Aristotle

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Aristotle

384 b.c.e.–322 b.c.e.

Philosopher
Teacher
Biologist

Early Development.

Aristotle was born in 384 b.c.e. in Stagira, Chalcidice, the projection of land that forms the eastern edge of the Thermaic Gulf in the northern Aegean Sea. His father Nicomachus was the court physician of King Amyntas II, the father of Philip II of Macedon who would eventually make Macedon the dominant power in Greece. Aristotle may have spent part of his boyhood at the Macedonian court at Pella, and acquired his interest in physical science in his father's surgery. At age seventeen, he travelled to Athens and entered Plato's Academy where he remained until Plato's death in 348 or 347 b.c.e., first as a student, then as a teacher and research associate. When Plato died, Aristotle left Athens, perhaps because he was disappointed at not being named Plato's successor as head of the Academy. In any case, the new head, Speusippus, represented the trend of later Platonic thought to make philosophy into a branch of mathematics, for which Aristotle had no sympathy. Aristotle went to the court of Hermias, a former student at the Academy who extended his hospitality to a small circle of philosophers, and Aristotle married his niece. Hermeias was a eunuch and a tyrant who ruled Atarneus and Assos in the Troad (the region around ancient Troy), on the fringe of the Persian Empire; in 341 b.c.e. he was betrayed to the Persians who captured him, tortured him and put him to death. In his memory, Aristotle wrote a hymn to virtue. The execution of Hermias may account for Artistotle's prejudice against the Persians which is apparent in his treatise, the Politics.

Founded the Lyceum.

Aristotle himself moved to Lesbos, and it is during his stay at Assos and Lesbos that he did much of his research into the natural sciences which laid the foundation for the modern study of biology. Then about 343 b.c.e. Philip II of Macedon asked him to come to Pella as tutor to his son Alexander. The appointment ended when Philip appointed Alexander regent in 340, and Aristotle probably went back to Stagira. The year after Philip's death in 336 b.c.e., Aristotle returned to Athens and leased some buildings—as a non-citizen he could not buy property—and founded a school where he gave lectures and collected books and artifacts to illustrate his lectures, especially his lectures on zoology. The school was in a grove sacred to Apollo Lyceius and the Muses, and it took the name, the Lyceum, from Apollo Lyceius. The buildings which Aristotle rented there included a courtyard with a colonnade called a peripatos where Aristotle loved to walk with his students, and from it, the Aristoteleans got the name "Peripatetics" by which they were known in later centuries. There Aristotle built a library and a museum; Alexander the Great is supposed to have given him a grant of 800 talents—a enormous sum by the standards of the day—to fund the collection and ordered information to be sent to him about any new species discovered in the course of his conquests. When Alexander died in 323 b.c.e. Athens was swept up in a wave of anti-Macedonian feeling, and Aristotle's close connections with Macedon put him in danger. He prudently withdrew to Chalcis on the island of Euboea where his family had an estate, and he died there less than a year later.

Research Lost.

Much of Aristotle's work is lost. As a young research associate at Plato's Academy, he wrote a number of dialogues that were much admired for their style, but none survive. He also produced memoranda and collections of materials for treatises. At the Lyceum, he organized large-scale research; he assigned his students the task of producing research essays on the constitutions of 158 Greek states and of these one survives: a papyrus found in Egypt at the end of the nineteenth century contains most of the Athenaion Politeia (The Constitution of Athens), which is probably one of these research essays. Aristotle's surviving works include the scientific and philosophic treatises, perhaps about one-third of his total output.

Diverged From Plato

Aristotle began as a student of Plato but he soon diverged from his master. He could not accept Plato's Theory of Forms, which held that physical objects in the world such as chairs, horses, and men are imitations of perfect realities which exist separate from the human sphere, and among these perfect realities were abstractions such as pure Goodness and pure Beauty. For Aristotle, these "Forms" did not exist apart from the substances from which they were formed. He pointed out that if the substances did not exist, the Forms could not exist. Thus a horse is recognizable, for instance, because a number of horses exist and their characteristics are known. This is true of all species, whether plants or animals or even types of government, and thus by collecting data about them, and classifying them, real knowledge can be acquired. Aristotle would have said that a political scientist who wanted to acquire skill in the art of governing should not formulate constitutions for imaginary utopias, but rather should imagine the actual constitutions of states in the Mediterranean world.

Achievement In Deductive Logic.

One of Aristotle's major achievements was in the field of deductive logic—the process of reasoning from a premise to a logical conclusion, or from a known principle to one that is unknown. Aristotle no doubt spent a great deal of thought perfecting his logic, and he was proud of the results, but for him it was always a means to an end, and the end was a solution to the old problem: how can anyone know anything for certain? Aristotle always regarded his logic as a tool that he might use to separate wrong arguments from sound ones. His logic was taken up with enthusiasm by the medieval philosophers who used it to make rigorously accurate deductions from one or more first principles that were taken as self-evidently true. The problem with this method of reasoning was that the first principle really must be true; otherwise the deduction would be wrong. However, Aristotle, unlike the medieval philosophers that came centuries after him, did not himself accept first principles as true without examining them carefully.

The Lyceum After His Death.

After Aristotle died in 322 b.c.e., Theophrastus became the head of the Lyceum and it flourished under his leadership. Theophrastus himself carried on research in botany; Eudemus of Rhodes wrote on the researches into science, including arithmetic, geometry and theology; and the brilliant researcher Aristoxenus wrote on music—parts of his works on harmonics and rhythm have survived. After Theophrastus' death, a series of lesser philosophers became heads, or "scholarchs," as they were called, but the Lyceum was increasingly overshadowed by rival schools. It probably ceased to exist after the sack of Athens by the Roman general Sulla in 86 b.c.e. Although the school did not survive, Aristotle's influence did, particularly after the publication if an edition of his works by Andronicus of Rhodes in 40 b.c.e.