I don't know how broadly or how narrowly you're using the word "physical," but if your "physical phenomena" include everything that takes place in the physical world, i.e. everything biological, then the answer is clearly Yes. As an observer of animals, the parts of animals, and their internal anatomy, both Aristotle's methodology and his actual statements are impressive. This is not to say he's right all the time, or even most of the time. Sometimes he can look right at an organ, like a heart, and misdescribe it. (This is not to mention his failure to understand how the blood circulates.) I imagine you'd rather hear the assessment from a modern biologist than from a philosopher, and so I recommend the recent book THE LAGOON by Armand Marie Leroi. Leroi is a biologist who makes clear what Aristotle observed correctly, what he missed, and where (as in his thinking about natural selection) his presuppositions prevented him from drawing better conclusions from his observations. The book is written...

Sometimes when you discuss ancient philosophers it’s allright to be a little anachronistic. Sowe can discuss Aristotle and technology, even though what he would have known as technology was close to nothing compared to what we find in the modern world. Or we talk about Plato and democracy in spite of the huge differences between the democracy that he lived in and the representative democracies of the past few centuries. There are other times when such tolerance for anachronism comes to an end, and I’d say that talk of economics is one of those times. No economic philosophy occurs in either one’s work, or in the work of any near-contemporary of theirs; and the most important reason must be that the economies they lived in were nowhere near sophisticated enough to make state economic policies possible, or to let such phenomena as employment fluctuations be studied. Look at a city like Athens,one of the largest populations in Greece and probably the wealthiest. Its economy was based (as all ancient...

The problem you describe is obviously a threat to Aristotle's view of nature and of the species of plants and animals (which may be why Aristotle argues against Darwin in Book 2 of the Physics). As you say, "species are organic processes" -- although you ought to recognize that this conception of biological species is our shared conception of species after Darwin. Darwin has indeed made many elements of the ancient theory of nature hard to imagine, even if the ancients found their view of nature extremely easy to imagine. Plato differs from Aristotle, however. For one thing, Plato expects to find much less order in the natural world than Aristotle does. If you confront Plato with the spectacle of constant change in nature, he might be inclined to agree. In this particular case, a lot depends on whether or not Plato thought there were Forms for species -- a Form of human being, of dog, of oak. In some of the dialogues that speak of Forms, the description of them does not seem to include biological...

As far as the use of force goes, I would be surprised if Plato would have had much to say about what we call terrorism. This is not because he would approve of the tactic of singling out civilians as targets, in the hopes of demoralizing an enemy; but simply because he would take a lot of such tactics for granted. The histories of the time indicate two distinct forms of engagement between enemies. On the one hand, a lot of battles on land and sea were fought formally, with arranged battlefields and times to fight (mostly in the summer); on the other hand, when one state besieged another one the attackers would subject everyone within the city walls to the deprivations that were intended to drive the city to surrender. Soldiers frequently distinguished between civilians and members of an army, but there were plenty of instances in which they did not. (See the Athenian attack on the island of Melos, as described in Book 5 of Thucydides, chapters 85-113.) You seem to have something else in mind,...

This question is on to something important. The language is a bit inexact, as people’s language tends to get when they discuss Platonic Forms, but that is partly because Plato himself uses broad and sometimes shifting terminology to capture the essence of the Forms. To say the Forms are “ideal” could mean too many things; and Plato doesn’t often say they are “perfect.” More often he’ll talk about “the beautiful itself,” “the large itself.” This absolute character of Forms does not follow from their unchanging nature – although you are quite right that Plato thinks they are unchanging. If anything, their quality of being unchanging follows from their “perfect” possession of whatever attributes they have. If the Form of the Large is large, and it’s absolutely large, then it can’t change, for change might make it larger or smaller. And if it became larger, then it hadn’t been abs0lutely large to begin with; if it became smaller, it would cease to be largeness as such. Objects we can perceive are...

This is an old question about Plato’s Republic, and it’s something of an evergreen, because every serious contemporary reader who goes through the Republic’s proposal for a better state will notice the similarity between some features of that proposal and features of modern totalitarian states. The guardians are subjected to a life without property or privacy that calls communism to mind. The organic unity of the state, which your question alludes to, might sound like modern fascism. But the question is a complex one, with too many elements to be handled in this space. Let me say a few words and then direct you to a place where I consider more aspects of the issue, chapter 10 of the third edition of my Guidebook to Plato’s Republic. There I ask about paternalism, individual autonomy, and other features of the Platonic state that are relevant to the question you have raised. The trickiest part of your question is the first word: “Would.” You aren’t asking whether Plato did describe fascism, but...

For a lot of people who study Nietzsche it’s not clear that a connection exists. Nietzsche himself considered these his two most important contributions to philosophy, although I’m not aware of any explicit attempt on his part to unite them. And you have to bear in mind that even though he thought these were his most important ideas, it doesn’t follow that they were. I find much deep and valuable philosophical thinking in Nietzsche’s works, but not always where he thought the best ideas were. For instance, Nietzsche has an extremely high opinion of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, while he treats On the Genealogy of Morals as if it were a mere appendix to Beyond Good and Evil. Other readers may disagree with me (although plenty do not), but in my own opinion On the Genealogy of Morals is his greatest single work, one that yields up more insights on every reading; while Thus Spoke Zarathustra is uneven and at most a supplementary part of Nietzsche’s oeuvre. But that’s just an example, by way of...

That looks like a straightforward question. And a reasonable person might expect some clear statement of the criterion that separates Homeric poetry (or any other poetry for that matter) from philosophical theory. So it’s interesting to realize, at the start, that even in antiquity it took some time for a consensus to emerge on the relationship between the two kinds of discourse. One of the first ancient Greeks to compile an intellectual history was Hippias the sophist, whom we know today from Plato’s rather unflattering portrayals of him in the Hippias Major and the Hippias Minor (titles that merely indicate, by the way, that the former dialogue is the longer of the two and the latter shorter). Socrates makes short work of Hippias in the dialogues, but in real life he was intellectually ambitious and enterprising. His history of thought is lost today, but it came before any history by Plato or Aristotle, and apparently contained philosophers and poets in comparable numbers. Plato, for his...

I'm not sure there is an answer to this question. Certainly you don't want to presuppose too much about one theory or another of Plato's dialogue form. In antiquity there were many philosophers before and after Plato who wrote dialogues, whether in order to be consistent Platonists or for another reason. But let's assume that the dialogue form is justified and accounted for by the passage in Plato's Phaedrus about the problems with writing. (A big assumption; not an assumption I would make. But it seems to be your assumption, so I'm accepting it for the sake of argument.) In that passage Socrates says that serious philosophers won't write their ideas down in a way that leaves them vulnerable to attack and misunderstanding, but at most will write "reminders" to themselves about what they think. The dialogue might then be seen as such a reminder. But already we run into a problem. What's to say that the writings of Plotinus are not reminders as well? Why call them by the anachronistic name of ...

Let me talk about political equality, to narrow things down. I agree there is a sense of “equality in the eyes of God” in the Bible passage, and offhand I can’t think of that idea’s appearing anywhere in pre-Christian Greek thought. (I may well be overlooking something obvious, but nothing comes to mind.) But political equality, the idea of equal treatment under the law, is another matter. When archaic Greece first started to emerge as new and newly-reorganized cities on the Greek mainland, on the islands, and along the coast of Asia Minor, their politics, poetry, and architecture reflected the idea of isonomia “equality under the law.” For a capsule description of this cultural and political construct see J-P Vernant The Origin of Greek Thinking, a short but superb book. Monarchs had largely disappeared from Greece by this time (800-600 BC). Cities were laid out with a central space, the agora, that symbolized citizens’ contributions to public discourse and policy. The military had changed so...