PHILOS 1 Lecture 12: SUMMARY #12
Document Summary
The standards and conditions aristotle"s finds in the society and the polis of his day. This severely limits his substantive views (slaves, women, aristocratic political power. ) But his approach and his question can be transposed to address problems in our own society (interest groups; seducibility of the electorate; the handling of inequalities. ) In book i aristotle takes existing social units as his point of departure, and builds the form the smallest and simplest to the bigger, more complex and leading unit, which is the polis. He presents this order as if it were a temporal sequence, the smallest its occurring first, and then growing into the more complex and more refined units, using the smaller ones as building blocks. To read aristotle as meaning that bigger units had predecessors that were as small as couples would ascribe to him the fundamental error of assuming a pre-social condition to earlier humans.
