Aristotle Essays

College

Aristotle: Nicomachean Ethics

Both Plato’s Symposium and Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics introduce provocative ideas about love and friendship and how best to attain them. They make it clear that, without love and friendship, life would be a miserable existence. Each figure in...

College

Aristotle's Poetics

In his literary theory treatise Poetics, Philosopher Aristotle explains that a successful tragedy must have characters who are improved-upon versions of their real-life subjects, making good, moral choices and appearing appropriate, lifelike, and...

Aristotle's Poetics

In The Poetics, Aristotle asserts that literature is a function of human nature's instinct to imitate. This implies that as humans, we are constantly driven to imitate, to create. By labeling this creative impulse an "instinct," one is to believe...

Aristotle's Poetics

According to Aristotle in his book Poetics, the cathartic effects of a tragedy are its purpose, which is mediated through its form. An examination of Shakespeare's King Lear in relation to the Aristotelian elements of tragedy - focusing on his...

Aristotle's Poetics

Aristotle’s passage Poetics (350 BC) was written the century after the composition of Sophocles Oedipus the King (428 BC). Despite their chronological separation, the two texts relate in incisive ways. In particular, Aristotle used Oedipus as the...

Aristotle's Poetics

Considered the precursor of Western dramatic criticism, Aristotle’s notes on The Poetics arms modern readers with the language by which tragedy is evaluated and judged. In this essay I will examine how Aristotle’s classical vision of tragedy...

College

Aristotle's Poetics

Aristotle breaks down the plot of the tragedy into three parts, reversal, recognition and catharsis. Shakespeare includes all three components of plot in his play,Henry IV Part I. He establishes a tragic hero, Harry Percy, and allows him to rise...

Aristotle's Politics

What is the best regime? Building from his discussion of happiness, virtue, and the good life in Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle answers this question elaborately in his later text, The Politics. In his elaboration, Aristotle investigates numerous...