Notes to Book: Mortimer J. Adler: Aristotle for Everybody: Difficult Thought made Easy (1978):

• physical things: 3 dimensions: length, breadth, height; i.e., spatial dimensions, in which a body can move.



• human beings = persons: personal dimensions; i.e., directions, in which we can act as human beings: making, doing, knowing.
  
  
  • making: man, the artist or artisan: producer of goods (shoes, houses, paintings).
  
  
  • doing: man, the moral and social being; distinguish right and wrong, associate with other human beings.
  
  
  • knowing: man, the learner; acquisition of knowledge about human nature and knowledge itself.
  
  
• man is a thinker in all these dimensions, but he thinks differently in each dimension.



• Aristotle speaks about:


• maker: 'productive thinking'.


• doer: 'practical thinking'.


• knower: 'speculative' or 'theoretical' thinking.


• Heraclitus: everything changes.
  
• Parmenides (and Zeno): everything remains constant.


• Aristotle: some things change, some remain the same.



• Euclid's geometry:
  
  • definitions: points, lines, straight lines, triangles.
  
  
  • axioms: cannot bew denied; confirmation cannot be avoided; "the whole is greater than the parts", "things equal to the same thing are equal to each other".
  
  
  • postulates: assumptions that Euclid makes in order to prove the propositions that need proof "a straight line can be drawn from any point to any other point."
  
  
• Socrates was Plato's teacher, Plato was Aristotle's teacher.



• Socrates: an unexamined life is not worth living.



• Aristotle: an unplanned life is not worth examining, for an unplanned life is one in which we do not know what we are trying to do or why, and one in which we do not know where we are trying to get or how to get there. An unplanned life is also not worth living because it can not be lived well.



• A happy time is one filled with pleasures rather than pains, with satisfactions rather than dissatisfactions.



• "good" = desirable; "better" = more desirable; "best" = most desirable.



• Aristotle: these two notions -- good and desirable -- are inseparably connected; 'the good is desirable' and 'the desirable is good'.



• Moral virtue is the habit of making right choices. If the wrong choices greatly outnumber the right choices, one will steadily move in the wrong direction, away from achieving happiness instead of toward it.



• Aristotle was a great logican; he founded the science of logic.