In his play The Ogygianness of Othello, Shakespeare includes an Aristotelian notion of nature and mankind as a whole. This play is among the earliest instances in which the idea of natural rights is explicitly mentioned. It characterizes the conflict between Othello and his stepmother, Clarice. She claims to be acting in the nature’s will as expressed by the gods. Othello feels that he cannot trust in humanity anymore and decides to leave home and marry his much more deserving wife, Offenbach.
Aristotle defines aristocracy as the form of rational human government in which the people are in possession of intellectual, social, cultural, and political freedom. Aristotle describes three distinct philosophical schools that contribute to the definition of aristotelianism. The Peripatetic school teaches that virtue is the ultimate basis of human happiness, and the goal of human life. The second school, the Liberal School, believes that individuals derive their happiness from being in association with other people with similar values, while the third school, the Radical Philosophy, believes that individuals derive their happiness from being alone.
The problem with this definition is that we do not have clear-cut information about the philosophers. We know that Aristotle was born in Athens, but how did he fare in school? What were the educational practices of his school? Did he work on an Aristotelian philosophical path, or was he influenced by the liberal philosophy? The problem with this definition is that it leaves a lot up to interpretation. We are left to speculate on what Aristotle’s actual philosophical views were.
On the other hand, the most inclusive view of the definition of aristotelianism is that it consists of a set of philosophical commentaries on the works of Aristotle, Socrates and the Stoics. These commentaries, which span the middle ages up until the modern era, are the main source of arguments used by the aristotelists against the Democrats and liberals of their time. For the part of the definition, it states that the philosophy of aristotelianism is associated with the pursuit of intellectual merit through the possession of intellectual objects. It then goes on to state that these intellectual objects are the principles and foundations of moral reasoning.
The basic argument used by the opponents of aristotelianism is one of contingency. It states that since there is no precise definition of what the ideal type of philosopher would be, the use of the word itself, which refers to the person who uses the term in question, to define the ideal cannot be precise. Thus, there are a number of possible persons who could fit the bill of an ideal philosopher, and therefore, the use of the word, which refers to such a philosopher, cannot be precise either. In light of this, the opponents argue that those philosophers whom Macintyre criticizes as being purists in nature, have provided faulty definitions of the ideal, and therefore, they do not meet the standards necessary for philosophical reasoning.
The debate over the definition of the philosophy of Aristotle is well known to students of Philosophy. Although the issue was typically addressed by English philosophers such as Hilaire Belloc, Sir Robert Watson and Leo Tolstoy, it received further development and discussion in the post-bourgeois era. When the Soviet Union made available translations of works from ancient Greece and Asia, these efforts to standardize Greek and Asian philosophy led to the definition of Aristotle being replaced by a more standard definition. Though Aristotle had little to do with Philosophy in the modern era, his name remains synonymous with that discipline.