Protrepticus (Aristotle)

This article is about the work by Aristotle. For other works entitled Protrepticus, see Protrepticus.

Protrepticus (Greek: Προτρεπτικός) is a philosophical work by Aristotle that encouraged the young to study philosophy. It survives only in fragments and is considered a lost work.

Reconstructions

Since the 19th century, when inquiry was initiated by Jakob Bernays (1863), several scholars have attempted to reconstruct the work. Attempted reconstructions include:

• A 1961 book by Ingemar Düring
• A 1964 book by Anton-Hermann Chroust
• 2015 Protrepticus or Exhortation to Philosophy by Hutchinson and Johnson

Commentary

The book The works of Aristotle (1908, p. viii) mentioned

The Historia Augusta says that Cicero's Hortensius was modelled on the Protrepticus and as the Hortensius was a dialogue 5 the Protrepticus was probably one too. There is thus good evidence that several of the nineteen works that stand at the head of Diogenes' and Hesychius' lists were dialogues; it may be inferred with high probability, though not with certainty, that the others were so too. but Stobaeus, pp. 59, 61 infra, and Athenaeus, p. 61 infra, confirm its genuineness.

Protreptic

See also: Protrepsis and paraenesis

A book review of Exhortations to Philosophy (2015), mentioned

Philosophers of fourth-century BCE Athens developed the emerging genre of the "protreptic" (literally, "turning" or "converting"). Simply put, protreptic discourse uses a rhetoric of conversion that urges a young person to adopt a specific philosophy in order to live a good life.

Clark (1989), mentioned

Throughout Iamblichus's lifetime (ca. 245 AD) Christianity was making converts, even in the philosophical schools and among his own friends. (p. x)

Translations

1908

Elias in Porph. 3. 17-23. We may also reason as Aristotle does in his Protrepticus, in which he encourages young men to philosophize. He says this: If we ought to philosophize we ought to philosophize, and if we ought not to philosophize we ought to philosophize; in either case, therefore, we ought to philosophize. If philosophy exists we ought certainly to philosophize, because philosophy exists; and if it does not exist, even so we ought to examine why it does not exist, and in examining this we shall be philosophizing, because examination is what makes philosophy. (p. 28)

1995

Pierre Hadot (into French), Michael Chase (translator into English of Hadot's volume):

What more accurate standard or measure of good things do we have than the Sage?

— Aristotle, Protrepticus

2015

Hutchinson and Johnson

Indeed, as Aristotle says in his writing entitled Protrepticus, in which he exhorts the youth to do philosophy - he says this: if you should do philosophy, you should do philosophy, and if you should not do philosophy, then you should do philo-sophy. Therefore in every case you should do philosophy. For if philosophy exists, then positively we are obliged to do philosophy, since it truly exists. But if it does not truly exist, even so we are obliged to investigate how it is that philosophy does not truly exist. But by investigating we would be doing philosophy, since to investigate is the cause of philosophy.

Excerpt from a speech by the character ‘Aristotle’ (Hutchinson and Johnson, p. 12)

If we have gathered any seed or principle of this kind of cognition by which we passed from a previous verbal acceptance of what kind of science it is to precisely observing what sort of thing its nature is, this came to us from no other source than from them mathematics. But also the power of the science established it more clearly by its own arguments in the demonstrations about them. Moreover it is the understanding of these things that has corrected us from being led astray when we were persuaded by many of the appearances, clearly establishing the truth about them, whatever it is.

For some of those who wish to advance them would not seem to assign to them the appropriate position, when they assert that we need to create understanding of them because a training in them is useful for other theoretical fields. For those things for the sake of which they encourage us to do this are by their nature less close relatives of the truth, even in the usual speeches spoken about them, nor are they champions in terms of the precision of their demonstrations. And here’s a sufficient indication of this: we see them enduring and being believed continually in the same way by those who take up those fields, but in the other fields we would discover extremely few demonstrations that are at all like that.

Now then, mathematical philosophy has helped us, both for many of the necessities for life, and also for those things that are worthwhile in themselves, as soon as we are affluent. For even among the industrial arts, in quite a few cases we would find that mathematics has come to their assistance. And as for natural philosophy, even if some other one were to have a more exalted position, we would see that it makes use of many of the things that we have seen in their own demonstrations, which we have observed by the things that were mentioned.

See also

• Clement of Alexandria
• Elias
• Hortensius (Cicero)

External links

• Downloadable reconstruction of Protrepticus (D. S. Hutchinson and M. R. Johnson)