Generosity is the middle way between stinginess (deficiency) and profligacy (excess).

Confidence is the middle way between self-deprecation (deficiency) and arrogance (excess).

Courage is the middle way between cowardice (deficiency) and recklessness (excess).

through the air” to which Descartes referred with derision. With the exorcismof these occult qualities,

Aristotle actually identified a third form of argumentthat may surprise you: narrative.

Aristotle argues that virtue is achieved by maintaining the Mean, which is the balance between the two excesses. Aristotle’s doctrine of the Mean is reminiscent of Buddha’s Middle Path. Aristotle’s doctrine of virtue is “golden mean”. Courage, for example, is a mean regarding the feeling of fear, between the deficiency of rashness (too little fear) and the excess of cowardice (too much fear). Justice is a mean between getting or giving too much and getting or giving too little. Benevolence is a mean between giving to people who don’t deserve it and not giving to anyone at all. Similarly Buddhism aims not to eradicate all feelings but to liberate it from its attachment to false values. He gave the concept of the Middle Way, a path between the extremes of religious asceticism and worldly self-indulgence to move away from false values. Aristotle and the Buddha reached very similar conclusions as to how we should conduct our lives, if we wish to find happiness and fulfillment as human beings. However, for Aristotle the mean was a method of achieving virtue, but for Buddha the Middle Path referred to a peaceful way of life which negotiated the extremes of harsh asceticism and sensual pleasure seeking.

The last element in his file system was an index, from which hewould refer to one or two notes that would serve as a kind of entrypoint into a line of thought or topic.

. That memory is based on order, and that order is a synonym for memory, were not novel ideas. According to Aristotle (De mem. et rem. ii, 452a 15), memory would be impossible without two requisites: the availability of a starting point and order.

Alexander possessed an additional weapon: Homer’s Iliad. He had learned to read and write by studying this text as a young man, and thanks to his teacher, the philosopher Aristotle

In rapid succession there followed alpha-betized subject indexes to major authors like Aristotle (indexed anonymously by 1250 in Paris), Augustine (by the Dominican Kilwardby at Oxford, 1256–61), or Aquinas (owner- indexed by Godfrey of Fontaines, then circulated more broadly). These indexes used a clear ordering system (the alphabet) and subject terms that were standard in scholastic circles, with the result that they could serve as a col-lective resource for students and scholars throughout Europe who had access to a copy, and they circulated separately from the works they indexed.127

Arabic numerals, which became common in the thirteenth century)

A writer collective is a set of editorial and financial structures designed to give writers the autonomy and upside that they get from writing alone, and the support and security they get from working for a media company. 

Be extra selective withquotes – don’t copy them to skip the step of really understanding

It wasn’t until the twentieth century that art historians determined that the figure was Aristotle

he Western tradition has never been more appealingly portrayed than in Rembrandt’s 1653 painting “Aristotle with a Bust of Homer.” Whether you stand in front of it at the Metropolitan Museum or look at it online, the painting turns you into a link in a chain that goes back three thousand years.

Aristotle already thought the argument to be deceiving. He ridicules it by saying that according to the same kind of argument a hair, which was subject to an even pulling power from opposing sides, would not break, and that a man, being just as hungry as thirsty, placed in between food and drink, must necessarily remain where he is and starve. To him it was the wrong argument for the right proposition. Absolute propositions concerning the non-existence of things are always in danger of becoming falsified on closer investigation. They contain a kind of subjective aspect: “as far as I know.”

scholars are annotators

As understood by the early scho-lastic philosophers, Aristotle taught also thatevery memory is composed of twoaspects: a ‘‘likeness’’ or ‘‘image,’’ which is visual in nature (simulacrum), and anemotional resonance or coloring (intentio), which serves to ‘‘hook’’ a particu-lar memory into one (or perhaps more) of a person’s existing networks of ex-perience.Memory works by association.

…it is not only necessary to consider how to make the speech itself demonstrative and convincing, but also that the speaker should show himself to be of a certain character…and that his hearers should think that he is disposed in a certain way toward them; and further, that they themselves should be disposed in a certain way towards him.[1]

syllogisms

one's rational powers

and the whole is really the flower of wisdom)

Vico recommends balance

defy the logic of theexcluded middle

Plato's dialogue

then it becomes plain that rhetoricity, in whatsoever forms it takes, will recruitfrom whatever is available to it.

so "being " is used in various senses, but always with reference to one principle. For some things are said to "be" because they are substances; others because they are modifications of substance; others because they are a process towards substance, or destructions or privations or qualities of substance, or productive or generative of substance or of terms relating to substance, or negations of certain of these terms or of substance. (Hence we even say that not-being is not-being.)

Aristotle says: ἡ ψυχὴ τὰ ὄντα πώς ἐστιν.vi “Man’s soul is, in a certain way, entities.”

When considered philosophically, the λόγος itself is an entity, and, according to the orientation of ancient ontology, it is something present-at-hand. Words are proximally present-at-hand; that is to say, we come across them just as we come across Things; and this holds for any sequence of words, as that in which the λόγος expresses itself. In this first search for the structure of the λόγος as thus present-at-hand, what was found was the Being-present-at-hand-together of several words. What establishes the unity of this “together”? As Plato knew, this unity lies in the fact that the λόγος is always λόγος τινός. In the λόγος an entity is manifest, and with a view to this entity, the words are put together in one verbal whole. Aristotle saw this more radically: every λόγος is both σύνθεσις and διαίρεσις, not just the one (call it ‘affirmative judgment’) or the other (call it ‘negative judgment’). Rather, every assertion, whether it affirms or denies, whether it is true or false, is σύνθεσις and διαίρεσις equiprimordially. To exhibit anything is to take it together and take it apart. It is true, of course, that Aristotle did not pursue the analytical question as far as the problem of which phenomenon within the structure of the λόγος is the one that permits and indeed obliges us to characterize every statement as synthesis and diaeresis.

Instead we shall give an interpretation of Aristotle’s essay on time,ii which may be chosen as providing a way of discriminating the basis and the limitations of the ancient science of Being.

f Plato’s call for fitting the speechto the souls of the audience (1.2.3). These become Aristotle’s Bthos,or the projection of the character of the speaker as trustworthy;pathos, or consideration of the emotions of people in the audience;andlogos, inductive and deductive logical argument

Thus in 347 b.c.e., inanticipation of or soon after the death of Plato, Aristotle left Athensand went first to Assos in Asia Minor and then to the island of Lesbos,where he did much of his biological research

e. Rhetoric is the counterpart of cookery, Socrates says, for just as cookery provides pleasure for the body with no regard for what truly benefits it, rhetoric gratifies the soul without considering its good. Consequently, rhetoric is ignoble flattery rather than art, both because it aims at the pleasant and also because it cannot give a rational account of its own activity.

He wants to learn, in other words, how to "make the weaker argument the stronger" (Clouds, 112-115

udicial, deliberative, epideictic

"Aristotle is Not Our Father."

It was Aristotle who said that there can be no natural connection between the sound of any language and the things signi-fied, and, if we set the problem right side up and remember the other words before examining it, we shall have to agree with him.

Among the ancients, Aristotle, the earliest whose works arc extant, may safely be pronounced to be also the best of the systematic writers on Rhc• toric.

Meanwhile, in his Rhetoric (1367a) he defines a free man (eleutheros) as a masterless person who needs obey no one because he does not depend on having to produce or sell anything.

Therefore let us allow Aristotle as sharp an intelligence in various subjects and branches of knowledge as any Aristotelian could imagine, for I admit that that philosopher had an amazing fecundity of talent.

The modes of persuasion are the only true constituents of the art

Rhetoric is the counterpart of Dialectic. Both alike are concerned with such things as come, more or less, within the general ken of all men and belong to no definite science. Accordingly all men make use, more or less, of both; for to a certain extent all men attempt to discuss statements and to maintain them, to defend themselves and to attack others. Ordinary people do this either at random or through practice and from acquired habit. Both ways being possible, the subject can plainly be handled systematically, for it is possible to inquire the reason why some speakers succeed through practice and others spontaneously; and every one will at once agree that such an inquiry is the function of an art.

Therefore things both are and are not.