Abstract

The indefensible ideas of Aristotle with which we shall be dealing are ideas such as that eels arise, not from eels, but from mud and slime, that the faculty of reason is not seated in the brain or in any other bodily organ, and that some humans are slaves by nature, ideas that are known, some twenty-three hundred years after they were written down, to be false. These ideas are a problem for a contemporary Aristotelian if they have been validly derived from the general principles of Aristotle’s philosophy. For in that case the indefensibility of the idea will stem from one or more of his general principles. This might, and probably should, lead one to conclude that no reasonable person should be an Aristotelian in the twenty-first century. No dedicated Aristotelian, including this one, can welcome this conclusion. Hence, the goal of this paper is to show how it can be avoided.