Why call it the Theoria Project?

Theoria (Θεωρία) is a word used by Aristotle in the tenth book of the Ethica Nicomachea and is often translated as ‘contemplation’ or ‘rapturous contemplation’.  The word comes from the verb theōrein “to consider, speculate, look at,” from theōros “spectator,” and thea “a view” (compare the word theatre) + horan “to see,” and “to perceive.”

Theoria is the activity of the happiest person on earth, the philosopher, who, quite self-sufficiently, needing only their mind and for the rest modest means to maintain their body and their leisure, uses reason for its own sake. Theoria as an activity “is the best since not only is reason the best thing in us, but the objects of reason are the best of knowable objects” (Eth. Nic. X,7,1177a)

But what does an enraptured contemplator actually do? Aristotle is not so clear about that in the Ethica, but we can get an idea of it when we look at what Aristotle himself did. He built a model of the world in thought. By the time he wrote the Ethica Nicomachea he was in his late fifties or sixties by which time that model had assumed spectacular proportions. Aristotle is thought to have written about 200 treatises of which 30 are extant, taking up a sizeable chunk of any bookcase. So you can imagine the philosopher building that world of thought, contemplating the result at each step of the way, employing his honed skills in pondering and reasoning to tinker and quietly improve that model, adding an insight there, removing an inconsistency here, clearing up a contradiction there, getting rid of dead branches, pruning the overabundant and making it into a single, unified, coherent, and consistent, harmonious whole.

When does a philosopher know he is on the right track? To decide this I shall use Leon Battista Alberti’s beautiful definition of beauty which takes centre stage during this whole project and against which everything will be measured and judged: “Beauty is that reasoned harmony of all things so that nothing can be added, removed or altered but for the worse.” (De Re Aed. Book 6).

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