ARISTOTLE TO AUGUSTINE greater and better ‘It is best, for all men and women, not to be born; and next after that—the best option for humans—is, once born, to die as quickly as possible’ (fr 44) To die is to return to one’s real home Another Platonic work of Aristotle’s youth is his Protrepticus, or exhortation to philosophy This too is lost, but it was so extensively quoted in later antiquity that some scholars believe they can reconstruct it almost in its entirety Everyone has to philosophy, Aristotle says, for arguing against the practice of philosophy is itself a form of philosophizing But the best form of philosophy is the contemplation of the universe of nature Anaxagoras is praised for saying that the one thing that makes life worth living is to observe the sun and the moon and the stars and the heavens It is for this reason that God made us, and gave us a godlike intellect All else—strength, beauty, power, and honour—is worthless (Barnes, 2416) The Protrepticus contains a vivid expression of the Platonic view that the soul’s union with the body is in some way a punishment for evil done in an earlier life ‘As the Etruscans are said often to torture captives by chaining corpses to their bodies face to face, and limb to limb, so the soul seems to be spread out and nailed to all the organs of the body’ (ibid.) All this is very diVerent from Aristotle’s eventual mature thought It is probable that some of Aristotle’s surviving works on logic and disputation, the Topics and Sophistical Refutations, belong to this period These are works of comparatively informal logic, the one expounding how to construct arguments for a position one has decided to adopt, the other showing how to detect weaknesses in the arguments of others Though the Topics contains the germ of conceptions, such as the categories, that were to be important in Aristotle’s later philosophy, neither work adds up to a systematic treatise on formal logic such as we are to be given in the Prior Analytics Even so, Aristotle can say at the end of the Sophistical Refutations that he has invented the discipline of logic from scratch: nothing at all existed when he started There are many treatises on rhetoric, he says, but on the subject of deduction we had nothing of an earlier date to cite, but needed to spend a long time on original research If, then, it seems to you on inspection that from such an unpromising start we have brought our investigation to a satisfactory condition comparable to that of traditional disciplines, it falls to you my students to grant me your pardon for the shortcomings of the inquiry, and for its discoveries your warm thanks (SE 34 184a9–b8) 67