ABSTRACT
Broadly, Aristotle agrees with Plato that the intellectual alien is someone with uncontainable desires. In the shadows of Nazism, commentators suggested that Aristotle believed slaves to be subhuman, interstitial creatures “of neither species [man or beast] but sui generis,” and that he “trivialize[s] the distinction” between slaves and animals. Like our social constructionists, the sophists were good at seeing mere social convention beneath what their contemporaries saw as natural. But Aristotle typically wants to deal with the unnoticed converse of this: that elements of nature may lurk beneath a social convention. His virtue is small because the natural community needs it to be small for the purposes of his particular social function, which renders his virtue different in kind rather than degree.
