Aristotle studied under Plato for twenty years, then spent a lifetime disagreeing with him. Where Plato looked upward to the Forms, Aristotle looked around: at animals, constitutions, arguments, and stars. He invented formal logic, founded biology as a discipline, and wrote on ethics with a clarity that still holds. He tutored Alexander the Great, founded the Lyceum in Athens, and left behind a body of work that defined the shape of knowledge for centuries.
Born to Nicomachus, personal physician to the Macedonian king Amyntas III. Growing up in a medical household may have instilled the empirical, observational temperament that marked all his work.
Words
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”
