Aristotle
Greek philosopher and polymath
384 BCE to 322 BCE
Aristotle (384 BCE – 322 BCE) is a Greek philosopher and polymath, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great.
His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, linguistics, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology.
Together with Plato and Socrates (Plato's teacher), Aristotle is one of the most important founding figures in Western philosophy.
Aristotle's writings were the first to create a comprehensive system of Western philosophy, encompassing morality and aesthetics, logic and science, politics and metaphysics.
Aristotle's views on the physical sciences profoundly shaped medieval scholarship, and their influence extended well into the Renaissance, although they were ultimately replaced by Newtonian physics.
In the zoological sciences, some of his observations were confirmed to be accurate only in the 19th century.
His works contain the earliest known formal study of logic, which was incorporated in the late 19th century into modern formal logic.
In metaphysics, Aristotelianism had a profound influence on philosophical and theological thinking in the Islamic and Jewish traditions in the Middle Ages, and it continues to influence Christian theology, especially the scholastic tradition of the Catholic Church.
His ethics, though always influential, gained renewed interest with the modern advent of virtue ethics.
All aspects of Aristotle's philosophy continue to be the object of active academic study today.
Though Aristotle wrote many elegant treatises and dialogues (Cicero described his literary style as "a river of gold") it is thought that the majority of his writings are now lost and only about one-third of the original works have survived.
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Aristotle is thirty-nine in 343 BCE when he moves to Pella to become the instructor of Phillip's thirteen-year-old son, crown prince Alexander, inspiring him with an interest in philosophy, medicine, and scientific investigation.
Aristotle, a graduate of the Academy's program to train young men for a political career and to provide advice to rulers, had joined the court of Hermias of Atarneus, tyrant of Assus in Ionia, following Plato's death in 347 BCE.
Xenocrates, a friend and classmate of Aristotle's, has accompanied Aristotle to Asia Minor, where Aristotle has established a Platonic school, but the Persians capture and kill Hermias in 342 BCE, necessitating his return to Greece.
Philip begins the series of campaigns in Thrace in 342 BCE that will enable him to annex great parts of it as a province within two years , and finally to demonstrate his power against the Scythians settled on the southern banks of the Danube Delta.
Neither Philip nor Macedon has representatives on the council, but the knowledge that the hegemon has the power of Macedon in his hand makes this organization effective.
In the constitutional details of his settlement of Greece, Philip may well have had the help of Aristotle, free from his recent duties as tutor of the young Alexander.
Philip's marriage to a young Macedonian noblewoman, Cleopatra, in 338, had led to a final break with Olympias, his queen, who left the country for her native Epirus accompanied by the crown prince Alexander, who will later goe to Illyria.
Ptolemy, the son of the nobleman Lagus, a native of the Macedonian district of Eordaea whose family is undistinguished, and of Arsinoe, who is related to the Macedonian Argead dynasty, was probably educated as a page at the royal court of Macedonia, where he has become closely associated with Alexander.
He is exiled in 337, along with other companions of the crown prince.
Although Olympias had been unpopular at court and though Cleopatra's connections are powerful and important, it had not been “politic” to put the succession in jeopardy.
Philip shows that he had never intended this result, by taking trouble to be reconciled with Alexander.
He does not, however, restore his son to favor, and Alexander, his position as heir in jeopardy, remains isolated and insecure.
Aristotle had interpreted atmospheric phenomena in his Meteorologica, written about 340.
Around 335, Aristotle defends poetry against Plato's criticisms in his fundamental text of literary criticism, the Poetics, in which he describes all arts as imitations (mimesis) of human actions, distinguishing between tragedy—an imitation of noble events—and comedy, which portrays a lower order of actions.
Following a discussion of the methods and effects of imitation, Aristotle offers a classic definition of tragic form, alluding to the effect of tragedy as “purgation".
He also rejects the notion that poetry should be judged by the morality of what it portrays.
Aristotle pays no attention to the producer, only the product.
Rejecting Plato’s idealism, Aristotle champions the empirical examination of natural and social phenomena.
Good, according to his doctrine, consists of individuals attaining the state suited to their natures.
Aristotle draws from earlier Greek thinkers to propound a theory of the four elements: fire, earth, air and water.
Xenocrates had succeeded Speusippus in 338 BCE as head of the Platonic Academy in Athens.
Feeling that the second generation of the Academy has overemphasized mathematics, he attempts to redirect the Academy’s primary focus to the Platonic forms, emphasizing their difference from mathematical and natural things.
He appears to have introduced a kind of formal atomism into geometry and physics.
Aristotle returns to Athens in 335 BCE to establish his own school, the Lyceum, or Peripatus.
In contrast to the Academy, which has become rather narrow in its interests since Plato's death, Aristotle intends the Peripatus to pursue a wider range of subjects than the Academy ever had, placing particular emphasis on the detailed study of nature.
Callisthenes, a nephew and former student of Aristotle, is appointed to attend Alexander as historian on his uncle's recommendation.
He will write a history of Greece from the peace of Antalcidas (386 BCE) to the Phocian War (355 BCE), a history of the Phocian War, and other works in addition to his account of the Asiatic campaign (all of which have perished).
His account of Alexander's expedition will be preserved long enough to be mined as a direct or indirect source for other histories that have survived; Polybius will scold Callisthenes for his poor descriptions of the battles of Alexander.
Some evidence indicates that the Classical Greeks know of the existence of zinc and call it pseudargyras, or “false silver”, but they have no means of producing it in quantity.
Arsenic, in the form of certain of its compounds, is known to Greeks of the fourth century BCE, who use these to harden copper.
Aristotle believes arsenic to be a kind of sulfur and writes of a substance called sandarache, now thought to have been the mineral realgar, a sulfide of arsenic.
The portraits of Alexander the Great by artists such as Lysippus and Apelles inaugurate a tradition of heroic-ruler imagery.
A finely sculpted head of Aristotle (the first certain example of true portraiture), attributed to Lysippus and executed in Greece in the 320s BCE or possibly earlier, gives the impression not only of a convincing sense of physical reality but an intangible feeling of personality as well.