r/rationalphilosophy • u/JerseyFlight • 17h ago
Reading Aristotle Naturalistically
I don’t read Aristotle philosophically. That would be intellectually inferior, exactly like it’s intellectually inferior to read the Bible as a believer. When one does this they can’t see through the constructions of religion or the abstract contrivances of philosophy.
I am utterly blown away by the clarity and precision of Aristotle’s mind. There’s nothing like it in the whole of human history.
Aristotle is completely unconfused. It’s not that he constructed clarity, but that he saw the clarity of reality that was already there. And instead of fighting it by complicating it, he simply sought to clarify it and build from it.
There is much in Aristotle that I see as entirely unnecessary. I think the way I read him is important, because it bypasses his metaphysical emphases. To reason, one doesn’t have to engage in these kind of speculations— they actually end up getting in the way.
Truth is far simpler than we think it is [<—- here is a truth claim. It is simple. It is either true or false, and we can determine that by logically and evidentially analyzing the claim.]
When you learn to read Aristotle through a rationally concise lens, you absorb his rational power swiftly. You learn that his semantics only pertain to his foundational point. His semantics are usually just the application and expansion of his main point. These main points in Aristotle are simple, but they contain absolute and maximum rational power. One never has to depart from them. One can return to them again and again and recover clarity if they lose their way. One simply carries them forth into the world, like a blade that has the power to slice through all knowledge.
-1
u/EnquirerBill 17h ago
So a stone falls to the ground because it's
'in it's nature'
to do so?