Aristotle On The Deliberative Abilities Of Women Summary

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Joseph Karbowski, the author of “Aristotle on the Deliberative Abilities of Women,” starts his work by acknowledging Aristotle’s claim that women should stay out of the Polis was not an uncommon opinion for his time. In the Politics, Aristotle confines women to the household because of their insufficient faculties (435). Many scholars have attempted to close the gap in Aristotle’s reasoning. Karbowski’s goal for his article is to examine what Aristotle could have meant when he claimed that women’s deliberative faculty lacks authority (akuron) that would exclude them from the polis. Karbowski concludes that Aristotle, and many from his time, save Plato, could not separate the biases that stem from tradition from his own rationale. Karbowski reaches this conclusion by not only using Aristotle’s texts to critique two …show more content…

This is important since Aristotle covers much of Plato’s Republic in five chapters of the Politics and responds directly to some of Plato’s notions about women (440). Plato rejects his culture’s demand that women be confined to domestic duties. He argues that just because women give birth does not mean that they must have different societal roles than men. He supports this claim by comparing it to the expectations of a female watchdog. Female watchdogs are expected to participate in all activities that male watchdogs perform. The fact that female watchdogs give birth does not affect their duties (439). Aristotle directly addresses this argument by saying that it is “absurd” to compare wild beasts to household management to show women should have the same sort of life as men (440). Aristotle believes that nature proves him right. 1. Karbowski uses this argument to show that in Plato and Aristotle’s time, it was very much instilled in the culture that women have different duties than men because of their biological differences, making Plato’s ideas

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