ROMSO Cyprus Knowledge Base

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The heteristic works of Aristotle are a series of dialogues, mostly composed between 360 and 340 BC, within the Plato School, intended for publication and preserved only in fragments.

The loss of public works
As stated recently,

In fact, the works that Aristotle had written for the public (from which exoterikòs, which means, in a broader sense, outside), in which he presented his theories in a more rhetorical manner, they were lost, replaced by the notes of the lessons, than from the 1st century BC were more studied and formal copied, despite the remarkable elaboration profused in the dialogues by Aristotle, which made them appreciate by an expert

The structure of aristotelian dialogues
According to a distinction that originates with the same Aristotle, in fact, his writings were divisible in two groups: "territorial" and "esoteric". Most scholars understood it as a distinction between the works that Aristotle intended for the public (exterimental) and the most technical works intended for use within the Lycée (exoteric).

Platonic dialogue certainly constituted a fundamental precedent for his pupil Aristotle who, however, changed its forms and development. According to Cicero,

Grillo or on rhetoric
Around 360 BC. the young Aristotle writes his first work entitled Grillo or On rhetoric; in reaction to a series of writings of praise - composed by some Athenian directors, including Isocrates, to celebrate Grillo, son of Senophon, who died in 362 BC in the battle of Mantinea - the Stagirita polemizzava against rhetoric as a means of acting on the soul.

Already Plato, in Gorgia, had argued that rhetoric was not an art, nor a science, but simply a εμπειρία (empeiria), a persuasive practice that can only succeed on the ignorant.

The success of the Grillo in the Academy gave Aristotle the task of holding a course of rhetoric, in which, following the Platonic Fedar, he claimed that rhetoric had to be based on dialectics; in this regard, it is passed that he began in the first lesson with the phrase: «It is what turpe silences and let Isocrates speak».

On the Ideas
Written shortly after the Grillo, the treatise Sulle Idee was lost except a few fragments, transmitted by Alessandro d'Afrodisia. There was the difficulty of understanding the relationship between ideas and things, conceived by Plato as participation of things in ideas, which are however separated from them.

He argued that between ideas and things there was neither separation, nor participation, but mixis, mix: ideas and things are mixed together. Aristotle does not accept the Eudossian theory, which does not solve the problem, but also criticizes the platonic theory of separation, of whose apories the same Platon