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Aristotle

Ancient philosophy

Aristotle (384–322 BC) was a Greek philosopher. A disciple of Plato, he broke away from his mentor's ideas and founded a school called the Lyceum. His thirst for knowledge was boundless; he turned his hand to a wide range of disciplines, including logic, ethics, politics, and physics, and laid the foundations for several of these fields. He was also the tutor of Alexander the Great. His work had a lasting impact, transmitted first through the Arab world and later through the Christian tradition.

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The Works of Aristotle Summarised on This Site

On the Soul

What is the soul? What is it composed of? What is its relationship to the body? Aristotle attempts to answer these questions in this book.

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Metaphysics

In the Metaphysics, Aristotle defines the first philosophy, and the science of being as being. He demonstrates the necessity of the existence of a first mover.

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Nicomachean Ethics

What is the sovereign good, the supreme good? It is happiness, but Aristotle shows that men differ on the means to this end

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Physics

What is chance, what is motion, what is infinity? These are the problems that Aristotle tackles in this work

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Poetics

Aristotle here sets out the rules that a work of art must follow in order to be beautiful, and sets out to define art as a kind of imitation (mimesis)

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Bibliography

Here are the essential books if you wish to gain a better understanding of this author's thought:

De Groot, Jean (2014), Aristotle's Empiricism: Experience and Mechanics in the 4th century BC, Parmenides Publishing
Gill, Mary Louise (1989), Aristotle on Substance: The Paradox of Unity, Princeton University Press
Irwin, Terence H. (1988), Aristotle's First Principles, Oxford: Clarendon Press
Lewis, Frank A. (1991), Substance and Predication in Aristotle, Cambridge University Press.
McKeon, Richard (1973), Introduction to Aristotle (2nd ed.), University of Chicago Press.

Recommended Videos

Conferences, symposia, radio broadcasts... here are 10 videos that will help you better understand Aristotle's thought.

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Biography: Life of Aristotle

At the Academy

Aristotle was born in 384 BC in Stagira, in Macedonia. His father was the king's physician, but died when Aristotle was eleven. He was brought up by his brother-in-law.

According to Diogenes Laërtius, he had a small voice, short legs, small eyes; he was always well dressed, wore rings on his fingers, and shaved his beard. He is also said to have suffered from a stammer or a lisp.

His thirst for knowledge led Aristotle to Athens at the age of seventeen, around 367 BC. After an unsuccessful attempt at Isocrates' school, he turned to Plato's Academy. Plato was in Sicily at the time, trying in vain to put his political principles into practice.

For twenty years, until 347 BC, Aristotle studied under Plato. A brilliant student, he became Plato's assistant.

Admiringly, Plato dubbed him the intelligence of the school and gave him the right to teach rhetoric.

In fact, Diogenes Laërtius tells us that this Aristotle was the only one [...] to listen to Plato reading his treatise on the soul; all the other listeners left before the end.

He also tells us of this tireless worker that when he slept he held a copper ball over a basin in his hand so that when it fell into the basin, it would wake him.

During this period he wrote nineteen works of Platonic philosophy, including Eudemian Ethics. Some of these were dialogues, now lost.

Over time, however, he began to pull away from certain aspects of Plato's thought. Plato remarked: Aristotle has done to me as a foal that rebels against its mother.

Although no precise chronology can be established, it is thought that from around 350 BC he wrote several books of the Physics, the third book of the treatise On the Soul, several books of the Metaphysics, and the opening sections of the Politics.

In 347, Plato died. The question of who would succeed him at the head of the Academy arose — yet it was not Aristotle who was chosen, but Speusippus, Plato's nephew.

Travels

Disheartened, Aristotle set off with Xenocrates and Theophrastus, two fellow students, to Assos in the Troad, where he founded a kind of branch of the Academy. His curiosity about the natural world was evident in the many observations he made during this period of the fauna around him.

When the local king was executed by the Persians, he took refuge in Mytilene, on the island of Lesbos, where he was welcomed by Theophrastus. There he opened a second school and began writing his History of Animals.

In 342 BC, King Philip of Macedonia entrusted him with the education of his thirteen-year-old son, Alexander, the future conqueror, better known as Alexander the Great.

For two or three years, he served as his tutor. He introduced him to Greek tragedies, had him read the Iliad and the Odyssey, and taught him to think logically.

He married and returned with his wife to Stagira, his home town, where they lived for five years. He continued his observations of animals, particularly horses.

During this entire period, he is thought to have written the continuation of The Physics, works such as On Generation and Corruption, The Poetics, and The Art of Rhetoric, as well as the opening sections of The Nicomachean Ethics and the continuation of the Metaphysics.

The Lyceum

In 338 BC, Philip II of Macedon conquered Athens. Three years later, Aristotle decided to leave the king's court and return to Athens. He was forty-nine at the time. Widowed, he remarried and had a son, Nicomachus, who died young.

The leadership of the Academy again passed him by, going instead to Xenocrates. And so, arriving in Athens just as Alexander was ascending the throne, he founded his own school. Since it was established near a sanctuary dedicated to Lycian Apollo, it came to be known as "the Lyceum".

The members of this school were called peripatetics, because they taught while walking (from the Greek peripatein, "to walk"). They covered a wide range of subjects, from philosophy and natural science to medicine and philology.

Aristotle championed the systematic observation of facts before any attempt at explanation. In keeping with this, he carried out several dissections, including that of a chameleon.

The Lyceum included a library and a museum, both funded by Alexander.

This period, which lasted thirteen years, was Aristotle's most prolific. He completed The Nicomachean Ethics, elaborated Book VIII of The Metaphysics, wrote the Writings on Natural Philosophy, and much else besides.

It was a period marked by an even more pronounced empiricism: he multiplied his observations of natural phenomena, described them, and sought their causes.

At the death of Alexander, Athens was plunged into political turmoil. The anti-Macedonian party seized power. Fearing for his life because of his ties to Alexander, Aristotle fled Athens in 323 BC. He wished, he said, to prevent the Athenians from committing a new crime against philosophy—alluding to the trial of Socrates, which had ended with his death sentence.

Death and Posterity

He died the following year, in 322 BC, in Chalcis on the island of Euboea, aged sixty-two. Theophrastus took over the running of the Lyceum. The school continued to teach until AD 529, when it was closed by Justinian I, an Orthodox Christian emperor determined to stamp out Greek philosophy, which he equated with paganism.

While Aristotle's dialogues were lost — only a few fragments survive — no fewer than thirty-one treatises have come down to us over the centuries. These are essentially lecture notes or writings intended for teaching at the Lyceum.

While his immediate successor Theophrastus did much to preserve these works, it was Andronicus of Rhodes who rescued the writings that had lain in a cellar — though not without some distortion: he artificially combined certain texts to form composite works and gave them titles, as in the case of the Metaphysics.

In the Middle Ages, Aristotle's works were widely disseminated throughout the Arab-Muslim world, while the Western world had access only to those translated by Boethius.
It was Thomas Aquinas who, in the thirteenth century, gave them their extraordinary influence, weaving them into the official doctrine of the Catholic Church — a movement known as scholasticism.

Main Works

Categories, Merrimack: Thomas More College Press, 2021
On Interpretation, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1938
Posterior Analytics, Merrimack: Thomas More College Press, 2021
Poetics, London: Penguin Classics, 1997
The Art of Rhetoric, London: Penguin Classics, 1992
Physics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008