aristotle abuse

[Jeff Bone]

Dave Long wrote:

> is a fair characterization, and these
> attempts to coerce Aristotle's thought
> into a framework you find elegant are
> like Procrustes coercing his guests'
> limbs into a bedframe he found elegant.

Let's be clear:  this whole mess started when I offered a single, standalone
quote:  "Law is reason free from passion."  I happen to agree with this.  Paul's
fallacy is in assuming that this implies that I buy any (or all or none) of the
rest of Aristotle's program --- it doesn't.  My deconstruction of the snippets
Paul chose to offer and interpret was an attempt to be an in-kind "creative"
interpretation.  I would never seek to speak authoritatively about Aristotle,
it's been years since I went through his work for anything other than the
occasional snippet.  I suppose if we've got a lot of Aristotle fans I could go
try to locate and resurrect one of the ancient term papers I wrote back in the
dark ages of DOS and college for us to beat up, but I think the entertainment
value of that is likely to be vanishingly small.

jb