John Sellars

Reader in Philosophy at Royal Holloway, University of London, and a historian of ancient philosophy — especially Stoicism and Aristotle — and author of Aristotle: Understanding the World’s Greatest Philosopher, Lessons in Stoicism, and The Fourfold Remedy.

Sellars writes and speaks to bring ancient thought within reach of a general reader, treating figures like the Stoics and Aristotle as living resources rather than museum pieces. A returning guest on Alex O’Connor’s Within Reason, he had previously discussed Stoicism on the show before this survey of Aristotle.

His reading of Aristotle is resolutely naturalistic. He argues that the standard English translations — ‘soul’, ‘virtue’, ‘God’ — carry later associations that obscure a thinker who is at bottom a natural scientist, and that stripping those away reveals a biologist building an ethics out of the study of organisms.

Core positions

• Aristotle is first a biologist. His metaphysics, account of the soul, and ethics all grow from trying to understand living organisms, against the reductive materialism of Democritus the atomist.
• Read the four causes as four explanations. ‘Cause’ is a misleading translation; a full explanation needs material, formal, efficient, and final components — above all what a thing is for.
• Teleology survives evolution. The heart is genuinely for pumping blood; Darwin explains how such functions arise without a designer rather than explaining function away. Sellars prefers the neutral word ‘function’ to the loaded ‘purpose’.
• The soul is the form of a living body. Psyche names the capacities that make a thing alive — not a ghost or an immortal substance. Plants, animals, and humans form a layered scale of capacities, with thought distinctive of humans.
• God is the unmoved mover. Aristotle believed in God, but the world is eternal and uncreated; his God is a first principle that ties up our explanations and ends the causal regress — the eternal source of all motion, not the Christian creator.
• Ethics is naturalistic — descriptive with a normative pull. The good life is the exercise of the human function, reason (his term is usually translated ‘happiness’). Virtue is cultivated character sitting at the mean between vices, and the social virtues follow from humans being social animals, dependent on one another from birth.

In the wiki

• John Sellars on Aristotle, the Four Causes, and Nicomachean Ethics — a survey of Aristotle across actuality and potentiality, hylomorphism, the four causes and teleology, the unmoved mover, the soul, formal logic, and the Nicomachean Ethics.