Chapter Thirteen: Big Aristotle.

Let’s start with Big Aristotle.

Let’s start with Big Aristotle. If you follow this link and search the page for Aristotle you find that Shaquille O’Neil of the NBA called himself Big Aristotle.
http://www.usaweekend.com/00_issues/001029/001029shaq.html#top
Go here to see why.
In similar vein, one of the key elements in John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice was the Aristotelian Principle, according to which we find happiness in fully using our gifts and abilities. This book was the major work of political theory of its generation. Like a great many other people, I cut my teeth on it in my book Matters of Justice (London: Croom Helm, 1986).
The Penguin translations always have a graphic on the cover and they portray Aristotle in a most unflattering form. Consider: This is Aristotle in medieval dress, not Greek, so as usual for Penguin accuracy is not the first consideration. Moreover this cover portrayal sits ill with Penguin’s determination to make the exotic Aristotle into a familiar for attention-span deprived college students in the Untied States. I prefer the vigorous, young Aristotle of Raphael. Pointing down to emphasis the material world as the foundation of reality, long before Karl Marx inverted another idealist, Georg Hegel, and holding a book in which knowledge is stored, a book from his extensive personal library. For he is sometimes credited with owning the first personal library for research.
Then there is the Hollywood version of Aristotle from Oliver Stone’s garbled “Alexander” (2004). Stone should have read Mary Renault’s three novels about Alexander instead of the executive summaries of his assistants. But I would indeed like Christopher Plummer to play me. Here Aristotle (Plummer) is shown with the young Alexander who may already be thinking about that elephant (see above). The resemblance that lucky guy Plummer bears to me is uncanny isn’t it?
Plato is played by Judith Drinan in 1966 film version of “Fahrenheit 451,” which is very faithful to the novel by Ray Bradbury. It is a world where books have all been burned but a few resistors have memorized the greatest books and share them with each other. Not quite the grandeur and gravitas of Plummer. But pathos and bathos both abound.
To be continued.