Aristotle

Biographical Summary

A teacher, philosopher, and polymath, Aristotle was among the deepest thinking and most influential of all philosophers through the ages.

A Macedonian by birth, Aristotle was the son of a physician who ministered to King Amyntas II of Macedonia—a connection that would later benefit the philosopher. When he was 22 years old, Aristotle moved to Athens to study with Plato, whose pupil he remained until he was 42. On Plato's death, Aristotle moved to the Troadian community of Assos for three years, then on to Mytilene on the island of Lesbos, where he remained until 344 BCE In that year King Philip of Macedonia, the son of Aristotle's father's former employer, invited Aristotle to become the tutor to his son Alexander. Accepting, Aristotle occupied that office until 335 BCE, when Alexander, en route to becoming surnamed "the Great," set out on his conquest of Asia (Wicksteed, p.12).

Returning to Athens, Aristotle founded a school of philosophy in a garden sacred to Apollo—the Lyceum. Owing to his practice of strolling about in deep discussion with his students, his school and its adherents became known as the Peripatetic school of philosophy. At the Lyceum, Aristotle collected a substantial library of scrolls, founded a museum of natural history, and shared his thinking with his students.

That thinking covered the entire field of human knowledge as it was then constituted. Over time, he came to disagree fundamentally with his former teacher, Plato. Whereas Plato had conceived of the nature of reality as understood by people to be the perception of a reflection of a reality that was constituted by immutable ideas, Aristotle came to think of the physical world as material, and he preferred methods that were more empirical than Plato's. Understanding the nature of reality required experiment, not merely reflection and debate. Thus, Aristotle was responsible for moving philosophy in the direction of natural science.

Some of what survives of Aristotle's work was probably reconstituted in ancient times on the basis of the notes that his students took during his lectures and his discussions with them. To this class of his work belong his treatises on ethics and on politics—works probably collected and edited, in the first instance, by his son Nicomachus and, in the second, by his student Eudemas.

Work of Aristotle

The work of Aristotle that most directly addresses the literary arena includes his Poetics and his Rhetoric. The Rhetoric reflects the deep and abiding interest of the Greek world, especially at Athens, in the arts of public speaking and persuasion—skills crucial to exercising influence in a democracy. I treat the Poetics in greater detail elsewhere in this volume.

Critical Analysis

Poetics is a pioneering work that identifies the criteria and establishes the standards for excellence in literature, particularly tragic drama. Aristotle introduces such enduring concepts as unity of plot and action; catharsis, or a cleansing of the audience's emotions; and hubris, arrogance that leads to a hero's downfall, which is itself an example of hamartia, a tragic flaw or catastrophic misjudgment (McKeon, p.23)

Human beings are possessed of ...