The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, Vol. 1

The Complete Works of Aristotle #1

by Aristotle, Jonathan Barnes (Editor)

Originally published in twelve volumes between 1912 and 1954, the Oxford translation of Aristotle is universally recognized as the standard English version of the great philosopher’s works. This revised edition has been fully updated in the light of modern scholarship while remaining faithful to the substance and vibrancy of the original translation. Now available in two volumes with three new translations and an enlarged selection of Fragments, The Complete Works of Aristotle makes the surviving writings of Aristotle readily accessible to a new generation of English-speaking readers.

Genres: Philosophy, Classics, Nonfiction, History, Science, Ancient, Reference

1757 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 323

About the author

Aristotle (Greek: Αριστοτέλης; 384–322 BC) was an Ancient Greek philosopher and polymath. His writings cover a broad range of subjects spanning the natural sciences, philosophy, linguistics, economics, politics, psychology, and the arts. As the founder of the Peripatetic school of philosophy in the Lyceum in Athens, he began the wider Aristotelian tradition that followed, which set the groundwork for the development of modern science.
Little is known about Aristotle's life. He was born in the city of Stagira in northern Greece during the Classical period. His father, Nicomachus, died when Aristotle was a child, and he was brought up by a guardian. At 17 or 18, he joined Plato's Academy in Athens and remained there until the age of 37 (c. 347 BC). Shortly after Plato died, Aristotle left Athens and, at the request of Philip II of Macedon, tutored his son Alexander the Great beginning in 343 BC. He established a library in the Lyceum, which helped him to produce many of his hundreds of books on papyrus scrolls.
Though Aristotle wrote many treatises and dialogues for publication, only around a third of his original output has survived, none of it intended for publication. Aristotle provided a complex synthesis of the various philosophies existing prior to him. His teachings and methods of inquiry have had a significant impact across the world, and remain a subject of contemporary philosophical discussion.
Aristotle's views profoundly shaped medieval scholarship. The influence of his physical science extended from late antiquity and the Early Middle Ages into the Renaissance, and was not replaced systematically until the Enlightenment and theories such as classical mechanics were developed. He influenced Judeo-Islamic philosophies during the Middle Ages, as well as Christian theology, especially the Neoplatonism of the Early Church and the scholastic tradition of the Catholic Church.
Aristotle was revered among medieval Muslim scholars as "The First Teacher", and among medieval Christians like Thomas Aquinas as simply "The Philosopher", while the poet Dante Alighieri called him "the master of those who know". His works contain the earliest known formal study of logic, and were studied by medieval scholars such as Pierre Abélard and Jean Buridan. Aristotle's influence on logic continued well into the 19th century. In addition, his ethics, although always influential, gained renewed interest with the modern advent of virtue ethics.

Reviews

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anyone who has even the slightest interest in Philosophy has to of course read Aristotle. However, reading the Ethics, Logic, Poetics, Physics and Metaphysics are satisfying in their own right. Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics are probably the most insightful and useful reconstruction of human ethical life that has been written. The Poetics are an exceptional source for an understanding of Greek Tragedy. And the Physics/Metaphysics are vital for anyone interested in the history of Religion and science, both because of his mistakes and because of the methodological insights he develops. Finally, it is worth reading these works if for no other reason than the way he develops a worldview of nature and theology that is so dramatically different than our own.

[Andrew Pixton · Rating 3 out of 5]

Much harder for me to read than Plato was. Plato used a story format and addressed more interesting topics whereas Aristotle often feels like he talks more about semantics. Both their influences have held back science, and perhaps in Aristotle's case, social progress. Paradoxically, he also effectively started science. I suppose any figure of influence will have some negative impacts when they make mistakes. I'm (was at the time) more of a Platonist but I like(d) Aristotle's objectivity, rules of logic, theories of potentiality to actuality, time as a measurement of motion, virtue ethics (morality is having good character), and natural telos. He focused on this world because we can observe it, though interesting still believed in an ether in the sky and had many similar ideas to Plato with out intending to. I didn't read all of this collection, but focused on various significant parts as well as contributions from scholars.

Favorite Quotes:

"It is the mark of an intelligent person to entertain an idea without accepting it."

"We are what we do repeatedly. Excellence then is not a single act, but a habit."

"The aim of art is not to represent the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance."

"There is no great genius without a mixture of madness."

"Poverty is the parent of revolution and crime."

"Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies."

[Kaberoi Rua · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Complete Works of Aristotle, Volume 1 includes: Categories, De Interpretatione, Prior Analytics, Posterior Analytics, Topics, Sophistical Refutations, Physics, On the Heavens, On Generation and Corruption, Meteorology, On the Universe, On the Soul, Sense and Sensibilia, On Memory, On Sleep, On Dreams, On Divination in Sleep, On Length and Shortness of Life, On Youth, Old Age, Life and Death, and Respiration, On Breath, History of Animals, Parts of Animals, Movement of Animals, Progression of Animals, Generation of Animals, On Colors, On things Heard, and finally Physiognomonics.

Before studying Aristotle, I recommend reading or having a solid idea of the Presocratic philosophers such as Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, Xenophanes, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Melissus, Pythagoras, Anaxagoras, and Empedocles. Too include the philosophy of the Sophists such as Protagoras, Gorgias, Hippias, Antiphon, and Thrasymachus. Finally, have read or an understanding of Plato and Socrates as Aristotle (the father of reason) destroys these philosopher's ideas and theories.

[Preetam Chatterjee · Rating 5 out of 5]

The year was 2003. I was professionally reviewing The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, Vol. 1 for the JNU Journal—a monumental task that felt less like reading and more like navigating an intellectual odyssey. You couldn’t read it in one go, but neither could you walk away from it. Every page turned felt like dislodging a mental boulder. I still remember the quiet tremor I felt entering Metaphysics, confronted by that opening line: “All men by nature desire to know.” In that moment, I felt my entire teaching career silently echo back at me.

Reading this was less an academic exercise and more a reconstruction of my own thinking. Aristotle’s grounded logic—his rejection of Platonic abstraction in favor of methodical, structured reasoning—reshaped the way I read, taught, and thought. From biology to ethics, logic to poetics, his vast reach felt like mapping the architecture of the human mind. The title of my review for the journal was “Reason as Structure: Reading Aristotle Beyond the Binary.” I remember those afternoons in Delhi vividly—sheets of notes, a desk always cluttered, a thermos full of tea, and a silence that wasn’t empty but full of philosophical weight.

This volume wasn’t just a deep dive into Aristotle—it was a rediscovery of self. No book since has pulled me that far inward. It wasn’t just a reading experience. It was an immersion into the logic, language, and existential blueprint of thought itself.

[James Henderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Aristotle is one of the foundation authors on which I base my personal philosophy and he is also one of the greatest thinkers who ever lived. We only have what were notes to his lectures, yet reading them I feel the power of his mind is always present. The books included in this two-volume set range from the foundation of thinking of logic, scientific speculation on physics, psychology and astronomy, metaphysics, and moral guidelines with the Nicomachean Ethics perhaps the acme of his philosophy. I also especially enjoyed the five books on animals (history, parts, movement, progression, and generation). His powers of observation were unsurpassed and the connections that can be made between the concepts developed in the different books helps to develop a better understanding of his ideas. I would recommend Aristotle for those interested in the foundations of philosophy (along with the Dialogues of Plato).

[Lukerik · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m ashamed to say that I abandoned the Organon half way through as I had failed to understand it. God knows how you will. It’s not at all like Plato where you get out as much as you put in. Here you must completely understand every sentence or you’re lost. Granted, this is an edition without notes, but I’d need more than notes. I’d need a three year degree course just to begin to understand what he means. I’m told that the text is essentially notes to support a series of lectures, and looking through some of the others books in this collection I found then written in the same impenetrable style. Well, it was all sackcloth and ashes here. I have found the limit of my vast intellect. Prior to this I hadn’t been sure there was one.

After the weeping and lamentation was over I pretended I’d enjoyed being humbled like that, and looking through the collection again I found that not all the books are written in the same style. On the Soul and the Parva Naturalia can be read profitably by human beings. These are series of treatises on biology, but Aristotle strays into what we would consider physics and chemistry because crucially he does not understand about things like radiation and chemicals. He’s basically working without results based experimentation, with no previous scientists’ work to refer to, and his only instrument appears to be the pipette. What he does have is observation and the pumpings of his vast multi-cylindered intellect. If you want to see the internal workings of a brain so powerful it must stand at the limit of the humanly possible then read these books. On Divination in Sleep, one of the Parva Naturalia, is funny as well. There’s also On Breath. This is one of the psedepigrapha that got mixed up and passed down under his name. This gives a nice contrast because you can immediately see the difference between how Aristotle thinks and how normal humans think.

Anyway, let’s set all this aside and try to rate this edition. What we have is essentially the standard English edition of the entire Corpus Aristotelicum – all the works passed down from the ancient world under Aristotle’s name, plus the Athenian Constitution, but not the Medieval fakes. It’s based on the 12 volume Oxford translation, with translations revised or replaced and all the notes stripped out to compress it into two volumes. I’ve seen the physical books and they’re nicely made, though probably a little large to read on the bus. Translations are modern and as readable as they probably can be. I have knocked off a star for the digital edition. There’s no need to maintain the split into two volumes, though I do see there is now a one volume digital edition. As size is not an issue I don’t see why thay can’t add the notes back in. They must own the copyright and any tyepsetting cost could be offset by not having to pay a printer.

[Conrad]

I bought this in college so I could read On the Heavens, Aristotle's early attempt at a cosmology (which he was to refine slightly in other books). I figured I might as well get the two-volume set since I was interested and had nothing better to do at the time.

The two books together weight about ten or fifteen pounds. It should be a testament to my devotion to Aristotle that when I got all my books out of storage last weekend and had to pick which ones to load in my massive backpack so as not to go over US Airways' fascistic luggage weight allowance, I picked these (as well as Gotham and a bunch of others).

I don't want to rate this because I haven't slogged through, for example, all of the Logic (Categories and its kin put me to sleep), but it's hard not to be completely bowled over by the sheer observatory power that must have been involved in collecting this much knowledge in one place. Why would you ever think to? It's hard to fathom Aristotle sometimes.

Anyway, I appreciate the perspective in Nicomachean Ethics much more than anything Plato ever wrote even though I'm fond of Timaeus and Gorgias, and the skeptical spirit that infuses Aristotle - plus his assumption that reality, physis, is infinitely granular - is worth taking in and then emulating.

[Breta · Rating 3 out of 5]

Decent publication for someone who would like to have an overview of Aristotle's work, but I wouldn't recommend this to a classicist or a demanding reader. The translation from ancient Greek to English is not completely accurate regarding some philosophical terms, something that might be quite confusing considering Aristotle's nominalism.

For example, personally I found irritating author's choice to translate the ancient word 'cosmos' to 'universe', especially due to the fact that the same word applies in modern English. This unreasonable need of changing every single word from the original text is the main reason why this translation is a little bit far away from Aristotle's himself preferences. Apart from the above, it's a good effort.

[Cristobal el Rubio · Rating 5 out of 5]

Aristotle is the master's master; he is, as Dante says, "the master of all who know."

[Blake]

Aristotle is one of my right hand men. I just picked up this book about a month ago. I plan to read it in the near future.

[Nathan Casebolt · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Have you ever heard of Plato, Aristotle, Socrates? Morons.”

With due respect to Vizzini’s dizzying intellect, I must demur: Aristotle might be more intimidating even than the Cliffs of Insanity, but a moron he was not. For myself, after powering through 1200 pages of the first volume of his complete works, I think it’s arguable that no single figure is more responsible for our world today than Aristotle.

I mean this specifically with respect to the physical sciences, since the first of this two-volume set comprises his work on logic, the heavens, the animal kingdom, and so forth. That’s not to say his theories still prevail: I don’t know anyone who thinks insects generate spontaneously from putrefying garbage, and only online cranks preach that Earth is the stationary center of the universe.

Further, Aristotle is not that different from his contemporaries and predecessors in terms of theorizing about nature from abstract starting principles. In truth, some of the theories he dismissed were closer to what we would recognize as reality. For their own esoteric reasons, Pythagoreans taught that Earth circles a sacred fire at the heart of the universe. Atomists envisioned a world built from indivisible, infinitesimal units. Aristotle rejected these in favor of theories that today sound quaint and antiquated.

What distinguished Aristotle was less the content of his thought and more his starting point: that nature does nothing superfluous or in vain. He hammers this so often that I would call it his first and greatest commandment. While others debated mental models of the universe, Aristotle began with careful observation of a natural order that works in reliably predictable ways. From this he drew the principle that everything nature does tends toward the best possible ends in the best possible ways, and he sought by abundant observation and rigorous logic to describe universal physical laws on that basis.

Aristotle also urged a self-correcting science that tests theory against fact, rather than carving up fact to fit theory. For example, in an excursus on the habits of bees, he wrote, “Credit must be given rather to observation than to theories, and to theories only if what they affirm agree with the observed facts.” He argued that theories which claim to be comprehensive must account for all phenomena, criticizing Democritus for “speaking generally without examining what happens in all cases” and asserting that “any one who makes any general statement must speak of all the particular cases.”

These principles, including the assumption common to Greek thinkers that existence lies within the grasp of the properly-trained human intellect, is easy to overlook because it’s so baked into the way we think today. One example, I think, illustrates how far ahead of his time he ran. Within Aristotle’s lifetime, the temple at Ephesus burned. One would expect a Greek of his time to wrestle with the meaning of such a desecration. Aristotle, by contrast, found it useful merely as an example of how wind, smoke, and fire interact with each other. This is so modern that it’s easy to miss how strange it is for a man steeped in a culture of gods to ignore the gods so utterly in his investigation of physical law.

I’m not an expert on the history of Aristotle’s transmission through the hands of Greek monks, Arabic scholars, the medieval Roman Church, and Renaissance Europeans. But having read his works on logic and the laws of nature, I see that his method of thinking about nature laid the foundations for the modern world. The blossoming of science and the scientific method left his natural theories far in the dust, but the way billions of us conceptualize the world — orderly, rational, mechanistic, deterministic, predictable, and knowable — is thoroughly Aristotelian. If he was a moron, he is unparalleled as one of the most influential morons in history.

[Corey · Rating 3 out of 5]

This read is a slog. I recognize that for its time, Aristotle was revolutionary in laying out the rules of logic, which in some ways laid the foundation for scientific thinking. But still, whew, a hard read. Plato was the better story teller, more beautiful use of language and more eloquent. But I'm glad I finally invested the effort to read Aristotle. He had some great insights.

[Kaylyn]

Read parts of “Parts of Animals”, book 5 of Physics, Alpha, Gamma, and Zeta of Metaphysics, books 1 & 2 of politics, and book 1 of NE. Not even a dint of the works by my dude but still a good time. Looking forward to finishing Politics and writing 60 pages about it hahaha

[Daniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Prior analytics was the worse thing I ever read. On the other hand for a guy so smart he sure got a lot of stuff wrong but this reading has helped me understand the basis for things. Hoping volume two is a bit more relevant and intriguing.

[Juniper Tvergastein · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found what I read, most of the Organon, to be interesting. I relied more on lectures, as I'm going to be honest: it was a slog. That's not a point against Aristotle. This sort of literature will likely be a slog to anyone who isn't acutely interested in logic.

[M.A. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Worthy of the time spent.

[Flo H · Rating 5 out of 5]

Was a really good read! I used my free trial at audible to listen to the book! Millions of other books on there also! Here’s a link to get a free trial to audible! https://amzn.to/34Ess3c

[Angaca · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book too much

[John · Rating 2 out of 5]

Rating: D+

OK, I'll confess. I'm not an Aristotle fan. I chose to read "Nicomachean Ethics", "Politics" and "Poetics" because it was on The New Lifetime Reading Plan by Clifton Fadiman. Obviously, around 350 B.C., basic concepts regarding alternative governments and their variations had not been thought through too well. Aristotle does a great job of reasoning through all of the good and bad points in a logical progression. He does the same with what makes a person "Happy" and the good, bad and ugly of tragedy vs. epic poetry. The granularity is excruciating and I found myself reading words just to read words.

Learned some things in "Ethics" about his view on temperaments. Loved what he says in "Politics, Book VII, Part 13": "This makes men fancy that external goods are the cause of happiness, yet we might as well say that a brilliant performance on the lyre was to be attributed to the instrument and not to the skill of the performer." His comments on poets (Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides) and their works shed a more contemporary critic.

The New Lifetime Reading Plan: Number 13

[Christopher · Rating 5 out of 5]

I will not be giving a philosophical review of the writings of Aristotle for want of a focused topic. However, it is my belief that an understanding of Aristotle is fundamental to an understanding of our circumstances - he should, must be read. The scholar who wishes to make use of an index would do well to consult "Bonitz's Index Aristotelicus (Greek) or Organ's Index to Aristotle (English)" (2467 V2) for reasons indicated by the editor Jonathan Barnes and my own experiece using the provided index.

[Masen Production · Rating 5 out of 5]

“He dared to ask and he thought over it, he questioned existence and sought enlightenment in its truest form. Till date most of the pages hold true because human nature is still the same. Its his lifetime of thoughts encapsulated in these volumes, one cannot just read and put it down. To comprehend the whole text will take this lifetime. Will keep coming back to it always for reference and guidance. ”

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

When approaching this collection of works it is important to keep in mind the fact that many of the books enclosed, have prerequisites. For example, it is expected you have read "Logic", and hopefully "Ethics" when you approach "Rhetoric".

[Brian Garrison · Rating 5 out of 5]

So far have only read 'Categories', 'Prior Analytics', and 'Posterior Analytics'. A giant of a mind! A is A.

[Jacob · Rating 5 out of 5]

this is very heavy dialectic. not for a feeble intellect.

[lindsie · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Happiness is an activity of the soul in accordance with virtue." —from the Nichomachaen Ethics

Um, need I say more?

[Isseicreek · Rating 5 out of 5]

the only editions that have the access to all the works of Aristotle. excellent for anyone who loves the ancient philosophy. :)

[James · Rating 2 out of 5]

Very thick and hard to get through. Unless you're a philosophy professor, stick to Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics.

[Gaile · Rating 4 out of 5]

Assigned for Philosophy class

[Fredrick Danysh · Rating 4 out of 5]

The writings and teachings of Aristole. Thought provoking. A little difficult to read.

[нєνєℓ ¢ανα · Rating 5 out of 5]

A strong sweeping blow of translation into the works of Aristotle.... excellent endeavor!