so now I am adding a recent photo of a sun occluded or occulted by cloud. Along with doing a bit of editing, including the updating or adding of links, I am correcting the date of the 2006 eclipse; I don’t know why I had set it a week too late.
View over Asia from the European side of the Bosphorus (Kireçburnu in particular), Sunday, April 7, 2024
In the Nicomachean Ethics, this third of eight readings on friendship (φιλία) is the first of three on the connection with the just (τὸ δίκαιον). A lot of the reading might be summarized in a table:
| Polity | | | Analogue | | | Perversion | | | Analogues |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| kingdom | | | fatherhood | | | tyranny | | | |
Persian fatherhood slave-owning |
| aristocracy | | | marriage | | | oligarchy | | | |
man does all woman rules |
| timocracy | | | brotherhood | | | democracy | | | |
no master weak master |
We are reading chapters ix–xi of Book VIII. The table is based on chapter x and is elaborated on in chapter xi. Chapter ix introduces the idea that friendship and justice go together in communities, and all communities are formed within political communities, or polities, which they somehow reflect.
Animal friends in the neighborhood
Cat, hen, and rooster, all attracted to a trash bin by the road
Tarabya, Sunday, March 24, 2024
This is about the bread that I baked on Sunday, March 17, 2024. It’s in the photo below. You can see that the rising was a bit uneven; otherwise, I don’t know how the bread can be any better than I am able to make it now. That is why I am writing things up.
Two loaves, just out of the oven. Ingredients: whole einkorn flour, sourdough starter, water, rolled oats, and salt. Pans greased with coconut oil
Amity is equality, as Rackham translates it:
ΦΙΛΟΤΗΣ ΙΣΟΤΗΣ.
That’s what they say, anyway (§ v.5). Aristotle only refines it (§ viii.5):
ἡ δ᾽ ἰσότης καὶ ὁμοιότης φιλότης.
equality and similarity is amity.
Of eight readings on amity, or friendship, or love, or philia, we are in our second, comprising chapters v–viii of Book VIII of the Nicomachean Ethics.
Tarabya Marina
Sunday, March 10, 2024
Friendship is natural to most animals, especially human beings, and that’s why we praise the philanthropist. You will see, if you travel, that all of us are family and even friends.
Something like that is what Aristotle says, in this first of eight readings on friendship. I have trouble imagining where the Philosopher is going to go with his subject; or perhaps I am troubled to imagine what may be in store.
Crows in a tree
in the morning mist by the Bosphorus
Kireçburnu, Sarıyer, İstanbul
Sunday, March 10, 2024
Our subject is pleasure as such. The Greek word is ἡδονή, which is both
The shared Indo-European root of the adjectives ἡδύς and sweet is *su̯ād-, and its existence is a symbol for a lot of what Aristotle has to say, here in the final chapters, xi–xiv, of Book VII of the Nicomachean Ethics.
Somebody was feeding the gulls
Thursday morning, February 1, 2024
Tarabya
Things taste good because they are good. At least sweet things can be good, if used properly; but this qualification causes a lot of difficulty.
Polytropy 