Aristotle Research Seminar

Funded by the LSU Center for Collaborative Knowledge, the Aristotle Research Seminar is composed of select faculty and graduate students undertaking to study texts by Aristotle across the disciplines under one another’s guidance.  Participants agree to read the selections beforehand, with presenters charged to begin and facilitate discussion rather than to lecture at length. During academic year 2019-20, we discussed Aristotle’s Categories, History of Animals, Politics, Nicomachean Ethics, Rhetoric or Poetics, De Memoria, and Physics.  With renewed funding for 2020-21, we studied Aristotle’s De Anima in the fall and Darwin’s Origin of Species in the spring; in 2021-22, we read Darwin’s Descent of Man in the fall and Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics in the spring; in 2022-23, we read Aristotle’s De Caelo in the fall and Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems in the spring.  Our reading for 2023-24 was Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics and Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions.  In 2024-25 we plan to read Aristotle's Rhetoric and Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow.  For more information, write James Stoner at poston@lsu.edu.

The seminar is the first step of an anticipated multi-year and multi-university project to assess the relation between Aristotle’s works and modern scholarship and science.  Recognizing Aristotle as author of foundational texts in most of the disciplines in colleges of arts & sciences in modern universities, we aim to explore to what extent his work (a) remains foundational or essential reading in certain disciplines, (b) has been superseded or corrected by subsequent discovery and analysis, or (c) has been dismissed but not genuinely refuted.  For more documentation and argument concerning this project, visit ARISTOTLE UPDATE.