"No idea in this book is less than 2,400 years old." So says the back cover.
Aristotle was a Greek philosopher, and one of the greatest thinkers and scientific investigators and organizers the world has ever seen. He was born in 384 B.C., and died 62 years later. His father, Nicomachus, was the court physician and a friend of the king. He studied under Plato for twenty years, until the latter's death. Although he criticized Plato's doctrines in later years, he always spoke of his master with greatest reverence.
Many of his popular writings were written in dialogue form, and were modeled in both subject matter and style, after Plato's. The writings which are traditionally attributed to him seem to have come primarily from the works prepared and arranged by Andronicus of Rhodes in about the first century.<P.
He wrote The Treatises on Logic; The Rhetoric and the Poetics; The Work on the first Philosophy (also called The Metaphysics); The Works on Natural Science; and The Ethics and Politics.
Mortimer Adler, the author of this book, says that his sons, Douglas and Philip, 13 and 12 respectively, read his manuscript enthusiastically, and so you may assume that the book is easy to assimilate. Which it is.
Why philosophy? Adler says, I think correctly, that philosophy is everyone's business, to help us understand things we already know better than we now understand them.
And, it is humbling to know, when you finally think you understand something, to find that someone--Aristotle, for example--understood it more than three hundred years before the birth of Christ, and without the benefit of television documentaries.
This book should probably be in your library.
Author of THE ROAD TO DAMASCUS: Our Journey Through Eternity
Reading this book almost made me want to go and read Aristotle's Metaphysics. Almost. It is to the works of Aristotle that the phrase 'eyes glazed over' most aptly applies. Fortunately, we've got Aristotle for Everybody. Mortimer Adler has written a popular level exposition of Aristotle's main ideas. Adler writes, "Almost all of the philosophical truths that I have come to know and understand I have learned from Aristotle." The intended target age for readers is 12 years old and up. Somehow, I doubt many 12 year olds will be clamouring for this book ( or any philosophy book), but hopefully there will be some. Why? Because we all use philosophy in our lives. Most of us just don't realize it. Adler writes, "Philosophy is everybody's business...(it) helps us to understand things we already know, (to) understand them better than we now understand them." The book contains 5 main sections: 1)Man the Philosophical Animal; 2)Man the Maker(Aristotle's Philosophy of Nature and Art); 3)Man the Doer(Aristotle's Moral and Political Philosophy); 4)Man the Knower(Aristotle's Psychology, Logic, and Theory of Knowledge); 5)Difficult Philosophical Questions(Aristotle's Cosmology and Theology).
There is also an epilogue which lists the various works of Aristotle from which Adler culled the information included in each of the (short) chapters. Anyone who's ever wondered what Aristotle was all about should read this book.