The Basic Works of Aristotle
| Author | Aristotle, edited by Richard McKeon |
|---|---|
| Pages | 1,487 |
| Recommended | Once |
| Buy | Amazon |
| Why it’s on the list | Richard McKeon’s one-volume selection from the Oxford translation — the Physics, Metaphysics, Nicomachean Ethics, Politics, Poetics and De Anima whole, with excerpts from the rest — and the standard American teaching Aristotle for most of the twentieth century. |
The Basic Works of Aristotle
Where I heard about it
- Dissident Teacher — on A Library to Build Great Americans, a 468-title curriculum published on Substack in December 2025, in the Ages 13–99+ band under Philosophy (Lexile 1200).
About this edition
Aristotle is the reason a curriculum like this can assume a shared vocabulary at all: virtue as a habit rather than a feeling, the mean between excesses, the human being as a political animal whose flourishing is bound up with the city. The Ethics and the Politics are the two texts most directly aimed at forming a citizen; the Rhetoric and Poetics are where the Western account of persuasion and of how stories work begins. His transmission runs through Arabic and then Latin Christian commentary rather than continuously from Greece, which is part of why he is a shared inheritance of traditions that otherwise disagree. McKeon’s compilation stayed in print as a Random House hardcover for roughly sixty years; this is the one-volume selection, not the two-volume Complete Works.
Connections
- A Library to Build Great Americans — the curriculum this came from; the adult “Ages 13-99+” band is the part Kyle carded.
- Aristotle — the author.
- The Complete Works of Aristotle — the two-volume Revised Oxford Translation; the complete-works alternative to this selection, already in the anti-library from a separate recommendation.
- Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle) and Politics (Aristotle) — two of the works printed whole here, each already carded on its own.
- Greek Philosophy — the tradition.
- Philosophy — the curator’s own genre bucket for this entry.
- Ethics — the subject of the single most-assigned work in the volume.
- Rhetoric — Aristotle’s treatise is the founding text of the discipline.
- Classics — the wider corpus this sits in.