Aristotle has a high regard for tragedy. Both in the Poetics itself and in the Politics discussion of the education of young citizens, he gives it a place of honor, attributing to it both motivational and cognitive value. Our discussion of his ethical views has brought us into contact with several features of his thought that help to explain this. The general anthropocentrism of his ethics and his rejection of the Platonic external ‘god's eye’ standpoint (Ch. 8) leads him to turn, for moral improvement, not to representations of divine non-limited beings (cf. Ch. 5), but to stories of good human activity. The value he attributes to emotions and feelings, both as parts of a virtuous character and as sources of information about right actions (Chs. 9, 10), naturally leads him to give another hearing to texts that Plato had banished on account of their representation of and appeal to the emotions. Then, too, since, in our aspiration to grasp ethical truth, the perception of concrete particulars is, for Aristotle, prior in authority to the general rules and definitions that summarize those particulars, since a detailed account of a complex particular case will have more of ethical truth in it than a general formula (Ch. 10), it will be natural for him to suppose that the concrete and complex stories that are the material of tragic drama could play a valuable role in refining our perceptions of the complex ‘material’ of human life.