Does anyone here teach Aristotle's Organon and Bacon's New Organon?

[Catherine]

I'm probably only teaching my 12 grader English next year. He's an exchange student this year and will be 18 already, and will take college classes for the most part. I'd really like to teach him some of the main thrust behind each of these texts, and I'd love to hear about how anyone else has handled it. I've not completely read either, so I'm really a novice. Any guidance appreciated. Thanks!

[Catherine]

Bump.

[Andrew Kern]

Hi Catherine

 

A couple thoughts on teaching these organon:

 

First, they are extremely technical and practical works that should be taught over a couple years. Aristotle's Organon is the foundation of what became the seven liberal arts and is essential to a complete education. But to teach these books, you'll want to take a different approach than, say, teaching a novel.

 

Here's what I mean. Organon is Greek for instrument or tool. We get organ from it. When Dorothy Sayers referred to the Lost Tools of Learning this is the thing she was referring to, or at least this is the beginning of the tradition that identified tools of learning as the foundation of all learning.

 

Specifically, the organon are the tools of logic, but in Aristotle's day Grammar was understood to be based on logic, not on usage (a belief I share), so the organon weaves grammar throughout.

 

There are six handbooks in the Organon: The categories, On Interpretation, Prior Analytics (the syllogism), Posterior Analytics (demonstration - the so called scientific method comes from this), Topics, and Sophistical Refutations.

 

Five minutes spent with any of them will improve your thinking more than almost anything else. Aristotle is a Super-Coach of thinking.

 

In the 19th century, American schools decided to merge everything into "subjects" and to neglect or even eliminate the tools/organon that underlay the subjects. When you teach Aristotle's Organon, you can't approach it like a subject. It's more like learning piano. Take your time and provide coached practice.

 

So far, that might all sound like bad news. Here's some good news. They are absolutely well worth learning and you are wise to have selected them. As indicated above, all learning depends on mastery of the organon.

 

Here's some more good news. They are advanced skills, so if you don't feel like you have prepared yourself or your child for them, don't worry. If you and he can listen, speak, read, and write (the preliminary language skills), then you can learn the organon. But TAKE YOUR TIME!! They can't be learned in a hurry any more than piano can.

 

And here's one more piece of good news. There are curricula available that are faithful to the spirit and practice of the organon. For example, Memoria Press and its logic materials developed by Martin Cothran. Brilliant and easy to use.

 

Also, The Lost Tools of Writing applies material logic, topics, and elements from the categories and the other handbooks. It is a rhetoric program, which, strictly speaking, is not part of the organon, but it applies the organon dynamically.

 

I would suggest, therefore, that you ensure that your child has studied as much of Martin Cothran's logic and of The Lost Tools of Writing as possible so that when you turn to the Organon the terms and ideas are not completely alien.

 

An aside: the reason Aristotle developed the organon is because he believed we live in a world that can be known, so he developed tools to help us gain that knowledge. Modern educational theorists do not believe the world can be known (you have your truth and I have mine), so they do not bother teaching the tools that help us come to know it. That is why you and I have to "Recover the lost tools of learning."

 

On Bacon's Novum Organon: this book is important as a historical document but much less important as a curriculum. In other words, while Aristotle's work is essential to being fully educated (having a thoroughly "well trained mind") and is the root of the whole renewal, Bacon's is not necessary in the same way.

 

For one thing, Bacon was at war with Aristotle and the reason he felt a need to write a "New Instrument" was because he felt Aristotle got it all wrong. He was wrong. Bacon misdirected the western mind and laid the "foundations" for the chaos of modern thought.

 

Thus Bacon is historically important, but not necessary as a handbook on thinking. If you want to read it, by all means do. Don't bother "reading" Aristotle. It would be like reading a car repair manual. Instead use Aristotle's Organon as a lesson guide and use Bacon's as an interesting history lesson with some great insights and some enormous errors.

 

This isn't really what you asked, though I hope it contains some answers. It's just that you asked about such an important thing that I had to leap in and expose my folly. God bless your studies!!

[Catherine]

Since I only have one year, and with a senior at that, I'm not sure I want to, or am able to, tackle teaching the methods of the Organon fully. My son is interested in the conflict that arises between the deductive logic of the Organon and the scientific method that arose from the New Organon. Are you aware of any resources that address this topic? Or can you clarify what you mean when you refer to Bacon misdirecting the western mind and laying the foundations of the chaos of modern thought? Or can you refer me to sources that clarify this? Thank you.

[Andrew Kern]

Catherine,

 

That's a good question. Let me approach it two ways. First, I want to encourage you to still focus on your child learning the tools of learning while he has time. It is agonizingly difficult to pick these things up as an adult, for the simple reason that responsibilities interfere.

 

If he doesn't take the time now and in college (and he'd have to do it on his own - I don't think you should bother being involved), he's very unlikely ever to get another chance, or at least as good a one.

 

The easiest way for someone his age to approach Aristotle's writings is through Mortimer Adler's Aristotle for Everybody. He might want to read that first, then do LTW or MP Logic, and then the one he doesn't do second.

 

Second, to your question about the controversy between Bacon and Aristotle, I would start by reading Bacon's own writings if he is ready for that. Bacon is pretty outspoken about the need to recreate the human race based on his new discoveries (in this he lays a precedent that dominates philosophy and popular literature from the 17th to the 21st century). The very title Novum Organon is the throwing down of a gauntlet to the Aristotelian tradition.

 

Any book on the history of philosophy will then describe the new direction taken under the lead of Descartes, Bacon, and other early modern or early Enlightenment thinkers. Some will favor it, a few will challenge it. I like these:

 

The Unity of Philosophical Experience by Etienne Gilson (focuses more on Descartes than on Bacon, but covers that era and describes the nature of philosophy beautifully).

 

Three insightful pages in a book well worth reading by Richard Rubenstein and called Aristotle's Children. The pages are 283-285, which describe the virulence of the rejection of Aristotle by 16th and 17th century thinkers like Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, and Martin Luther. I'd check it out of the library just for those three pregnant pages, though the whole book is a history/philosophy buff's dream.

 

I do hope this helps answer your question. The last thing I should say is a quotation from Dante:

 

Much worse than uselessly he leaves the shore

More full of error than he was before

Who fishes for the truth, but lacks the art.

 

If your son is interested in philosophy, please ensure that he masters the arts of thinking first. The ocean of philosophy is stormy and not to be rushed into without sound preparation.

[Catherine]

Thank you so much. This is very helpful.

[Andrew Kern]

You're very welcome. I'm glad that my life has a purpose after all! My brothers never would have believed it.:bigear:

[Guest brianglass]

This thread is old, but has anyone compared the Classical Academic Press logic program with that of Memoria Press? Having used their Latin program I trust MP, but the CAP materials seem to be a bit more engaging for young minds. Would this program adequately prepare a student to approach Aristotle directly?

 

Also, how does the approach to Aristotle's philosophy differ between eastern and western Christendom?