Synopsis
Ancient
Greek philosopher
Aristotle was born circa 384 B.C. in Stagira, Greece. When he turned 17, he
enrolled in Plato’s Academy. In 338, he began tutoring Alexander the Great. In
335, Aristotle founded his own school, the Lyceum, in Athens, where he spent
most of the rest of his life studying, teaching and writing. Aristotle died in
322 B.C., after he left Athens and fled to Chalcis.
ristotle is a towering figure in ancient Greek philosophy, making
contributions to logic, metaphysics, mathematics, physics, biology, botany,
ethics, politics, agriculture, medicine, dance and theatre. He was a student of
Plato who in turn studied under Socrates. He was more empirically-minded than
Plato or Socrates and is famous for rejecting Plato's theory of forms.
As a prolific writer and polymath, Aristotle radically transformed most,
if not all, areas of knowledge he touched. It is no wonder that Aquinas
referred to him simply as "The Philosopher." In his lifetime,
Aristotle wrote as many as 200 treatises, of which only 31 survive.
Unfortunately for us, these works are in the form of lecture notes and draft
manuscripts never intended for general readership, so they do not demonstrate
his reputed polished prose style which attracted many great followers,
including the Roman Cicero. Aristotle was the first to classify areas of human
knowledge into distinct disciplines such as mathematics, biology, and ethics.
Some of these classifications are still used today.
As the father of the field of logic, he was the first to develop a
formalized system for reasoning. Aristotle observed that the validity of any
argument can be determined by its structure rather than its content. A classic
example of a valid argument is his syllogism: All men are mortal; Socrates is a
man; therefore, Socrates is mortal. Given the structure of this argument, as
long as the premises are true, then the conclusion is also guaranteed to be
true. Aristotle’s brand of logic dominated this area of thought until the rise
of modern propositional logic and predicate logic 2000 years later.
Aristotle’s emphasis on good reasoning combined with his belief in the
scientific method forms the backdrop for most of his work. For example, in his
work in ethics and politics, Aristotle identifies the highest good with
intellectual virtue; that is, a moral person is one who cultivates certain
virtues based on reasoning. And in his work on psychology and the soul,
Aristotle distinguishes sense perception from reason, which unifies and
interprets the sense perceptions and is the source of all knowledge.
Aristotle famously rejected Plato’s theory of forms, which states that
properties such as beauty are abstract universal entities that exist
independent of the objects themselves. Instead, he argued that forms are
intrinsic to the objects and cannot exist apart from them, and so must be
studied in relation to them. However, in discussing art, Aristotle seems to
reject this, and instead argues for idealized universal form which artists
attempt to capture in their work.
Aristotle was the founder of the Lyceum, a school of learning based in
Athens, Greece; and he was an inspiration for the Peripatetics, his followers
from the Lyceum.
Early Life
Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle was born circa 384 B.C. in Stagira,
a small town on the northern coast of Greece that was once a seaport.
Aristotle’s father, Nicomachus, was court physician to the Macedonian king
Amyntas II. Although Nicomachus died when Aristotle was just a young boy,
Aristotle remained closely affiliated with and influenced by the Macedonian
court for the rest of his life. Little is known about his mother, Phaestis; she
is also believed to have died when Aristotle was young.
After Aristotle’s father died, Proxenus of Atarneus, who was married to
Aristotle’s older sister, Arimneste, became Aristotle’s guardian until he came
of age. When Aristotle turned 17, Proxenus sent him to Athens to pursue a
higher education. At the time, Athens was considered the academic center of the
universe. In Athens, Aristotle enrolled in Plato’s Academy, Greek’s premier
learning institution, and proved an exemplary scholar. Aristotle maintained a
relationship with Greek philosopher Plato, himself a student of Socrates, and
his academy for two decades. Plato died in 347 B.C. Because Aristotle had
disagreed with some of Plato’s philosophical treatises, Aristotle did not
inherit the position of director of the academy, as many imagined he would.
After Plato died, Aristotle’s friend Hermias, king of Atarneus and Assos
in Mysia, invited Aristotle to court. During his three-year stay in Mysia,
Aristotle met and married his first wife, Pythias, Hermias’ niece. Together,
the couple had a daughter, Pythias, named after her mother.
Teaching
In 338 B.C., Aristotle went home to Macedonia to start tutoring King
Phillip II’s son, the then 13-year-old Alexander the Great. Phillip and
Alexander both held Aristotle in high esteem and ensured that the Macedonia
court generously compensated him for his work.
In 335 B.C., after Alexander had succeeded his father as king and
conquered Athens, Aristotle went back to the city. In Athens, Plato’s Academy,
now run by Xenocrates, was still the leading influence on Greek thought. With
Alexander’s permission, Aristotle started his own school in Athens, called the
Lyceum. On and off, Aristotle spent most of the remainder of his life working
as a teacher, researcher and writer at the Lyceum in Athens.
Because Aristotle was known to walk around the school grounds while
teaching, his students, forced to follow him, were nicknamed the
“Peripatetics,” meaning “people who travel about.” Lyceum members researched
subjects ranging from science and math to philosophy and politics, and nearly
everything in between. Art was also a popular area of interest. Members of the
Lyceum wrote up their findings in manuscripts. In so doing, they built the
school’s massive collection of written materials, which by ancient accounts was
credited as one of the first great libraries.
In the same year that Aristotle opened the Lyceum, his wife Pythias
died. Soon after, Aristotle embarked on a romance with a woman named Herpyllis,
who hailed from his hometown of Stagira. According to some historians,
Herpyllis may have been Aristotle’s slave, granted to him by the Macedonia
court. They presume that he eventually freed and married her. Regardless, it is
known that Herpyllis bore Aristotle children, including one son named
Nicomachus, after Aristotle’s father. Aristotle is believed to have named his
famed philosophical work Nicomachean Ethics in tribute to his son.
When Aristotle’s former student Alexander the Great died suddenly in 323
B.C., the pro-Macedonian government was overthrown, and in light of
anti-Macedonia sentiment, Aristotle was charge with impiety. To avoid being
prosecuted, he left Athens and fled to Chalcis on the island of Euboea, where
he would remain until his death.
Science
Although Aristotle was not technically a scientist by today’s
definitions, science was among the subjects that he researched at length during
his time at the Lyceum. Aristotle believed that knowledge could be obtained
through interacting with physical objects. He concluded that objects were made
up of a potential that circumstances then manipulated to determine the object’s
outcome. He also recognized that human interpretation and personal associations
played a role in our understanding of those objects.
Aristotle’s research in the sciences included a study of biology. He
attempted, with some error, to classify animals into genera based on their
similar characteristics. He further classified animals into species based on
those that had red blood and those that did not. The animals with red blood
were mostly vertebrates, while the “bloodless” animals were labeled
cephalopods. Despite the relative inaccuracy of his hypothesis, Aristotle’s
classification was regarded as the standard system for hundreds of years.
Marine biology was also an area of fascination for Aristotle. Through
dissection, he closely examined the anatomy of marine creatures. In contrast to
his biological classifications, his observations of marine life, as expressed
in his books, are considerably more accurate.
As evidenced in his treatise Meteorology, Aristotle also dabbled in the
earth sciences. By meteorology, Aristotle didn’t simply mean the study of
weather. His more expansive definition of meteorology included “all the
affectations we may call common to air and water, and the kinds and parts of
the earth and the affectations of its parts.” In Meteorology, Aristotle
identified the water cycle and discussed topics ranging from natural disasters
to astrological events. Although many of his views on the Earth were
controversial at the time, they were readopted and popularized during the late
Middle Ages.
Philosophy
One of the main focuses of Aristotle’s philosophy was his systematic
concept of logic. Aristotle’s objective was to come up with a universal process
of reasoning that would allow man to learn every conceivable thing about
reality. The initial process involved describing objects based on their
characteristics, states of being and actions. In his philosophical treatises,
Aristotle also discussed how man might next obtain information about objects
through deduction and inference. To Aristotle, a deduction was a reasonable
argument in which “when certain things are laid down, something else follows
out of necessity in virtue of their being so.” His theory of deduction is the
basis of what philosophers now call a syllogism, a logical argument where the
conclusion is inferred from two or more other premises of a certain form.
In his book Prior Analytics, Aristotle explains the syllogism as “a
discourse in which, certain things having been supposed, something different
from the things supposed results of necessity because these things are so.”
Aristotle defined the main components of reasoning in terms of inclusive and
exclusive relationships. These sorts of relationships were visually grafted in
the future through the use of Venn diagrams.
Aristotle’s philosophy not only provided man with a system of reasoning,
but also touched upon ethics. In Nichomachean Ethics, he prescribed a moral
code of conduct for what he called “good living.” He asserted that good living
to some degree defied the more restrictive laws of logic, since the real world
poses circumstances that can present a conflict of personal values. That said,
it was up to the individual to reason cautiously while developing his or her
own judgment.
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