The Basic Works of Aristotle

A one-volume selection from the Oxford translation of Aristotle, assembled by Richard McKeon: the Physics, Metaphysics, Nicomachean Ethics, Politics, Poetics and De Anima whole, with excerpts from the rest. It was the standard American teaching Aristotle for most of the twentieth century and stayed in print as a Random House hardcover for roughly sixty years.

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.

Context: Listed under Philosophy in the Ages 13-99+ band, Lexile 1200. Aristotle’s 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.

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.