Sellars kindly agreed to be interviewed by Riley Moore for Quillette in February. The following transcript has been edited for length.
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Riley Moore: It’s difficult to discuss Aristotle without discussing everything, because Aristotle wrote about everything—ethics, logic, biology, politics, literature; anything knowable, he investigated it. You go through this in detail in your newest book, Aristotle: Understanding the World’s Greatest Philosopher. Let’s pretend I have never heard of Aristotle. Who was Aristotle, biographically? Was he a pupil of Plato just as Plato was a pupil of Socrates? Is there a direct lineage there?John Sellars: Yes, there is. Aristotle was originally from northern Greece. His father was a doctor who died when Aristotle was about 10 years old. Aristotle is then brought up by his uncle who had been a student at Plato’s Academy some years earlier. When Aristotle reaches 17 or 18, he goes to Athens to study at Plato’s Academy and stays there for 20 years. Plato is certainly the key point of reference. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle make up this kind of triumvirate of significant Greek thinkers, and they’re all engaging with their predecessors. We see Aristotle wrestling with Plato’s ideas and ultimately trying to break away from them in order to develop his own independent views. That’s the beginning of Aristotle’s career.
Then Plato dies, and the Academy passes to Plato’s nephew. Aristotle decides that’s a good point to leave. Maybe Plato’s nephew and Aristotle didn’t get on, we don’t know, but he heads off to Asia Minor—what we would now call Turkey—with some other pupils from the Academy who left around the same time. Then he moves just a short distance to Lesbos, which is the nearest Greek island, and starts to study the natural world. In particular, he studies marine biology. He does that for a few years, and then he is invited back north to his home region by Philip of Macedon, the king, to tutor Philip’s young son, Alexander, who goes on to become Alexander the Great. It may have been that Aristotle’s father, the doctor, had been a physician at the Macedonian court. So, there may have been a family connection there.
Alexander grows up after a few years studying with Aristotle and sets off for his great adventure in the Middle East and all the way to India. Philip of Macedon is murdered around the same time, and Aristotle, having been Philip of Macedon’s guest, decides it’s not a very safe environment. So, he returns to Athens and sets up his own school, the Lyceum, as an alternative, in a sense, to the Academy. The last few years of his life were spent primarily in Athens. So, there’s a big early period in Athens and a big later period. There’s a brief interlude where he’s traveling to Lesbos and Macedonia.
RM: It’s speculated that Plato’s death prompted Aristotle to leave Athens when he didn’t inherit the Academy. Philip of Macedon’s death prompted Aristotle to return to Athens. These monumental deaths have a powerful impact on his life.
JS: Yes, that’s true. Of course, when Aristotle comes to Athens he’s an outsider. He’s not an Athenian citizen. This may have played a role in the story. As a non-Athenian, he wouldn’t have been eligible to own property. If the succession of the Academy involved the transfer of property, it may well have been that Aristotle just wouldn’t have been a plausible successor because he couldn’t have owned anything. He’s kind of an orphan and an outsider with this slightly transient lifestyle. But at the same time, his father may have been at the court of Macedon. Aristotle’s obviously got enough private income to devote his life to intellectual pursuits. He’s moving in quite high circles. But at the same time, he doesn’t really have the social stability and security that one might want.
RM: Can you sketch the ground covered by Aristotle’s work?
JS: It covers nearly everything. It covers everything that we think of as philosophy today. Metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, political philosophy, logic. All the things that we would think of as parts of philosophy, he does all of that. But he’s also engaged in a series of wider intellectual pursuits that have now become disciplines in their own right. There’s a sense in which his work really founds the discipline of biology. No one’s done that kind of work carefully and closely—studying particular types of creatures—before him.
He starts with metaphysics when he’s in Plato’s Academy—the most abstract and complex stuff. And then he moves on to the study of nature. One presumes that his later time with Philip of Macedon and Alexander prompted him to become more interested in political questions. He spends time studying literature, thinking about Greek tragedy, thinking about what makes a good work of art. On the one hand, we might think of Aristotle as a kind of research scientist, but these days we wouldn’t imagine a research scientist to also be interested in questions of literary theory. But Aristotle is actually doing both. In our hyper-specialized world today, that rarely happens.
RM: Could you define “metaphysics” broadly? What does it mean to Aristotle?
JS: “Metaphysics” is a modern word. It’s not one that Aristotle himself would have known. According to legend—and some might dispute the story—Aristotle’s lecture notes were lost for a while after his death. One of his pupils inherited them. The notes were just ignored for a century or two, and then they were rediscovered and edited. A series of works about the natural world were grouped together and given the title Physics. And a series of other works were then grouped together and called Metaphysica, meaning “after the physics.” So, the word doesn’t refer to something beyond the physical world or supernatural or anything like that. It’s just the work that comes after the Physics. Aristotle called the content of those works “first philosophy”—the fundamental questions that deal with the most basic facts about the nature of what exists. So, if we’re asking about the nature of being or existence, we’re asking the most fundamental question because it applies to everything. Then we can ask questions like “What’s a living being?” But that’s also a much narrower question because it doesn’t apply to everything that is, it’s just a subcategory.
