The Cambridge Companion to Aristotle’s Politics
One of the most influential works in the history of political theory, Aristotle's 'Politics' is a treatise in practical philosophy, intended to inform legislators and to create the conditions for virtuous and self-sufficient lives for the citizens of a state. In this 'Companion', distinguished scholars offer new perspectives on the work and its themes. After an opening exploration of the relation between Aristotle's ethics and his politics, the central chapters follow the sequence of the eight books of the 'Politics', taking up questions such as the role of reason in legitimizing rule, the common good, justice, slavery, private property, citizenship, democracy and deliberation, unity, conflict, law and authority, and education. The closing chapters discuss the interaction between Aristotle's political thought and contemporary democratic theory. The volume will provide a valuable resource for those studying ancient philosophy, classics, and the history of political thought.
Natural Right and the Problem of Aristotle's Defense of Slavery
Many social theorists, appalled at the moral enormities made possible by the modern scientific conquest of nature, now look to a restoration of classic natural right as a standard for human affairs. But the key role of slavery in Aristotle's magisterial exposition of natural right is typically overlooked. Commentators on Aristotle's account of natural slavery add to the perplexity, charging that this account is culturally biased and logically inconsistent. Such charges play into the hands of the opponents of natural right, whose common theme is the inability of reason to overcome such biases in its search for what is right by nature. Lacking a defense of the moral and theoretical respectability of Aristotle's account of slavery, the restorationists' cause must remain unpersuasive. To provide this defense, I suggest that Aristotle's teleology implies that the natural slave, generally speaking, is made not born. Child-rearing and other cultural practices, which ordinarily promote the natural destiny of mankind, may instead subvert this telos by inculcating a dysfunctional, slavish second nature. Despotic rule may be said to be natural in such cases, and only insofar as it aids the slave in better realizing the telos proper to a human being. Aristotle quite consistently condemns all employments of the slave that are uncongenial to the reformation of slavishness and allows for emancipation in the event of this achievement.
Decidability of some intuitionistic predicate theories
Suppose T is a first order intuitionistic theory (more precisely, a theory of Heyting's predicate calculus, e.g., abelian groups, one unary function, dense linear order, etc.) presented to us by a set of axioms (denoted also by) T. Question. Is T decidable? One knows that if the classical counterpart of T (i.e., take the same axioms but with the classical predicate calculus as the underlying logic) is not decidable, then T cannot be decidable. The problem remains for theories whose classical counterpart is decidable. In [8], sufficient conditions for undecidability were given, and several intuitionistic theories such as abelian groups and unary functions (both with decidable equality) were shown to be undecidable. In this note we show decidability results (see Theorems 1 and 2 below), and compare these results with the undecidability results previously obtained. The method we use is the reduction-method, described fully in [12] and widely applied in [3], which is applied here roughly as follows: Let T be a given theory of Heyting's predicate calculus. We know that Heyting's predicate calculus is complete for the Kripke-model type of semantics. We choose a class M of Kripke models for which T is complete, i.e., all axioms of T are valid in any model of the class and whenever φ is not a theorem of T, φ is false in some model of M.