Aristotle

Introduction

Aristotle (384-322 bce) was born in Stagira. His father, Nicomachus, was a doctor at the court of Macedonia. The profession of medicine may well have influenced Aristotle's interests, and his association with Macedon was lifelong: in 343 he became tutor to Alexander the Great. After Alexander's death in 323, the political climate in Athens turned anti-Macedonian, and Aristotle went into voluntary exile. He died shortly thereafter, in 322.

At the age of 17, Aristotle went to Athens and studied at Plato's Academy for twenty years, until the death of plato in 348/7. Plato was succeeded as head of the Academy by his nephew Speusippus (c.407-339). Aristotle left Athens, traveling with another Academic, Xenocrates (c.396-314), who later succeeded Speusippus. There is no solid reason for supposing that Aristotle was disaffected with the Academy, or ever expected to become its head; both Speusippus and Xenocrates were senior to him. It was during this period that Aristotle acted as tutor to Alexander; he also married Pythias, adopted daughter of one of Aristotle's fellow students at the Academy, Hermeias of Atarneus. Aristotle returned to Athens in 335 and founded his own “school,” the Lyceum or the “peripatetic school” (either because Aristotle and others lectured while walking or because the grounds had noted walkways).

Influence over Society

Writings

Aristotle, like Plato, wrote dialogues. None of these, or other works he wrote “for publication,” have survived; there are quotations or paraphrases from these lost works in later authors, and such material constitutes collections of Aristotle's “fragments.” Among the more important of the lost works are Eudemus, or On Soul, Protrepticus, Statesman, On Poets, On Philosophy, On Justice, On Contraries, On Ideas (or On Forms), On the Pythagoreans, On the Philosophy of Archytas, and On Democritus. Some of these works are datable, and most appear to have been published early in Aristotle's career, while he was still in the Academy.

Cicero (Academica 2.38.119) speaks of Aristotle's “golden river of eloquence,” and it is the lost works to which he is referring; what survives cannot be so described. This appears, rather, to be lecture notes, in which the style is compressed sometimes to the point of unintelligibility. This leads to a false contrast with Plato: Plato seems lively, where Aristotle is dry as dust. Their surviving works do present that contrast, but there is no reason to extend that to a comment on the men themselves.

What we have of these lecture notes is divided into separate areas of philosophy: logic (broadly conceived), natural philosophy or “physics,” “psychology” or the soul, biology, metaphysics, ethics, political philosophy, rhetoric, and poetics. This division into disciplines presumably does not go back to Aristotle, but is an artifact of the early editions of these writings: there are intricate interconnections among the views presented in these works that are to some extent masked by this compartmentalization, and some of the treatises (particularly the Physics and the Metaphysics) do not appear to have been composed by Aristotle as units.

Developments

Some think that a developmental pattern can be discerned in the material we ...