Although Aristotle was by no means the first philosopher in the European tradition, he was often the one who first addressed key concepts in a systematic way. The fact that he was just finding his way with many ideas might be enough to make his work difficult to read, but there is a second reason for difficulty. His surviving work is thought to have been assembled from notes associated with his lectures (either his own notes or notes of students), and these notes were apparently sometimes fragmentary and sometimes drawn from more than one lecture on the same topic. As a result, you shouldn’t expect this exposition to hang to together as well as it would if he had written it to be published. (You may notice places where a later editor might have added little summary comments or other transitional remarks in order to make things hang together a little better.)
So don’t expect to come away from reading Aristotle with a clear sense of his views on all the issues he discusses. Instead look for some things he says that are interesting (whether he is right or wrong from your point of view), and also have in mind some places where what he says seems important but is puzzling. We will spend the class discussing some passages of each sort. The notes below are intended to help you get started in looking for such passages.
• Aristotle often begins his discussions of ideas with a survey of common problems and previous views, and you can find such a survey here from the beginning through the first paragraph of §II (pp. 60-62). This is probably the most difficult part of the selection to follow; don’t worry if much of it is mysterious.
• For Aristotle, much of our understanding of ideas and other things is naturally formulated in definitions, and the rest of §II (pp. 62-65) seems to be devoted to developing something like a definition of time. Think both what this definition might be and whether you think he has really captured what time is.
• Section III is closely related in topic to §II, so you might imagine he is commenting on his definition or elaborating it further. Notice the discussion at the end of things that are or are not in time. (The “incommensurability of the diagonal” he mentions on p. 68 is the mathematical fact that the ratio of diagonal of a square to one of its sides—i.e., the square root of 2—cannot be expressed as a fraction.)
• Although Aristotle comments on the “now” at several points throughout these chapters, it seems to be the center of his attention in §IV, where he has a number of different things to say about it. This variety of topics continues in §V, but most of the latter part of that chapter, beginning at the bottom of p. 70, concerns the relation of time to circular motion. (When he speaks of “the sphere” on p. 71, he probably means the sphere of the stars, which he took to revolve around the earth daily.)