Aristotle as a Critic Essay

Aristotle (384-322 B. C. E. ), the son of a physician, was the educatee of Plato from approximately 367 B. C. until his mentors death in 348/347. After carrying on philosophical and scientific investigations elsewhere in the Greek world and circumstances as the tutor to Alexander the Great, he returned to Athens in 335 B. C. E. to make the Lyceum, a major philosophical center, which he used as his storey for prolific investigations into many areas of philosophy.Aristotle is a towering figure in quaint Greek philosophy, making contributions to logic, metaphysics, mathematics, physics, biology, botany, ethics, politics, agriculture, medicine, dancing and theatre. As a prolific writer and polymath, Aristotle radically transformed intimately, if non all, areas of knowledge he touched. It is no peculiarity that Aquinas referred to him simply as The Philosopher. In his lifetime, Aristotle wrote as many as 200 treatises, of which only 31 survive.Unfortunately for us, these plant are in the form of lecture notes and draft manuscripts never intended for general readership, so they do not demonstrate his reputed polished prose style which attracted many massive followers, including the Roman Cicero. Aristotle was the first to classify areas of human knowledge into distinct disciplines such(prenominal) as mathematics, biology, and ethics. Some of these classifications are serene used today. There has been long dead reckoning that the original Poetics comprised two adjudges, our extant Poetics and a lost twinkling book that supposedly dealt with engenderdy and catharsis.No firm evidence for the existence of this second book has been adduced. Our (knowledge of the text of the Poetics depends principally on a manuscript of the ten percent or eleventh century and a second manuscript dating from the fourteenth century. (not to write in notes)*. Aristotle could be considered the first popular literary critic. Unlike Plato, who all but condemned written verse, Aristotle breaks it down and analyses it so as to separate the good from the bad. On a number of subjects Aristotle developed positions that most-valuablely differed from those of his teacher.We very clearly note this profound difference of opinion with Plato and, indeed, disclose the overt correction of his erst eyepatch master in Aristotles literary and aesthetic theories. Aristotelian aesthetics directly contradicts Platos negative take of art by establishing a potent intellectual role. The principal antecedent of our knowledge of Aristotles aesthetic and literary theory is the Poetics, but alpha supplementary information is found in other treatises, chiefly the Rhetoric, the Politics, and the Nicomachean Ethics.Aristotles main contribution to criticism may well be the supposition that poetry is after all an art with an object of its own, that it can be rationally understood and reduced to an intelligible set of rules (that is, it is an art, consort to the comment in the Ethics). The main concern of the rules of the Poetics, however, is not with the composition of literary works it is rather with their critical evaluation. Consequently, criticism can be a science, and not a mass of random principles and intuitions. Aristotle speaks of the educative value of visual, musical and oral arts.Both the Rhetoric and the Poetics can be considered to be expansions of this view. We might secern that Aristotle sets literature free from Platos radical moralism and didacticism, while he still expects it to be conformable to a moral understanding of the world. For him, literature is a rational and beneficial activity, and not an irrational and dangerous unrivaled, as it was for Plato. Aristotle? s approach to literature is mainly philosophical he is more implicated with the nature and the structure of poetry than with its origin.The origins of poetry had been grounded on the instinct of assumed which is natural to man. The first poetical works were spontaneo us improvisations. The origins of the different genres is reassert by Aristotle thus Poetry soon branched into two channels, according to the temperaments of individual poets. The more serious-minded among them represented noble actions and the doings of noble persons, while the more trivial wrote about the meaner sort of people thus, while the one type wrote hymns and panegyrics, these others began by writing invectives.(Poetics II). The development goes through serious or comic epic poems such as those written by home run to comedy and tragedy these new forms were both grander and more highly regarded than the sooner (Poetics II). Aristotle does not, however, decide on whether tragedy (and by implication, literature) has already developed as far as it can but he does assert that it has come to a standstill.Aristotle makes a brief outline of the narration of tragedy At first the poets had used the tetrameter because they were writing satyr-poetry, which was more closely relate d to the dance but once dialogue had been introduced, by its very nature it stimulate upon the right measure, for the iambic is of all measures the one best suited to address . . . . Another change was the increased number of episodes, or acts. (Poetics II). Aristotle also deals shortly with the rise of comedy the early history of comedy. . .is obscure, because it was not taken seriously. funniness had already acquired certain clear-cut forms before there is any take down of those who are named as its poets. Nor is it known who introduced masks, or prologues, or a face pack of actors, and other things of that kind. Of Athenian poets Crates was the first to discard the lampoon pattern and to watch stories and plots of a more general nature. (Poetics II). The work of Aristotle as a consentaneous may be considered to be an attempt to develop a morphological and metalinguistic approach to literature.Although it preserves a concern with valuation, its main thrust is towards th e commentary of theoretical possibilities and general laws. Some critics have spoken of Aristotles drop the ball of omission in relationship with lyric poetry and the inspirational fixings in literature. This is a fact. But it does not seem so important when we look at what Aristotle does say and the principles he establishes. We can barely own the aspect of criticism after Aristotles work, if we compare it to its previous state. His is the most important single contribution to criticism in the whole history of the discipline.