Style
Many scholars believe that Aristotle's works as we have them today are little more than lecture notes. Plenty of his works are extremely compressed and baffling to beginners. Nowhere is this more evident than in the Metaphysics - Ibn Sina (Avicenna), who was one of the greatest Islamic philosophers in the Medieval age, said that he had read the Metaphysics of Aristotle forty times, but still did not understand it. Later he read the book of al-Farabi, Purposes of Metaphysics of Aristotle, and understood Aristotle's book.
In the 19th century, with the rise of textual criticism, the Metaphysics was examined anew. Critics, noting the wide variety of topics and the seemingly illogical order of the books, concluded that it was actually a collection of shorter works thrown together haphazardly. Werner Jaeger further maintained that the different books were taken from different periods of Aristotle's life. Everyman's Library, for their 1000th volume, published the Metaphysics in a rearranged order that was intended to make the work easier for readers.
Read more about this topic: Metaphysics (Aristotle)
Famous quotes containing the word style:
“All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter.... For me “style” is matter.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“Carlyle must undoubtedly plead guilty to the charge of mannerism. He not only has his vein, but his peculiar manner of working it. He has a style which can be imitated, and sometimes is an imitator of himself.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The history of all Magazines shows plainly that those which have attained celebrity were indebted for it to articles similar in natureto Berenice—although, I grant you, far superior in style and execution. I say similar in nature. You ask me in what does this nature consist? In the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)