Aristotle with Philip Freeman

Yeah, I have read Aristotle ever since it started my university days.

So I was familiar with him.

And as somebody with a PhD in classics and who's taught in humanities for a long time, I have certainly read a lot of Aristotle, taught a lot of Aristotle.

But I never thought of him so much as a subject for a a biography.

Say, you know, like Alexander the Great, he's sort of natural to write a biography of Alexander.

But Aristotle, when you think of him, you think of his thoughts, his ideas, his incredible influence.

But you don't think that much about his life.

So I thought, you know, I'm going to see what I can do.

And then I did a little digging, and I found out that actually nobody had ever written a biography of Aristotle before.

I mean, let me qualify that People had done a lot of important biographical studies of Aristotle.

I mean, without which I could not have written the book, but Nobody had sat down, as far as I know, in English, at least, or in a European language, and written a narrative biography of Aristotle.

So I thought, all right, I'm going to try this.

And so I got the opportunity from Yale University Press, and they were very gracious.

And so I did it and had a great time.

So something in your question there, Philip, that I wanted to discuss, you mentioned that you never thought Aristotle would be someone who you could write a biography about.

What is it about Aristotle that made you think that?

Because I had...

Every encounter I'd ever had on those rare occasions in life when Aristotle, the life of Aristotle comes up, people had always sort of pooh-pahed it, dismissed it.

And I talk about in the introduction to the book how I interviewed for one of my first jobs 35 years ago, and they asked about Aristotle and how I would teach him, and I explained it.

And I mentioned, I dared to mention the fact that I wanted to talk a little bit about his historical context.

And so they said, no, no, no, that doesn't matter.

It's his ideas that matter.

That's all that matters.

And so I thought, well, yes, his ideas matter incredibly.

But there's a story there.