/lit/ - Literature

>>17120709
The Wisdom books of the Bible (including those in the deuterocanon), City of God by St. Augustine (pretty much deals with this exact topic but in the context of the Roman Empire collapsing), The Republic by Plato, Nichomachean Ethics and Politics by Aristotle.

>>17084005
The point of that is to start with things that are more readily apparent to the human person and then from there derive a contradiction that implies that there is a terminus in terms of causation, actuality etc. It’s blatantly Aristotelian (and frankly mathematical/logical) that way: if you start with things that are less obvious before you lay down the axioms, you give room for refutation. By laying down basic axioms everyone can agree on, that disappears.

>>17075228
Honestly, no. It’s good to read Plato before reading Aristotle to see how their ideas are similar but different (especially in respect to empiricism versus rationalism and their theories of the Forms). But Aristotle’s corpus is pretty self-contained and really only relies on other works in it (e.g. Nichomacean Ethics depends on the Metaphysics which depends on the Physics which depends on the Organon etc).