In 323 BCE, Aristotle was charged by the Athenians with the capital offense of impiety (the same charge that led to their execution of Socrates 76 years earlier) - although modern scholars think that Aristotle's ties to Alexander the Great played a large role, since Aristotle was suspected of being a foreign agent for Macedonian interests and was fair game after Alexander's death earlier that year. To prevent the Athenians from "sinning twice against philosophy", as he put it, Aristotle fled to Chalkis, where a year later he died of natural causes at the age of 62.
Well, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Yesterday I learned, via a mention at The Hinternet, that an ancient philosophy scholar named Svetlana Mesyats has been put under house arrest by Vladimir Putin's goons for alleged financial irregularities related to a years-long effort to translate the works of Aristotle into Russian. As her former colleague Elizaveta Shcherbakovba explains, not only are the charges trumped up, but the real reason for targeting Mesyats is that Russian authoritarians like Aleksandr Dugin harbor a hatred of Aristotle because he was "the founder of the Western theory of democracy" - even going so far as to label the Institute of Philosophy, where Mesyats has worked for many years, as "the last refuge of scoundrels, traitors, foreign agents, defectors, Russophobes, and extremists."
Much as the Asharite school of Islamic theology felt threatened by (and ultimately went on to snuff out) the open inquiry of the Aristotelian-leaning Mutazilite school a thousand years ago, so also today atavistic authoritarians such as Putin and Dugin feel threatened by the very possibility of a translation of Aristotle's works into Russian. Apparently ~2400 years after his death Aristotle is still the ultimate foreign agent, and scholars of great integrity like Svetlana Mesyats are paying the price for their apostasy.
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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