(LE) The Uses of Aristotle

A few of your comments lead me to try to clarify what we're up to in the opening phase of the course. We're reading Donald for background; this is some of the raw material out of which we will build our analyses of Lincoln, and we need to be very familiar with it. We're not reading Aristotle, just now, primarily for comparison with the biographical material (though of course it's natural and inevitable that we will draw some loose connections between the two texts). Rather, we're reading Aristotle to acquire one tool, among several, that we will attempt to use later to think about Lincoln's life and work.

So don't be too surprised if the connection seems a little tenuous; it is as though I was showing you how to use a microscope, and you were puzzled about why the microscope was so different from the objects we will eventually use it to inspect.