Greece & Rome · 384–322 BCE
Aristotle
Plato’s student, Alexander’s tutor, founder of the Lyceum
Brought Plato’s Forms down into things and founded formal logic, biology and the systematic study of ethics and politics. He held that humans are rational, political animals whose good is a life of virtuous activity.
Life and thought
Aristotle was born in 384 BCE in Stagira, in northern Greece, the son of a court doctor to the Macedonian king. At seventeen he joined Plato’s Academy and stayed twenty years. After Plato’s death he did research on Lesbos, especially in marine biology, and tutored the young Alexander the Great. In 335 he founded the Lyceum in Athens; after Alexander’s death, anti-Macedonian feeling drove him to Chalcis, where he died in 322. His surviving works are mostly lecture treatises; his polished dialogues are lost.
He kept Plato’s demand that knowledge be of what is universal but placed forms in things: a horse’s form is its structure and way of life, not a separate Form elsewhere. To understand anything, ask four questions: what is it made of, what is its form, what produced it, and what is it for. He invented formal logic with the syllogism, founded zoology, and argued that human happiness is a life of activity in accordance with virtue within a political community. For medieval Islamic, Jewish and Christian thinkers he was simply “the Philosopher”.