Aristotle's philosophy and major contributions

¶ … king and a statesman is that a personal government is ruled by a king. If the government is run by the rules of political science with citizen participation, then the ruler is a statesman.

Societies are formed out of individual relationships between men and women who create families. In time, families unite and form villages and communities. When villages unite, states are created.

Households are made up of slaves and freedmen. Three relationships in the household can be examined: the relationship between master and servant, the marital relationship between husband and wife, and the procreative relationship between spouses.

People need possessions, and so acquiring property is part of the management of the household. Some equipment is used for pleasure, others for work. The servant is a living possession.

One view of slavery is that it is both necessary and important that some people rule and others be ruled. It is part of nature; like men rule inferior women and domestic animals, men may rule slaves as well. Some people are by nature inferior and need to be ruled.

VI: Other people take an opposite view. Slavery allows one man to overcome and enslave another as spoils of war as justified by law, but if the cause of the war is unjust to begin with, this principle is called into question. In a natural relationship the master and slave work together for a common interest, but in a legal relationship the slave is held by force.

VII: Not every kind of rule is the same. In a household, the house is ruled by one master, but under a constitution, the government is ruled by freemen and citizens.

VIII: It is debatable whether the art of creating wealth is a part of household management or if it can be considered an art in itself. There is a natural art to the process of acquiring wealth as it is practiced by both households and by rulers.

IX: All possessions have more than one purpose; they can be used, or they can be exchanged. Bartering is useful to people for getting what they need, but as societies became more complex, people began to import and export what they needed, and a system of exchange was needed that was lighter and easier to transport. Therefore, people began using coins. However, coins cannot be eaten, and a rich man may starve to death.

X: There are two kinds of wealth acquisition. One is for household management (food, clothing, shelter), and the other is for trade (coins). One is necessary, while the other is unnatural.

XI: There are three useful parts of wealth acquisition: knowing about livestock, knowing about planting or animal husbandry, and timber or mining. These methods are hard on the body and need little mental energy, but as trades they are useful and reliable.

XII: When a man rules over his family, he rules his children royally, meaning that the father is to be permanently respected, but when he rules his wife, he rules her constitutionally because he is by nature more fit to lead.

XIII: The question can be raised of whether or not women, children and slaves have virtues such as courage and justice or whether they are solely physical and servile creatures. If they indeed have virtues, then the question arises of what separates them from the freemen.

Book II

I: Virtue is both intellectual and moral. In states, legislators make the citizens good by instilling good habits in them. In poorly run states, they instill bad habits into their people.

II: Too much or too little food or exercise can destroy the health. Similarly, too many or too few virtues lead equally to problems.

III: Moral excellence concerns itself with things that bring both delight and pain. All souls are concerned with things that make them either better or worse. People measure their actions by whether they cause pain or pleasure.

IV: Arts and virtues are dissimilar. A piece of art has a character of its own, but regarding virtue, the work must be done with knowledge, goodness must be chosen for its own sake, and the action must arise from an unwavering character.

V: Virtues cannot be defines as passions or faculties. Virtues must rather be defined as states of character.

VI: If too few or too many virtues can be self-defeating, then virtue should aim for a middle ground and avoid both excesses and deficiencies. Virtue is a state of character that is concerned with choice.

VII: Temperance is a mean, while self-indulgence is an excess. In financial terms, some people spend too little, while others spend too much. In anger there is also an excess, a deficiency and a mean.

VIII: Excess and deficiency are both vices. Mean is a virtue. All of these states are contradictory to one another.

IX: Virtue can be seen as a mean between two excesses or vices. It is extremely difficult to be good and to find the middle ground.