Aristotle: Introductory Readings (Hackett Classics)

Excellent book needed it for a class and when it arrived came in perfect condition.

I am currently reading this book for a course. It is easy to read and understand. I also like it because I purchased it on my kindle fire. No waiting. I received the book as soon as I paid for it.

Interesting book with words to live by.

I needed the book Introductory Readings for my philosophy class. The book helps understand the ideals and arguments of Aristotle. It was written especially for students. Introductory Readings was originally in Greek, so the translation done by Hackett Publishing is by far one of the most understandable, since it is hard to translate Greek to English. I would highly recommend picking this up if you want to understand philosophy a bit more, since philosophy is confusing if you easily get lost with philosophical ideas that can just throw you off. However, if you like reading the works of famous philosophers you should not pass this book up.

I love Aristotle, and this is a great one to own. Buy it and keep it and reference it forever.

This book alone can get you through any Aristotle courses in college.

A great introductory resource for students learning philosophy.

If you are needing the kindle version and need to cite this for any reason DO NOT BUY. Buy the physical version. The way in which you are to decipher the citations you need from the digital version make no sense, and I was unable to use the digital version for school. Completely useless unless you are just reading it for fun.

These Introductory Readings run to 350 pages, compared with the standard two-volume edition of 2500 pages, and the companion Selected Readings running to 650 pages. Most of the biological writings are excluded, as are the Prior Analytics (dealing with syllogisms) and many extracts consist of just a few paragraphs. By contrast, the Metaphysics, the Nichomachean Ethics and the Politics take up about two thirds of the book. The English is rough, but the editors explain that this is because their aim is to get as close as possible to what Aristotle actually wrote. The volume includes a glossary of key terms, which are capitalised whenever they appear in the main text, and references are given to their appearance elsewhere in the corpus. Most importantly, such terms appear in the main text with a subscript to distinguish those English words -for example “substance” - for which Aristotle has one or more different words to denote different concepts.It is a cliché that all philosophy is footnotes to Plato. I don’t think this is actually right. It all begins with Aristotle. Somewhere – I think in the introduction to the Selfish Gene – Richard Dawkins says we don’t need to bother reading anything written before the 1850’s, because it would have been written in ignorance of Darwin. Well, he may like to start by pondering the passage in the Physics where Aristotle raises the question of whether the configuration of a meat-eating animal’s teeth came about by chance, and whether it just so happened that this made that animal suitable for survival. The point is raised in the context of a discussion on chance, randomness, and concomitant and supervenient causes which is of direct relevance to the current debate among evolutionary biologists over the question of free-riders and spandrels. His appetite whetted, maybe Dawkins could go on to read the rest of this book.

I purchased this book to help me along in my third year of an honours degree in Philosophy. I highly recommend it to students of all levels as either the perfect introductory text or a handy resoursce for reference or additional insight.This is a fine collection of introductory texts to one of the great early philosophers. The author's comments and insight are particularly useful also. No serious student of philosophy should pass up giving this a read.

Excellent - arrived on time