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Books as Christmas Gifts: Aristotle’s Regime of the Americans
Like John Miller’s Kindle single The Polygamist King, Peter L. P. Simpson’s edition of Aristotle’s Regime of the Americans can be acquired for a pittance. What you get if you spring for this slender volume purports to be the printed version of a recently recovered manuscript by the great philosopher himself — which Professor Simpson, who teaches at the CUNY Graduate Center and at the College of Staten Island, purchased from “a shadowy Hittite book dealer near ancient Scepsis in the Troad.”
To be precise, you get the original Greek and an English rendering by Professor Simpson — who has published distinguished translations of and commentaries on Aristotle’s Politics, his Eudemian Ethics, and his Magna Moralia. His commentary on The Politics is widely recognized as an especially fine piece of work.
There are, of course, spoilsports and party-poopers who claim Aristotle never wrote a treatise on the American regime and that this volume is a forgery — that it was composed by Professor Simpson or foisted on that absent-minded academic by unscrupulous persons who are now trying to pass it off to a gullible public as the genuine article. Whether some such charge is true you will have to judge for yourself. I will confess that I do find it worrisome that the depiction of Aristotle on the cover of Professor Simpson’s translation of the Magna Moralia looks an awful lot like the good professor himself. This sort of thing makes one wonder whether the old boy has finally lost it.
But look at it this way. It surely is a fine thing to know what Aristotle thought — or would have thought — about us.
Published in Culture, Literature
Dumb question: When I see Aristotle’s Ethics on Gutenberg.org, is that the Nichomachean, the Eudemian, or the Magna?
Probably the first; almost certainly not the last.
Just read the first para. Is it all action tends toward some good & what kind of goods & sciences are there? N.E.
Is it the Theognis quote from Delos about getting one’s desire being better than health or justice? E.E.
Once I get my Christmas Kindle up and running I’ll probably give it a read. Heck, even a phony Aristotle is still worth the price (Zilch if you have a KindleUnlimited free trial).
Thank you kindly. Looks like N.E.
“Every art, and every science reduced to a teachable form, and in like manner every action and moral choice, aims, it is thought, at some good: for which reason a common and by no means a bad description of the Chief Good is, “that which all things aim at.””