Aristotle

ClassicalPeripatetic

Born 384 BCE, Stagira

Died 322 BCE, Athens

He classified the world. Logic, biology, ethics, politics; he gave each its language.

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.

Aristotle teaches in a shaded Lyceum garden while students study plants, animals, diagrams, instruments, and specimens. — The world becomes a school of causes.

Places

Ideas

Virtue Reason Happiness Moderation Nature

Words

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”
— Aristotle

“Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.”
— Aristotle

“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”
— Aristotle

Works

Nicomachean Ethics

c. 340 BCE·Greek

Aristotle's most important work on ethics. Argues that happiness (eudaimonia) is the highest good, achievable through a life of virtue and the cultivation of practical wisdom.

Politics

c. 335 BCE·Greek

A systematic study of the state, citizenship, and constitutions. Famous for declaring that humans are by nature political animals.

Metaphysics

·Greek

A collection of treatises on first philosophy: the study of being as being, substance, causation, and the unmoved mover.

Poetics

·Greek

The earliest surviving work of dramatic theory. Defines tragedy, introduces catharsis, and argues that poetry is more philosophical than history.

Life & Moments

384 BCE

Born in Stagira

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.

c. 367 BCE

Joining the Academy

At seventeen, Aristotle traveled to Athens and enrolled in Plato’s Academy. He stayed for twenty years, first as a student, then as a teacher. Plato called him ‘the mind of the school.’

343 BCE – c. 340 BCE

Tutor to Alexander

Philip II of Macedon invited Aristotle to tutor his son Alexander. For several years, the greatest philosopher of the age taught the future conqueror of the known world. What exactly he taught remains one of history’s great mysteries.

335 BCE

Founding of the Lyceum

Aristotle returned to Athens and established the Lyceum, where he taught while walking along the covered walkway (peripatos). His school became known for empirical research, systematic classification, and the sheer range of subjects it investigated.

322 BCE

Exile and Death

After Alexander’s death, anti-Macedonian sentiment swept Athens. Aristotle, with his Macedonian connections, was charged with impiety. He fled, reportedly saying he would not let Athens sin twice against philosophy. He died the following year.

Influence

Influenced by

Platoteacher → student
Aristotle studied at Plato’s Academy for twenty years. He revered Plato but fundamentally disagreed with the theory of Forms.

Influenced

Ciceromodel for rhetoric and philosophy
Cicero admired Aristotle's style and drew on his rhetorical and ethical writings throughout his career.
Al-Kinditranslated and studied
Al-Kindi supervised the translation of Aristotle into Arabic and built on his metaphysics.
Ibn Rushdthe great commentator
Ibn Rushd wrote three levels of commentary on nearly every work of Aristotle.
Thomas Aquinasthe philosopher
Aquinas called Aristotle simply 'The Philosopher' and built the Summa Theologica on Aristotelian logic and metaphysics.
Maimonidesphilosophical master
Maimonides took Aristotle as the measure of reason and labored to reconcile him with the Torah.
Albertus Magnusphilosophical master
Albert set himself the task of making the whole of Aristotle available to the Latin world.
Theophrastusteacher and successor
Theophrastus succeeded Aristotle as head of the Lyceum and carried his empirical method into botany and the study of character.
Alasdair MacIntyrevirtue ethics revived
MacIntyre's After Virtue argued for recovering Aristotle's idea that virtues are habits built through participation in shared practices and traditions, making him one of the central architects of the twentieth century's revival of Aristotelian ethics.
Galenteleology and logic applied to the body
Galen explicitly modeled his method on Aristotle's logic and teleological reasoning, treating the body's organs as designed for purposes discoverable through careful observation — a framework he defended against rival medical sects of his day.
Elizabeth Anscombevirtue ethics recovered
Anscombe's 'Modern Moral Philosophy' called for setting aside modern talk of moral obligation and returning to Aristotle's question of what a person of good character would actually do, launching the twentieth-century revival of virtue ethics.
Ibn al-Haythamoptical theory engaged and overturned
Ibn al-Haytham worked through and ultimately rejected the Aristotelian and Euclidean theory that vision works by rays emitted from the eye, replacing it with an intromission theory built on controlled experiment rather than authority.

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