ARISTOTLE.
The Rhetoric, Poetic, and Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle. Translated from the Greek by Thomas Taylor.
ARISTOTLE.
The Rhetoric, Poetic, and Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle. Translated from the Greek by Thomas Taylor.
The second edition of the important English translation of these three key philosophical works by Aristotle, originally published in 1811. The first volume includes both the Rhetoric, widely heralded as “the most important single work on persuasion ever written”, and Aristotle’s Poetics, which stands as the earliest existing philosophical work devoted solely to literary theory. The second volume contains exclusively the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle’s masterpiece of moral philosophy.
The translation was undertaken by Thomas Taylor (1758-1835), known as ‘The Platonist’. ‘Taylor’s approach to this philosophy was determined by his initial encounter with it, through reading Aristotle and Plato together with the Neoplatonic commentaries, which encouraged an understanding of the essential unity of Aristotle and Plato, provided by their Neoplatonic interpretation’ (ODNB). It was through Taylor’s translations that the Romantic poets had access to Platonism, demonstrably so in the cases of Blake and Coleridge.
