Aristotle was an ancient Greek philosopher and scientist, the founder of the Lyceum and so-called Aristotelian tradition in philosophy. He also laid the foundations of formal logic and made a complex study of earlier philosophies. His writings in ethics and political theory as well as in metaphysics and the philosophy of science continue to be studied, and his work remains a powerful current in contemporary philosophical debate.
Career
On Plato's death in 348/347 B.C. Aristotle left for Assos in Mysia (in Asia Minor), where he and Xenocrates joined a small circle of Platonists who had already settled there under Hermias, the ruler of Atarneus.
After 3 years in Assos with Theophrastus and Xenocrates, Aristotle went to Mytilene for 2 years. Later, Theophrastus and Aristotle made their way to the court of Philip of Macedon, where Aristotle became tutor to Alexander, who later gained immortality by becoming master of the whole Persian Empire. Scant information remains regarding the specific contents of Alexander's education at the hands of Aristotle, but it would be interesting to know what political advice Aristotle imparted to the young Alexander. The only indication of such advice is found in the fragment of a letter in which the philosopher tells Alexander that he ought to be the leader of the Greeks but the master of the barbarians (foreigners).
Aristotle returned to Athens in 335/334. Under the protection of Antipater, Alexander's representative in Athens, he established a philosophical school of his own in the gymnasium Lyceum, located near a shrine of Apollo Lyceus. The school derived its name, Peripatetic, from the colonnaded walk (peripatos). Members took meals in common, and certain formalities were established which members had to observe. The lectures were divided into morning and afternoon sessions, the more difficult ones given in the morning and the easier and more popular ones in the afternoon. Aristotle himself led the school until the death of Alexander in 323.
After the death of Alexander, he felt it expedient to leave Athens, fearing for his safety because of his close association with the Macedonians. He went to Chalcis, where he died the following year of a gastric ailment. His will, preserved in the writings of Diogenes Laertius, provided for his daughter, Pythias, and his son, Nicomachus, as well as for his slaves.
Aristotle produced a large number of writings, but relatively few have survived. Because of the great weight of his authority, it was inevitable that several spurious treatises should find their way into the corpus of his work. His earliest writings, consisting of the most part of dialogues, were produced under the influence of Plato and the Academy. Most of these are lost, although the titles are known from the writings of Diogenes Laertius and from one of several Lives to come down from antiquity. They include his Rhetoric, Eudemus (On the Soul), Protrepticus, On Philosophy, Alexander, On Monarchy, Politicus, Sophistes, Menexenus, Symposium, On Justice, On the Poets, Nerinthus, Eroticus, On Wealth, On Prayer, On Good Birth, On Pleasure, and On Education. These were exoteric works written for the public, and they deal with popular philosophical themes. The dialogues of Plato were undoubtedly the inspiration for some of them, although the divergence in thought between Plato and his pupil - which was to become apparent later - reveals itself to a certain extent in these works too.
The second group of writings is made up of collections of scientific and historical material, among the most important of which is the surviving fragment of the Constitution of the Athenians. This formed part of the large collection of Constitutions, which Aristotle and his students collected and studied for the purpose of analyzing various political theories. The discovery of the Constitution of the Athenians in Egypt in 1890 shed new light not only on the nature of the Athenian democracy of the 5th century B.C., but also on the difference in quality between the historical and scientific works of Aristotle and his successors. The prejudices and errors shown in the Constitution reveal a mind influenced by Plato and aristocratic social prejudices, while the factual discrepancies reveal the unreliable historical sources which Aristotle used for this type of treatise. Other works in this category are the Pythian Victors, Barbarian Customs, Didascaliai (lists of dramatic performances at Athens), Homeric Questions, Problems, and Olympian Victors.
The last group of writings is made up of those that have actually survived, and they consist of both philosophical and scientific works. Among them are Prior Analytics, Posterior Analytics, Topics, Sophistic Arguments, Physics, On Heaven, etc.
Upon the death of Theophrastus, who had kept Aristotle's manuscripts after the master's death in 322, these works were hidden away in a cellar in the Troad and not brought to light again until the beginning of the 1st century B.C., when they were taken to Rome and edited by Andronicus. Our texts derive from Andronicus's recension and probably do not represent works which Aristotle himself prepared for publication. The peculiarly clipped language in which they are written indicates that they are lecture notes of some sort organized from oral discussions of the material by Aristotle. From the time of his death until the rediscovery of these writings, Aristotle was best known for the works which today are the lost writings. Ironically, modern scholars find themselves in possession of works that their ancient counterparts lacked for several centuries, while the works extant in antiquity are lost today.
Aristotle’s claim to be the founder of logic rests primarily on the Categories, the De interpretatione, and the Prior Analytics, which deal respectively with words, propositions, and syllogisms. These works, along with the Topics, the Sophistical Refutations, and a treatise on scientific method, the Posterior Analytics, were grouped together in a collection known as the Organon, or “tool” of thought. Aristotle’s syllogistic is a remarkable achievement: it is a systematic formulation of an important part of logic. From roughly the Renaissance until the early 19th century, it was widely believed that syllogistic was the whole of logic.
Politics
Aristotle’s political studies combine observation and theory. He and his students documented the constitutions of 158 states - one of which, The Constitution of Athens, has survived on papyrus. The aim of the Politics, Aristotle says, is to investigate, on the basis of the constitutions collected, what makes for good government and what makes for bad government and to identify the factors favorable or unfavorable to the preservation of a constitution.
Aristotle asserts that all communities aim at some good. The state (polis), by which he means a city-state such as Athens, is the highest kind of community, aiming at the highest of goods. The foundation of the state was the greatest of benefactions because only within a state can human beings fulfill their potential.
Government, Aristotle says, must be in the hands of one, of a few, or of the many; and governments may govern for the general good or for the good of the rulers. Government by a single person for the general good is called "monarchy"; for private benefit, "tyranny." Government by a minority is "aristocracy" if it aims at the state’s best interest and "oligarchy" if it benefits only the ruling minority. Popular government in the common interest Aristotle calls "polity"; he reserves the word "democracy" for anarchic mob rule.
If a community contains an individual or family of outstanding excellence, then, Aristotle says, monarchy is the best constitution. But such a case is very rare, and the risk of miscarriage is great, for monarchy corrupts into tyranny, which is the worst constitution of all. Aristocracy, in theory, is the next-best constitution after monarchy (because the ruling minority will be the best-qualified to rule), but in practice, Aristotle preferred a kind of constitutional democracy, for what he called "polity" is a state in which rich and poor respect each other’s rights and the best-qualified citizens rule with the consent of all.
Two elements of Aristotle’s teaching affected European political institutions for many centuries: his justification of slavery and his condemnation of usury. Some people, Aristotle says, think that the rule of master over slave is contrary to nature and therefore unjust. But they are quite wrong: a slave is someone who is by nature not his own property but someone else’s. Aristotle agrees, however, that in practice much slavery is unjust, and he speculates that, if nonliving machines could be made to carry out menial tasks, there would be no need for slaves as living tools. Nevertheless, some people are so inferior and brutish that it is better for them to be controlled by a master than to be left to their own devices.
Aristotle does not seem to have involved himself much with political matters in the polis, although he did found politics as an autonomous science. That said, he acted as mediator between Macedon and various Greek cities, for which the citizens of Athens were grateful.
Views
Aristotle divided the sciences into three kinds: productive, practical, and theoretical. The productive sciences, naturally enough, are those that have a product. They include not only engineering and architecture, which have products like bridges and houses, but also disciplines such as strategy and rhetoric, where the product is something less concrete, such as victory on the battlefield or in the courts. The practical sciences, most notably ethics and politics, are those that guide behavior. The theoretical sciences - physics, mathematics, and theology - are those that have no product and no practical goal but in which information and understanding are sought for their own sake.
Aristotle divided the theoretical sciences into three groups: physics, mathematics, and theology. Physics as he understood it was equivalent to what would now be called "natural philosophy,” or the study of nature (physis); in this sense it encompasses not only the modern field of physics but also biology, chemistry, geology, psychology, and even meteorology. Metaphysics, however, is notably absent from Aristotle’s classification; indeed, he never uses the word, which first appears in the posthumous catalog of his writings as a name for the works listed after the Physics. He does, however, recognize the branch of philosophy now called metaphysics: he calls it "first philosophy" and defines it as the discipline that studies "being as being."
Aristotle’s contributions to the physical sciences are less impressive than his researches in the life sciences. In works such as On Generation and Corruption and On the Heavens, he presented a world-picture that included many features inherited from his pre-Socratic predecessors. From Empedocles he adopted the view that the universe is ultimately composed of different combinations of the four fundamental elements of earth, water, air, and fire. Each element is characterized by the possession of a unique pair of the four elementary qualities of heat, cold, wetness, and dryness: earth is cold and dry, water is cold and wet, air is hot and wet, and fire is hot and dry. Each element has a natural place in an ordered cosmos, and each has an innate tendency to move toward this natural place. Thus, earthy solids naturally fall, while fire, unless prevented, rises ever higher. Other motions of the elements are possible but are “violent.”
Aristotle’s vision of the cosmos also owes much to Plato’s dialogue Timaeus. As in that work, the Earth is at the centre of the universe, and around it the Moon, the Sun, and the other planets revolve in a succession of concentric crystalline spheres. The heavenly bodies are not compounds of the four terrestrial elements but are made up of a superior fifth element, or "quintessence." In addition, the heavenly bodies have souls, or supernatural intellects, which guide them in their travels through the cosmos.
He also made a philosophical analysis of some of the concepts that pervade the physics of different eras - concepts such as place, time, causation, and determinism. According to Aristotle, the place of a thing is the first motionless boundary of whatever body is containing it. Thus, the place of a pint of wine is the inner surface of the flask containing it - provided the flask is stationary. But suppose the flask is in motion, perhaps on a punt floating down a river. Then the wine will be moving too, from place to place, and its place must be given by specifying its position relative to the motionless river banks. For Aristotle, if there were no bodies, there would be no place. Aristotle does, however, allow for the existence of a vacuum, or “void,” but only if it is contained by actually existing bodies.
Spacial extension, motion, and time are often thought of as continua - as wholes made up of a series of smaller parts. Aristotle develops a subtle analysis of the nature of such continuous quantities. Two entities are continuous, he says, when there is only a single common boundary between them. On the basis of this definition, he seeks to show that a continuum cannot be composed of indivisible atoms. A line, for example, cannot be composed of points that lack magnitude. Since a point has no parts, it cannot have a boundary distinct from itself; two points, therefore, cannot be either adjacent or continuous. Between any two points on a continuous line there will always be other points on the same line.
Similar reasoning, Aristotle says, applies to time and to motion. Time cannot be composed of indivisible moments, because between any two moments there is always a period of time. Likewise, an atom of motion would in fact have to be an atom of rest. Moments or points that were indivisible would lack magnitude, and zero magnitude, however often repeated, can never add up to any magnitude.
For Aristotle, extension, motion, and time are three fundamental continua in an intimate and ordered relation to each other. Local motion derives its continuity from the continuity of extension, and time derives its continuity from the continuity of motion. Time, Aristotle says, is the number of motion with respect to before and after. Where there is no motion, there is no time. Where there is no motion, there is no time.
In several places Aristotle distinguishes four types of cause, or explanation. First, he says, there is that of which and out of which a thing is made, such as the bronze of a statue. This is called the material cause. Second, there is the form or pattern of a thing, which may be expressed in its definition; Aristotle’s example is the proportion of the length of two strings in a lyre, which is the formal cause of one note’s being the octave of another. The third type of cause is the origin of a change or state of rest in something; this is often called the "efficient cause." Aristotle gives as examples a person reaching a decision, a father begetting a child, a sculptor carving a statue, and a doctor healing a patient. The fourth and last type of cause is the end or goal of a thing - that for the sake of which a thing is done. This is known as the "final cause."
Aristotle regarded psychology as a part of natural philosophy, and he wrote much about the philosophy of mind. This material appears in his ethical writings, in a systematic treatise on the nature of the soul (De anima), and in a number of minor monographs on topics such as sense-perception, memory, sleep, and dreams.
For Aristotle, the soul is not an exile from a better world ill-housed in a base body. The soul’s very essence is defined by its relationship to an organic structure. Not only humans but beasts and plants too have souls, intrinsic principles of animal and vegetable life. A soul, Aristotle says, is "the actuality of a body that has life," where life means the capacity for self-sustenance, growth, and reproduction.
The souls of living beings are ordered by Aristotle in a hierarchy. Plants have a vegetative or nutritive soul, which consists of the powers of growth, nutrition, and reproduction. Animals have, in addition, the powers of perception and locomotion - they possess a sensitive soul, and every animal has at least one sense-faculty, touch being the most universal. Whatever can feel at all can feel pleasure; hence, animals, which have senses, also have desires. Humans, in addition, have the power of reason and thought (logismos kai dianoia), which may be called a rational soul. The way in which Aristotle structured the soul and its faculties influenced not only philosophy but also science for nearly two millennia.
Aristotle’s approach to ethics is teleological. If life is to be worth living, he argues, it must surely be for the sake of something that is an end in itself - i.e., desirable for its own sake. If there is any single thing that is the highest human good, therefore, it must be desirable for its own sake, and all other goods must be desirable for the sake of it. One popular conception of the highest human good is pleasure - the pleasures of food, drink, and sex, combined with aesthetic and intellectual pleasures. Other people prefer a life of virtuous action in the political sphere. The third possible candidate for the highest human good is scientific or philosophical contemplation. This triad provides the key to his ethical inquiry.
People’s virtues are a subset of their good qualities. They are not innate, like eyesight, but are acquired by practice and lost by disuse. They are abiding states, and they thus differ from momentary passions such as anger and pity. Virtues are states of character that find expression both in purpose and in action. Moral virtue is expressed in good purpose - that is to say, in prescriptions for action in accordance with a good plan of life.
While all the moral virtues are means of action and passion, it is not the case that every kind of action and passion is capable of a virtuous mean. There are some actions of which there is no right amount because any amount of them is too much; Aristotle gives murder and adultery as examples. The virtues, besides being concerned with means of action and passion, are themselves means in the sense that they occupy a middle ground between two contrary vices. Thus, the virtue of courage is flanked on one side by foolhardiness and on the other by cowardice.
Wisdom, the intellectual virtue that is proper to practical reason, is inseparably linked with the moral virtues of the affective part of the soul. Only if an agent possesses moral virtue will he endorse an appropriate recipe for a good life. Only if he is gifted with intelligence will he make an accurate assessment of the circumstances in which his decision is to be made. It is impossible, Aristotle says, to be really good without wisdom or to be really wise without moral virtue.
Quotations:
"Excellence is never an accident. It is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, and intelligent execution; it represents the wise choice of many alternatives - choice, not chance, determines your destiny."
"Be a free thinker and don't accept everything you hear as truth. Be critical and evaluate what you believe in."
"The most important relationship we can all have is the one you have with yourself, the most important journey you can take is one of self-discovery. To know yourself, you must spend time with yourself, you must not be afraid to be alone. Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom."
"Happiness is a quality of the soul... not a function of one's material circumstances."
"The more you know, the more you know you don't know."
"Virtue means doing the right thing, in relation to the right person, at the right time, to the right extent, in the right manner, and for the right purpose. Thus, to give money away is quite a simple task, but for the act to be virtuous, the donor must give to the right person, for the right purpose, in the right amount, in the right manner, and at the right time."
"Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all."
"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit."
"Give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. Give a man a poisoned fish, you feed him for the rest of his life."
"Teenagers these days are out of control. They eat like pigs, they are disrespectful of adults, they interrupt and contradict their parents, and they terrorize their teachers."
"You will never do anything in this world without courage. It is the greatest quality of the mind next to honor."
"A flatterer is a friend who is your inferior, or pretends to be so."
"When there is no middle class, and the poor greatly exceed in number, troubles arise, and the state soon comes to an end."
"The high-minded man must care more for the truth than for what people think."
"We are what we repeatedly do... excellence, therefore, isn't just an act, but a habit and life isn't just a series of events, but an ongoing process of self-definition."
"No great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness."
"The society that loses its grip on the past is in danger, for it produces men who know nothing but the present, and who are not aware that life had been, and could be, different from what it is."
"He who has overcome his fears will truly be free."
"He who has never learned to obey cannot be a good commander."
"Man is a goal-seeking animal. His life only has meaning if he is reaching out and striving for his goals."
"Poverty is the parent of revolution and crime."
"The man who is truly good and wise will bear with dignity whatever fortune sends, and will always make the best of his circumstances."
Personality
Aristotle spent most of his time on his studies, research, and teaching. If the ancient reports are to be believed, Aristotle spoke with an incisive wit and could deliver clear and captivating lectures. A diligent reader, collector and thinker, he was ever open to the world and learned in its ways, well beyond simply the teachings of the Academy. He was masterfully versed in the works of the sophists, the pre-Socratics, the medical writers, as well as Greek lyric, epic, and drama, and the various constitutions of his world.
Aristotle was a collector of proverbs, riddles and folklore and his school especially studied riddles of Delphic Oracle and the fables of Aesop.
Quotes from others about the person
It appears to me that there can be no question, that Aristotle stands forth, not only as the greatest figure in antiquity, but as the greatest intellect that has ever appeared upon the face of this earth." - George J. Romanes
"Aristotle is the last Greek philosopher who faces the world cheerfully; after him, all have, in one form or another, a philosophy of retreat." - Bertrand Russell
"Aristotle was the first accurate critic and truest judge — nay, the greatest philosopher the world ever had." - Ben Jonson
"If there is a philosophical Atlas who carries the whole of Western civilization on his shoulders, it is Aristotle." - Ayn Rand