Aristotle - Virtues and Vices videos

censor in the sense of blame is so 19th century and confuses me when someone 21st century uses it other than of a junta cutting out sections of a newspaper.
warning people not to confuse αἰτία with xxx risks linking the two in the mind of someone how has not got the two confused and probably won’t help someone who is already confusing the two. Taking extra time to explain such easily confused words (as you do) is helpful but its probably best not to say why you are doing so.

the sentence τριμεροῦς δὲ τῆς ψυχῆς λαμβανομένης κατὰ Πλάτωνα, τοῦ μὲν λογιστικοῦ ἀρετή ἐστιν ἡ φρόνησις, τοῦ δὲ θυμοειδοῦς ἥ τε πραότης καὶ ἡ ἀνδρεία, τοῦ δὲ ἐπιθυμητικοῦ ἥ τε σωφροσύνη καὶ ἡ ἐγκράτεια, ὅλης δὲ τῆς ψυχῆς ἥ τε δικαιοσύνη καὶ ἡ ἐλευθεριότης καὶ ἡ μεγαλοψυχία. utterly defeated me the first time I tried it about a year ago. It again defeated me when I tried again in preparation for watching your video. Your explanation, being very full, made it seem easy. I especially liked the way you didn’t translate ἥ but described what it was doing in the sentence and what it related back to.

At the end you apologize for not using the metalanguage. That’s not a fault. The meta language does convey a lot of information concisely at the cost of being confusing to those not fully on top of the metalanguage. As such it it is needed only when your space is constrained. You, however, explained everything in full which is why I liked the video.

Lastly please don’t say something is easy. It is a little disheartening to be told that of something that for me was diabolically difficult before watching your video.

Overall - excellent.

hi, can you please give a link to the video(s) that you’ve reviewed above? thanks! cheers, chad

My review is of the video by Scribo:

and the one by jeidsath will no doubt also interest you.

Yes, what is easy is very subjective. I remember people telling me Homer was easy 20 years ago. They were comparing Homer to Attic Tragedy. But if you have never read Homer and your texts have been NT and LXX Homer isn’t easy.

Yes, what is easy is very subjective. I remember people telling me Homer was easy 20 years ago. They were comparing Homer to Attic Tragedy. But if you have never read Homer and your texts have been NT and LXX Homer isn’t easy.

There is some doubt as to whether Aristotle is the real author of Virtues and Vices . I am curious as to why his authorship has been questioned but to be honest what what really interests me is whether it is written in the same style as the rest of Aristotle’s works and does the author (whether Aristotle himself or one of his followers) favor the same idioms as Aristotle. In short is reading Virtues and Vices helpful in getting on top of the specific features of Aristotle’s Greek.

Good question. I think I alluded to , but largely steered clear of this. Disputed authorship comes from two parts a) style and language being slightly later and b) philosophical content. The intro to the Teubner edition has a full essay. I can’t really comment two much on the latter, but as for the former it just seems…simpler, less polished etc in style.

Will this impact reading Aristotle? Not at all. First, it’s always good to get practice in Attic Greek. Secondly, it’s a good grounding in things like ethical vocab (which goes back to Plato) and thirdly what I loosely call the “lecture note” style one finds in philosophy. It’s an excellent introduction and once I’ve finished going through this I’d like to do one or two bits on Aristotle proper just to hammer that in. Though, again, I’m no fan or expert on Aristotle so I can’t be at all elucidating.

http://www.podium-arts.com/1440/aristotle-virtues-vices

Has any one seen this webpage? It has a good recording of part of the text as well as part of the text itself.

His audio is very good. Very clear and fluent with attention to vowel length, accent, and prosody.

So the style differs from typical Aristotle in being less hard? In other words, as an introduction to the rest of Aristotle’s work, the extent it differs from typical Aristotle makes it a better introduction.
As an argument against Aristotle’s authorship it seems to me rather weak - as if it is unimaginable that the great man might choose to write some so down market and accessible.
However, as far philosophical content is concerned my knowledge of Aristotle is too superficial to judge even though I shall probably check them out those arguments in detail sometime.

A lot of treatises transmitted under Aristotle’s name are suspect or downright spurious, often on philosophical grounds. The Nicomachean Ethics is the place to go for Aristotelian virtues and vices. But to judge from the opening (I haven’t read further) the style seems quite Aristotelian enough for your purposes. The classification system at the outset is characteristic in its form of presentation. The tripartite soul is Plato’s (Phaedo, Republic); Aristotle didn’t accept it.

In which case I look forward to the next installment.


That makes sense.

It is possible that it was just through luck that Scribo managed to cover all my difficulties but does seem to me that doing it as a video has the advantage over hearing it in a classroom in that I can go back over it as many times as I like. Also Scribo clearly made an effort to cover every possible problem.

Ok, put the second one up. It’s not…very good.

So my feeling a bit stuffy and nasaly turned into my being, well, I shan’t admit to suffering illness but I’m somewhat out of sorts. I’ve had trouble getting the visual and the audio to match so the cursor is not always helpful but I believe overall it’s functional. I’ve tried to pair down the amount of time I spend explaining stuff but somehow…somehow I’ve ended up at 20mins for less text and what seems like less explanation. I’m definitely going to have to do this one but I really want to press on to the end and then record a recitatio of the entire text first.

Like I said though, still working out the kinks.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHc-NXjqo6M

Aristotle also wrote fictional philosophical dialogues for consumption by the general public, much as Plato did (only with himself as the main character: Plato would never have done that!), in a much more approachable style. It’s unfortunate that all we have of them is a few measly excerpts.

What happened to the original thread on this? Could some kind soul post the link to it please?

The original discussion of scribo’s and my video happened in this thread: http://discourse.textkit.com/t/plan-of-action/67/1

Roger Masters claims that we still have some of Aristotle’s dialogues: http://www.jstor.org/stable/191146

The original discussion of scribo’s and my video happened in this thread: viewtopic.php?f=2&t=63701&start=40#p174387

Thanks Joel. I stand by what I said there, but daivid makes an important counter-point: a youtube presentation (like Textkit posts) you can go back over whenever and as often as you want (if you can find them again).

Roger Masters claims that we still have some of Aristotle’s dialogues: > http://www.jstor.org/stable/191146

But I trust no-one has believed him.

Roger Masters claims that we still have some of Aristotle’s dialogues: > http://www.jstor.org/stable/191146

But I trust no-one has believed him.

You are correct: http://www.jstor.org/stable/191169

Still, it’s a fun argument.

@Scribo – these are my thoughts on the second video. I’m being detailed because I think that will be useful to you, so it may look more critical than I intend it. Please don’t take it that way! I appreciate the very hard work that’s going into this.

0:00 – It may be helpful to read through the texts (expressively) once at the beginning. A lot of things that aren’t apparent in a written text can be signaled when read aloud – clause breaks, what words fix together, etc.

1:00 – The explanation of sentence structure is short and good.

1:41 – 1:48: Why not drop the δὲ and μὲν, so as not to leave the listener hanging?

I don’t like pronunciation of συντεινόντων – the vowels are muddled. It’s clearer to me if the των at the end of the word sounds like the τῶν that it’s agreeing with.

This reading is a chance to signal what τῶν πρὸς εὐδαιμονίαν συντεινόντων is doing before you explain it. You could do it similarly to how you would modulate your voice for the noun phrases in “The house-on-the-left is ugly, but the house-on-the-right has charm.”

I imagine that to get it to sound right it would help to memorize the passage and explain it to someone without the text in front of you. (My wife has been getting to hear a lot of Euthrypro lately.)

2:00 – “τοῦ λογιστικοῦ τοῦ μέρος” – nice extemporization, please more of this.

2:18 “You literally have φρόνησίς ἐστι παρασκευαστική.” Again nice and simple, but maybe add τινος, and try to reduce the English verbiage introducing the phrase.

2:18-2:50: I would suggest illustrating this first my modulating your voice (see above), and then by using a simpler Greek sentence with simpler vocabulary, or a paraphrase. The visual explanation at the bottom is muddled. There are two things to explain 1) παρασκευαστική with a genitive, and 2) the noun phrase. Take them separately. For 2), bring it into the nominative, and then try a paraphrase?

2:50-3:10 I really dislike this picking out of English equivalents, making it sound to listeners like you are just picking a meaning at random from the dictionary. Teach the Greek, not the text. Why not use Xen. Mem. 3.1.6 as an explanation of παρασκευαστικός instead? It has mostly the same structure as this phrase and could be simplified. Or use παρασκευαστικός in an English phrase without trying to give a precise meaning.

3:10-4:00 You end up with the English translation at the end, but the explanation of how to get there was tough for me to follow (and I knew where you were going with it).

4:00 - 4:08 You were very good reading the φρόνησίς ἐστι ἀρετὴ τοῦ λογιστικοῦ clause, and this clause should sound exactly the same, among other things signaling to the listener that it’s parallel. Instead, it’s read with no modulation.

4:50-5:15 You spend half a minute here trying to explain the sound of Greek contraction instead of just saying it. I would simplify this to: “κατὰ ἥν (pronounce this as prissily as possible) contracts to καθ’ ἥν.”

5:55: Here another example of picking out an English meaning for a word (seemingly) at random. Don’t say that ὑπό can mean ‘by’ or ‘from’ and that you’ve picked ‘from.’ Instead mention that ὑπὸ is a common idiom and illustrate with some simple examples.

6:00 — Your boxes showed up late, unfortunately, so it’s hard to judge how much sense they made in context. I liked that you were explaining δυσ- versus ευ-, but it would have helped to see more example sentences.

NOTE: For the rest of the video, the mouse is badly offset from the audio.

8:21-35 δυσέκπληκτοί εἰσιν. Try pronouncing these two words together once instead of explaining how you did pronounce them 20 seconds ago. Also, you may notice from your reading that it’s really the pronunciation of word accent that makes a word enclitic, not (just) how close they are together (words in a sentence are mostly said together), so I was happy to hear you stress -τοί.

9:02 “Notice how the article comes after the noun…” I understand what you are saying, but that was an infelicitous expression. This is not the article of φόβων moved to after the noun, rather it’s the article for περὶ θάνατον, agreeing with φόβων. Also “rhythm of the sentence” is similarly unhelpful. But then you follow everything by “ὑπὸ φόβων, which φόβων?, τῶν περὶ θάνατον, those regarding death.” That was perfect.

12:15 That’s a good illustration of “base desires” for English, but not so good for τῶν φαύλων ἡδονῶν, I would think. Our word “base” has picked up more moral connotations in this phrase. I could be wrong.

13:15 You mention that you aren’t glossing the philosophical headwords. It makes me wonder who the audience of this is supposed to be? Have your listeners learned these words from reading other texts, and therefore know quite a bit of Greek, or did they study a sheet of glosses before watching the video? If you expect them to have used glosses before watching this, how exactly are you getting them to “learn the words in context” just because you avoid saying them now. The solution here, instead of glosses, might be example sentences, simplified from real Greek usages of these words.

I listened to the rest, but didn’t stop and rewind very much (my notes would have been very similar to the above anyway). Regardless, thank you for the very hard work on putting this together!

Actually that was all incredibly helpful. Unfortunately I can’t necessarily fix anything with my reading right now because I’m pretty bunged up still. Honestly I thought I’d be done with this by now, I intended to do one each evening over 7 days and ended up with, like, 2 in 12? So I guess I rushed it a bit too much. But the positive is I think the overall presentation was better and I’ve learned a lot from messing about with editing.

Either way, this one needs re-doing. I just couldn’t get the sound and images to go together properly. The only points I would make, by way of explanation are:

I tried to avoid giving a full reading in order to save time…but somehow I ended up at the 20min mark none the less, so you may be right that I should just do that. I don’t get how I’m going so over my time limit. If I had followed your suggestions I think I could have cut a few mins down.

I think one way I can cut down time, and make things better, is by limiting the English glosses. It’s where I stumble, for some reason I often go anc Greek > modern Greek > English rather than Anc > English. I guess hearing aitiatikh, metoxh etc all the time is MORE confusing. It’s the lack of physical audience and interaction I think. That said I’m not sure I can keep citing Greek because this is meant to be for beginners and I don’t want to introduce new words etc that they wouldn’t understand. If I get the hang of this, a later text can be explicated in that manner, with a lot of Greek. I’m heading to less and less explanation each vid anyway in this series.

I’m gonna take your notes and have another go in the morning before the gym if I can. Hopefully it will be clearer and, by the gods, less than 20 mins.

So here’s where I am generally with this: I’m not sure how helpful the whole process can be rather than simply producing beginner PDF commentaries. My aim is generally to produce something different to what is already out there. I myself am skeptical a bit of the helpfulness generally, but I think I’m following the old adage “Primum non nocere”. So there’s that, at least.

I feel you on this. The big advantage with a PDF commentary is that one can take it at whatever pace they want: they can jump around back and forth, spend more time on certain parts and less on the parts they get, etc. However, there is a definite advantage to something like this for a beginner: hearing someone read the Greek text brings the language to life and ‘‘pulls it off the page’’. I think that it can be very motivating, especially for a beginner, to realize that the symbols on the page represent a living, breathing human communication. It gives ‘‘warmth’’ to the text. Overall, your pronunciation is quite good. I hope you continue with these.