Teaching Philosophy

ONLINE FIRST

published on May 7, 2022

David RoochnikOrcid-ID

Teaching Aristotle
A Dramatization

Despite their difficulty, the writings of Aristotle can be effectively used in an introductory course. This does not mean that students should be assigned whole books, or even chapters. Instead, their readings should consist of individual paragraphs. To justify this procedure, the paper draws on the work of Reviel Netz, who has argued that the “basic discourse unit” in Aristotle’s writings is precisely the “paragraph.” With this term he does not refer to the feature of modern writing signalled by indentation, for that did not exist in antiquity. Instead, he means a short, logically self-contained segment, discernible through specific linguistic markers. To illustrate how a close reading of an Aristotelian “paragraph” can be pedagogically fruitful, this paper offers a case study: the opening lines of the Metaphysics (980a20–27), in which Aristotle argues that “all human beings by nature desire to know.”