Aristotle

Life

Aristotle was the son of a physician at the court of the king of Macedon. At seventeen he went to Athens and studied at Plato’s Academy for twenty years. After Plato’s death he travelled and studied marine life on the island of Lesbos, and around 343 BC King Philip II invited him to tutor his son, the future Alexander the Great. Back in Athens he founded his own school, the Lyceum, where his habit of teaching in its covered walkway, the peripatos, gave his followers the name Peripatetics.

Ideas

Where Plato looked beyond the world to perfect Forms, Aristotle studied the world itself, gathering and classifying evidence. He created the first system of formal logic, described hundreds of animal species, and wrote on physics, astronomy, ethics, politics, rhetoric and drama. His ethics centred on virtue as a balanced mean between extremes and on eudaimonia, a flourishing human life.

Legacy

Aristotle’s works were preserved and studied by scholars in the Islamic world, such as Avicenna and Averroes, and returned to Western Europe in the Middle Ages, when he became known simply as the Philosopher. His influence on science, logic and theology lasted for nearly two thousand years.