Bøker av Aristotle

Aristotle's Poetics is a profound exploration into the human emotional landscape and the intricacies of our psychological responses. It delves into the origins of epic poetry and contemplates all forms of poetry as manifestations of imitation. The work meticulously explores the elements of tragedy - plot, character, diction, thought, spectacle, and song - and examines their profound impact on audiences. Poetics stands as a timeless masterpiece of literary criticism, exerting a significant influence on literary theories throughout the centuries. Even today, it remains a benchmark for evaluating the quality and depth of literature.

Aristotle's Poetics is the earliest-surviving work of dramatic theory and the first extant philosophical treatise to focus on literary theory. It is widely regarded as one of the earliest and most influential works of literary criticism and has been studied by countless scholars. Poetics provides a thorough analysis of the structure and elements of drama, as well as a discussion of the essential ingredients of good tragedy. Aristotle explains how the most effective tragedies rely on complication and resolution, recognition and reversals, centring on characters of heroic stature, idealized yet true to life. One of the most powerful, perceptive and influential works of criticism in Western literary history, the Poetics has informed serious thinking about drama ever since.A masterpiece of literary criticism, poetics has majorly influenced literary theories. Even after centuries it continues to remain an evaluation benchmark for literature.

It seems clear that happiness is the ultimate goal to which human life aspires. But what is the true essence of happiness? This thorny question is faced by Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) in the Nicomachean Ethics. Among the many values that can be attributed to the philosopher of Stagira (Macedonia) is this text belonging to the last period of his production and undoubtedly the most influential and elaborate of his writings on Ethics. The result of the selection made by his son Nicomachus, hence the title with the notes that the author himself used for his lessons at the Lyceum, the work summarizes with total clarity the keys to the moral reflection of its author. But even more meritorious is the fact of having been the one who for the first time in universal literature deals with the discipline as an independent philosophical branch. For Aristotle, as Teresa Martinez Manzano points out in her introduction, Ethics, the science of habits and character, is not merely a theoretical knowledge, but also displays a practical dimension in the search for virtue, the most precious good as the patrimony of the soul.

Baruch Spinoza composed a philosophical work titled The Ethics in Latin. The book is a comprehensive attempt to use Euclid's technique in philosophy. The link between God and the cosmos is discussed in the first section of the book. Additionally, he contends that the cosmos is what it is due to necessity rather than divine will or a religious explanation. According to this perspective, rather than being God's creation, the cosmos is made of God. The human mind and how we come to understand our ideas, as well as those of other bodies, are the main topics of the second section. According to Spinoza, we cannot know our minds any more intimately than we know our bodies. Spinoza contends that all things, including people, try to maintain their perfection of power in being unaffected in the third section of his Ethics. According to Spinoza, power and virtue are equivalent. The fourth section examines human emotions, which, according to Spinoza, are mental faculties that lead us to seek out and avoid pleasure and misery. The fifth section makes the case that reason can control the effects of the pursuit of virtue, which for Spinoza is self-preservation. Only with reason's help can people tell which passions are beneficial to virtue from those that are ultimately destructive.