You weren’t kidding about the increased difficulty of Aristotle over Plato. I’m getting through it, but it will definitely take more time to grasp enough to answer any but the simplest questions. A slower pace with notes like these is a good idea.
In case it helps anyone else here, I’ll share a few things I’ve learned over the last few days about how to approach the text.
Audio is not as much of a help to me here as it was with Plato. It’s not useless, but this text clearly wasn’t written to be read out loud. Some of the introductions to Plato provided earlier describe it as more like Aristotle’s personal notes, and that seems apt. He spends a lot of time defining terms in order to be as precise as possible, and that can be especially confusing when I can’t speak the original language. The one thing I did learn from listening, though, was that it’s best not to get stuck trying to unravel a difficult statement on my first pass. A thought that seems impenetrable at first often becomes clearer a bit later. My advice is to read through the whole passage once without stopping to dwell on the (many) difficult parts. You’ll pick up a bit more with each subsequent reading as you get a better idea of what he’s talking about.
Thanks for that, Tom. I agree with everything you said here.
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