>In Book 3, Chapter 13 of the Politics, Aristotle actually recommends excluding the most ethical people from the polis.

But the ones who are included in the polis still have to be far more ethical than the worst people. Do you really believe that Aristotle was so foolish as to believe that you could have a good society if even half its citizens were simply bad?

>This is completely wrong. Aristotle is not expounding a "set of principles for living a rewarding life."

Then what is eudemonia supposed to be? The difference between Aristotle and (some) moderns is what they thought a rewarding life was.

>Far from providing a set of principles to obey (à la Kant, or the deontologists), Aristotle provides a set of virtues to achieve. Living the good life, for Aristotle, is not at all about following universal principles -- rather, it is about trying to achieve the proper virtue in a given situation and context.

I was writing for non-philosophers, and so I was using the terms as such people generally understand them, rather than the somewhat different meanings of academic philosophy.

And let me add that a key reason philosophy today is for most Americans seen as valueless or dangerous is that philosophers have basically stopped writing for the general public.

>This is probably wrong, especially if you mean "science" in the modern sense of the word

As someone with a background in the sciences, I meant science as actually practiced, rather than the mistaken ideas about it that some philosophers, such as the positivists, impose on it. His politics was based on systematically collecting data on over a hundred societies, and analysing it for patterns. His ethics was based on a life of carefully observing people's behavior.

>Furthermore, Aristotle does not observe and critique the behaviors of other people so much as he does their opinions (i.e., doxa).

The reason doxa matters is that people so often act on it.

>Again, the idea that Aristotle had an "empirical method" that is basically the same as the kind of argumentation that modern commentators employ is spurious. Did Aristotle look at the world around him? Of course. Does that make him an empiricist, as you describe? No.

By empirical, I simply mean extensive, systematic observation. Compare for instance Plato's writings on ethics with Aristotle's.

More generally, as someone with a background in both science and philosophy, this is what many philosophers don't get about Aristotle. He was far and away the greatest observer of humans and the natural world who ever lived, and in this I include logical thinking as a form of human behavior that can go right or wrong.

The story that philosophers have told for a long time is that modern science was based on a radical rejection of Aristotle is simply wrong. Aristotle's philosophy was based on observation plus logical thinking. As such, it is subject to correction when further observations are made.

What happened was that Aristotle established his version of the forms on the basis of observation and reasoning, and then in the modern era scientists making further observations and thinking things out further rejected the forms and replaced it with modern mechanistic thinking.