Aristotle

This is the classic statement of why men form institutions and the benefits they derive from them. It includes the heretical idea that one of the purposes of institutions is to encourage virtue among those who live in them. --Mark Moore, The Harvard guide to influential books: 113 distinguished Harvard professors discuss the books that have helped to shape their thinking (1986), edited by C. Maury Devine, Kim D. Parrish, and Claudia Dissell, p. 178, on Politics


Aristotle, The Nichomachean Ethics: ... It argues that the happiness all humans necessarily desire is more than a feeling, more than a possession. It is, rather, our being personally engaged in a set of activities that are done for their own sake, which fully integrate all aspects of human life and which are exalted enough to be worthy of human nature’s essential rationality. --David Novak, What to Give a 'First Things' Reader, First Things, December 2008

Modern philosophy has never recovered from its false start. Like men floundering in quicksand who compound their difficulties by struggling to extricate themselves, Kant and his successors have multiplied the difficulties and perplexities of modern philosophy by the very strenuousness-and even ingenuity-of their efforts to extricate themselves from the muddle left in their path by Descartes, Locke, and Hume. To make a fresh start, it is only necessary to open the great philosophical books of the past (especially those written by Aristotle and in his tradition) and to read them with the effort of understanding that they deserve. The recovery of basic truths, long hidden from view, would eradicate errors that have had such disastrous consequences in modern times. --Mortimer J. Adler, The Superiority of Aristotelian to Modern Philosophy and the Failings of Modern Aristotelian Philosophers, Philosopher at Large (1977), p. 304

Reading Aristotle, by David Weinberger, Journal of the Hyperlinked Organization, July 25, 2004

Just for the Thrill: Sycophantizing Aristotle's Poetics, by Anne Carson, Arion 1.1, December 2001

Aristotle and the Christian Church, by Brother Azarias, 1888, at Jacques Maritain Center