Abstract

This dissertation is part of a larger effort to determine in what ways different political and ethical arguments are rooted in rival and incommensurable views of nature. In the present work, I concentrate on Aristotle alone. ;In this century there has been a renewed interest in Aristotle's ethical and political arguments as viable counter-arguments to the perceived failings of ethical and political liberalism. Very few, however, have inquired into the difficulty of reviving Aristotle. As Leo Strauss bluntly stated, Aristotle's political and ethical arguments are essentially, not accidentally, tied to his natural teleology. It would seem that, with the victory of modern non-teleological, materialist physics, the attempt to reintroduce Aristotle's teleological arguments about human nature is questionable. To settle the question of the viability of Aristotle's political and ethical arguments, we must inquire more deeply into the relationship of ethics, politics, physics, and metaphysics in Aristotle. ;The vast majority of Aristotelian scholarship in this century has tended to focus on isolated treatises of the corpus. This is especially true in regard to those who attempt to revive Aristotle's political and ethical arguments. Consequently, there are countless books and articles devoted either to the Politics or to the Nicomachean Ethics alone as if Aristotle's arguments about human nature could be abstracted from his larger, comprehensive arguments about nature. In contrast to this approach, I attempt to show how Aristotle's political and ethical arguments must be understood as integral parts of his comprehensive natural teleology, paying particular attention to the almost universally neglected treatises on animals--the Generation of Animals, Parts of Animals, History of Animals, Motion of Animals, and Progression of Animals. These treatises provide an intellectual link between the ethical and political arguments and the Physics and Metaphysics. ;I conclude that Aristotle's arguments about human nature are indeed inextricably part of his more comprehensive natural teleology. Thus, those who wish to revive Aristotle's arguments must follow his own example: ethical inquiry cannot be done apart from a more general inquiry into nature and an inquiry into the first principles of the various sciences and of natural things . Not only should Aristotelians understand the full interdependent complexity of his arguments, but they also must critically engage contemporary physics in an effort to reestablish nature as fundamentally teleological. In the last chapter I provide what I take to be promising directions of inquiry and argument for accomplishing this task.