Aristotle

Thursday

Peter Jones

What Aristotle would have made of Brooks Newmark’s selfies

News that the soon-to-be-ex-Tory MP Brooks Newmark has sent pictures of his genitals to a second (presumed female) contact has centred yawningly around ‘rights’, ‘exploitation’, ‘power’ and so on. Aristotle can take us back to basics. The ancients did not do ‘rights’ anyway: they did the law. If there was no law against what you were doing, go ahead. But that did not mean that your action was therefore praiseworthy. How, then, should a man, especially one in the public eye, judge his actions? Aristotle suggested there were four main criteria: whether the actions in question were legal, advantageous, honourable and appropriately motivated. That Newmark’s action was ‘legal’ is undeniable. That

Thursday

Peter Jones

Horace still understands happiness better than the LSE

So here comes another book about how to be happy, written by Professor Dolan, an ‘internationally renowned expert’ at the LSE. The key evidently lies in ‘pleasure and purpose’, derived from your ‘daily felt experiences’, an analysis hymned in the introduction by a Nobel prize-winner as a ‘bold and original move’. Really? Since Dolan asserts that happiness derives from your ‘felt experiences’ (or ‘paying attention to the things that make you happy’), he is simply saying that it is a state of mind. Very original. This old hat is a form of 4th century bc Stoicism, which asserted that happiness depended on what went on inside your head, because that

Thursday

Peter Jones

How Plato and Aristotle would have tackled unemployment

Labour is up in arms because many of the new jobs currently being created are among the self-employed. This seems to them to be cheating. Quite the reverse, ancients would have said. Ancient thinkers knew all about the needs of the poor and were worried about their capacity to cause trouble (as they saw it) by revolution. So in a world where everyone lived off the land (the wealthy by renting it out), Plato thought there should be a law that everyone should have a basic minimum of land to live off, and no one should own property more than five times the size of the smallest allotment; any excess

Thursday

Peter Jones

Sorry, Rory Stewart, but you don’t understand the Greeks

In last week’s Spectator, Rory Stewart, MP for Penrith, was reported to be proposing that we should create in Britain ‘1,000 little city states, and give power right down to all the bright, energetic people everywhere who just feel superfluous’. What did they teach him at Eton? The ancient Greek city-state (polis, source of our ‘politics’, etc.) was certainly ‘little’. There were at any one time about 1,000 of them dotted round the Mediterranean, most consisting of a city plus its surrounding countryside; and because of the nature of the terrain and the limited resources it could command, the average polis was c. 5,000 strong. The explanation of Athens’ power