Polytropy

Here is a directory to the posts on and of  the Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle. The posts are only named in the table below; links to them are in the list after that (which is taken from the automatic list of all posts on my “About” page).

The name of an Ethics post is supposed to have a connection to the content, often by being an unusual word for the subject.

As with all of my posts and pages since “LaTeX to HTML” in September, 2020, I write this one as a txt file, then convert to html with the pandoc program. This is why I have put links only in the list of posts, but not in the table: a url there would take up too much space in the txt file.

I write the posts listed above for my use during a weekly online seminar with the Catherine Project. Currently, I make a post for each week’s reading, and the post consists of

• the Greek text of the reading, with my own typographical interventions (line breaks, bullets, colors; in the beginning, I included some links to dictionaries);
• occasional interjections of comments;
• a summary or outline of the reading, roughly section by section;
• prefatory remarks, musings, and discoveries, more or less connected to the reading;
• a photograph or two, usually from walks around my neighborhood, to serve as a mnemonic device for the post, if nothing else.

I created this directory page on February 12, 2024. I hope and expect to continue writing posts in the manner just described. The first two posts contained respectively the wholes of the first two books of the Ethics, which the seminar covered in four and three readings. When we got to Book III, I thought a post for each reading was needed, and I continue to think so.

We are scheduled to finish Book X in June, then reread Book I in July.

After finishing each book, we spend a week reviewing it. I have not created any corresponding posts, but sometimes I go back to add to earlier posts.

It is difficult for me to go back and just read Aristotle’s Greek after my memory of it has gone cold. I “read” it initially, mostly by comparing it with a translation, usually that of Bartlett and Collins, because this seems to be the most literal.

Time spent making sense of the Greek can be time not spent making sense of what Aristotle is talking about. On the other hand, one can be misled by the way even Bartlett and Collins smooth out the language to make readable English. I see that the problem is addressed by Montgomery Furth in the Preface to his translation of Books VII–X of Aristotle’s Metaphysics (1985):

Aristotle’s text is terse and elliptical, and reads like cipher … Faced with this sort of thing, translators endeavor to bridge the gap between it and English by interpolating in the light of their understanding of its meaning and their sense of diction and style … the consequence is … paraphrase, in which the divide between data and interpretation is effaced. For philosophical study of such a work as this, the reader, not just the translator, should know what the translator was looking at when he or she began to interpolate.

I recall reading this in the St John’s College bookstore when Furth’s translation came out. It is a translation into what was dubbed “Eek.”

I have liked to imagine that my summaries better reflect Aristotle’s purpose than a translation with the interpolations that Furth mentions. On the other hand, my bullet points may represent the kind of imposition of order called Ramism, for having been introduced by Petrus Ramus; see “Dicaeology.”