22 March 2025, 12:12 (GMT)

Aristotle often gets caricatured as being arrogant or grandiose: “Some ancient philosophers thought that they could understand everything. Today, we’re more sophisticated: we specialise.”.

While Aristotle’s project was ambitious, spanning — at a minimum — logic, physics, metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, rhetoric, biology, and politics, I always read him as approaching his work in a humble and pragmatic manner.

Near the start of his Ethics, he says this of politics:

Our account of this science will be adequate if it achieves such clarity as the subject-matter allows; for the same degree of precision is not to be expected in all discussions, any more than in all the products of handicraft.

While he may have been ambitious in his pursuit of both mathematics and politics, he was humble and realistic about how exact his politics could be.

Like a lot of Aristotle’s wisdom, this might come across as plain old “common sense”.

Yet we commonly seek to be “scientific” in business or “mathematical” in design. The accusation that something is not sufficiently quantifiable is often fatal, leading it to be dismissed as useless or destroyed in some doomed effort at operationalisation.

We curtail our ambition by specialising and then seek to be inappropriately exact in our speciality. Aristotle’s deep awareness of many fields may have helped mitigate against this tendency.

A lot of Aristotle’s normative guidance is of the form:

do x to the right degree, at the right moment, for the right reasons.

How unsatisfying…

How true.