Aristotle – An Introduction

What is life? How should we live it? And why are difficult books so much easier to digest on audio than in print? Ever since I heard Jim Norton reading Ulysses and John Rowe transforming Proust’s impenetrable prose into a novel I wish I’d read years ago, I now recommend everyone who has struggled unsuccessfully with Paradise Lost or A Brief History of Time to get the audio version instead. Even so, there were passages in the Griffith brothers’ admirably digestible guide to the often wacky belief systems of some of those pre-Socratic thinkers, cynics, sceptics, Epicureans et al that I had to rewind a few times. There’s Heraclitus, for instance, who advised that sexual pleasures should be confined to winter and believed that everything was composed of and reverted to fire. The eightfold division of the soul upheld by the Stoics also took a bit of unravelling, but it was worth it if only to appreciate that Stoicism originally meant a great deal more than grin and bear it. Having several readers brings the Platonic dialogues to life, and I defy anyone not to be moved by Socrates’ cool, courageous speech to the Athenian jury which has just condemned him to death for impiety. We may have über-technology, the internet, DNA and The Moral Maze, but the ethical beliefs and clear-headedness of those legendary first thinktanks – Plato’s Academy, Aristotle’s Lyceum, Zeno’s Stoa and the Garden of Epicurus – still have a lot to teach us.

Sue Arnold, The Guardian, 29 March 2008