Men at Work: Poesis, Politics and Labor in Aristotle and Some Aristotelians
Abstract
In Book 3 of his Politics, and again in Book 7, Aristotle makes explicit his disdain for the banausos (often translated ‘mechanic’) as an occupation qualified for full civic life. Where modern admirers of Aristotle, such as Alasdair MacIntyre, have taken him at face value concerning this topic and thus felt a need to distance themselves from him, I claim that the grounds that Aristotle offers for the exclusion of banausoi from citizenship are not consistent with other important teachings (found in the eighth book of the Politics as well as in several of his other writings) about the nature of poesis (‘productive science’, which is the form of knowledge characteristic of the so-called ‘mechanical arts’). I further support this claim with reference to the role played by the mechanical arts within the Aristotelian framework of knowledge that one encounters in medieval European thought between the twelfth and the fourteenth centuries, with particular reference to Hugh of St. Victor, John of Salisbury, and Marsiglio of Padua.
© 2008 by Lucius & Lucius, Stuttgart
Articles in the same Issue
- MacIntyre and the Polis
- Men at Work: Poesis, Politics and Labor in Aristotle and Some Aristotelians
- After Tradition?: Heidegger or MacIntyre, Aristotle and Marx
- The Uniqueness of After Virtue (or ‘Against Hindsight’)
- MacIntyre, Thomism and the Contemporary Common Good
- From Voluntarist Nominalism to Rationalism to Chaos: Alasdair MacIntyre’s Critique of Modern Ethics
- MacIntyre’s Search for a Defensible Aristotelian Ethics and the Role of Metaphysics
- MacIntyre’s Radical Intellectualism: The Philosopher as a Moral Ideal
- Traditional Moral Knowledge and Experience of the World
- Moral Philosophy, Moral Identity and Moral Cacophony: On MacIntyre on the Modern Self
- Utopias and the Art of the Possible
- Misunderstanding MacIntyre on Human Rights
- Alasdair MacIntyre’s Contribution to Marxism: A Road not Taken
- Why Business Cannot Be a Practice
- Ethics, Markets, and MacIntyre
- What More Needs to Be Said? A Beginning, Although Only a Beginning, at Saying It
- Social Criticism and the Exclusion of Ethics
- Practices: The Aristotelian Concept
Articles in the same Issue
- MacIntyre and the Polis
- Men at Work: Poesis, Politics and Labor in Aristotle and Some Aristotelians
- After Tradition?: Heidegger or MacIntyre, Aristotle and Marx
- The Uniqueness of After Virtue (or ‘Against Hindsight’)
- MacIntyre, Thomism and the Contemporary Common Good
- From Voluntarist Nominalism to Rationalism to Chaos: Alasdair MacIntyre’s Critique of Modern Ethics
- MacIntyre’s Search for a Defensible Aristotelian Ethics and the Role of Metaphysics
- MacIntyre’s Radical Intellectualism: The Philosopher as a Moral Ideal
- Traditional Moral Knowledge and Experience of the World
- Moral Philosophy, Moral Identity and Moral Cacophony: On MacIntyre on the Modern Self
- Utopias and the Art of the Possible
- Misunderstanding MacIntyre on Human Rights
- Alasdair MacIntyre’s Contribution to Marxism: A Road not Taken
- Why Business Cannot Be a Practice
- Ethics, Markets, and MacIntyre
- What More Needs to Be Said? A Beginning, Although Only a Beginning, at Saying It
- Social Criticism and the Exclusion of Ethics
- Practices: The Aristotelian Concept
