The Best Constitution for the Flourishing Lives: Aristotle’s Political Theory and Its Implications for Emancipatory Purposes

IF 0.2 4区 哲学 0 PHILOSOPHY Problemos Pub Date : 2023-10-18 DOI:10.15388/problemos.2023.104.7
Andrius Bielskis
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Abstract

The aim of this paper is to discuss the issue of the best constitution given Aristotle’s account of human flourishing articulated in the Nicomachean Ethics. There, Aristotle claims that monarchy is the supreme form of constitution. A similar claim is repeated in Politics. The paper argues that these claims sit uneasily with Aristotle’s teleological accounts of the polis, the citizen, and his discussion of the virtues of the citizen and the good man in Politics. Given Aristotle’s philosophical definition of the state as “an association of equals for the sake of the best possible life” and his notion that “the best is happiness, and that consists in excellence and its perfect actualization and its employment”, and Aristotle’s argument on the relationship between the good man and the good citizen, this paper concludes that the best constitution is politeia. Yet, simply to argue so is not enough if we are to rescue Aristotle from his inconsistencies and his claims on “natural inequalities”. Finally, a more radical interpretation of Aristotle is outlined, which rejects Aristotle’s separation between the oikos and the polis and argues that the verticality of the former is philosophically arbitrary and contradicts the revolutionary implications of Aristotle’s normative teleology.
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繁荣生活的最佳宪法:亚里士多德的政治理论及其对解放目的的启示
本文的目的是讨论亚里士多德在《尼各马可伦理学》中所阐述的人类繁荣的最佳构成问题。在那里,亚里士多德声称君主制是宪法的最高形式。在《政治》中也有类似的说法。本文认为,这些主张与亚里士多德对城邦、公民的目的论描述,以及他在《政治》中对公民美德和好人的讨论,是不一致的。鉴于亚里士多德对国家的哲学定义是“为了尽可能最好的生活而建立的平等的联盟”,以及他的“最好的是幸福,而幸福在于卓越及其完美的实现和运用”的概念,以及亚里士多德关于好人与好公民之间关系的论证,本文得出的结论是,最好的宪法是政治。然而,如果我们要把亚里士多德从他的矛盾和他关于“自然不平等”的主张中拯救出来,仅仅这样论证是不够的。最后,对亚里士多德的一种更激进的解释进行了概述,这种解释拒绝了亚里士多德对城邦和城邦的分离,并认为前者的垂直性在哲学上是武断的,与亚里士多德规范目的论的革命性含义相矛盾。
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来源期刊
Problemos
Problemos PHILOSOPHY-
CiteScore
0.30
自引率
0.00%
发文量
27
审稿时长
18 weeks
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