It is a notorious fact of philosophical history that Aristotle had a strong inclination to think that Greeks had no obligation to take account of any rights or privileges that supposedly belonged to non-Hellenes-i.e. people who, when attempting to speak the Greek language, typically made awkward noises that sounded something like ABar-bar-bar.... Rather, according to him, it was natural, appropriate, and just for Greeks ruthlessly to exploit all foreigners, as if they were nothing more than farm animals or domesticated plants. Present-day commentators find this idea both puzzling and horrifying. They are at a loss to explain how Aristotle, who in other respects was obviously an intelligent, wise, and fair-minded thinker, could have adopted such an intransigently negative attitude towards all those (mostly unknown) individuals who happened to have been born outside his own cultural group. For example, Peter Bamm pauses in his historical account of the career of Alexander the Great to say:

See, for example, the discussion of "natural slaves" in Politics, 1, 2-7.

Thomas E.J. Wiedemann provides a useful discussion of the notion of "barbarian" in ancient Greek and Roman society, in The Osxford Classical Dictionary (1996, p.233). For instance, one insightful remark he makes is this:

Apart from a lack of competence in Greek ... , the barbarian's defining feature is an absence of the moral responsibility required to exercise political freedom. The two are connected, since both imply a lack of logos, the ability to reason and speak (sc. Greek) characteristic of the adult male citizen.

(I thank Tim Hegedus for pointing out this reference to me.)

It will always be a source of wonder that Aristotle, who did so much for the future of the West, persisted so stubbornly in regarding non-Greeks as human beings of inferior status. ((1968) p.304.)

Was this attitude of Aristotle's a merely irrational prejudice based on personal experience; or was his negative opinion of non-Greeks a principled outgrowth of certain theoretical views? I shall argue in this paper that the second of these alternatives is true. In particular, rather than an expression of irrationality, Aristotle's attitude towards barbarians was a result of the fact that he tended to think of the topic of rationality in an excessively narrow and rigorous way. Second, I shall argue that we cannot make proper sense of this paradox unless we also take account of the historical fact-widely neglected among philosophical commentators today-that it was not until late in Aristotle's life that Greece and Macedonia became the center of political, intellectual, military, and artistic life in the eastern Mediterranean region

As a first step in defending these claims, let me make a few observations about Chapter 4 of the Fourth Book (G) of Aristotle's Metaphysics-a chapter sometimes entitled, "Proofs of the Law of Contradiction." Aristotle was aware of the fact that it was paradoxical for him to offer a series a series of proofs, in this chapter, in favor of the truth of that law-i.e. the logical and metaphysical principle that nothing could both be of a certain kind, and also not be of that same kind (e.g. be a man and not be a man). After all, he had described this law at the beginning of the chapter as "the most indubitable of all principles" (see Aristotle 1976, p.125), and had given two arguments there to show (a) that it was always self-defeating to deny this law, and therefore (b) that all proofs in favor of it were either unnecessary or impossible. The first of these two introductory arguments was methodological and self-referential in character. It was that the law of contradiction was basic to all rationality, and therefore, as soon as a person began to reason-e.g. stated a position to be defended-he or she already must have presupposed the truth of this principle. The second argument concerned ontology. It was that existence itself confirmed the truth of the law of contradiction, because this law had a centrally important role to play in the general structure of the world. Nevertheless, in spite of these arguments, Aristotle felt motivated to propose, analyse, and discuss seven additional proofs in support of the law of contradiction in the remainder of Chapter 4. (I shall not describe each of these latter proofs in detail. But it will convey some sense of what they were like to mention just one single example. The first proof was that, if the law of contradiction were false-so (e.g.) someone at the same time could be both a man and not a man-then it would follow a fortiori that all other distinctions also would be cancelled and eliminated; and this in turn would lead to the absurdly unacceptable result of "making all things one.")