For example, all men are mortal, all Greeks are men, therefore all Greeks are mortal. He also broke rhetoric into types of speeches: epideictic ceremonial , forensic judicial and deliberative where the audience is required to reach a verdict. Aristotle takes a different approach, analyzing the purpose of poetry. He argues that creative endeavors like poetry and theater provides catharsis, or the beneficial purging of emotions through art. After the death of Alexander the Great in B.
He died a little north of the city in , of a digestive complaint. He asked to be buried next to his wife, who had died some years before. In his last years he had a relationship with his slave Herpyllis, who bore him Nicomachus, the son for whom his great ethical treatise is named. The historian Strabo says they were stored for centuries in a moldy cellar in Asia Minor before their rediscovery in the first century B.
In 30 B. In the 13th century, Aristotle was reintroduced to the West through the work of Albertus Magnus and especially Thomas Aquinas, whose brilliant synthesis of Aristotelian and Christian thought provided a bedrock for late medieval Catholic philosophy, theology and science. Scientists like Galileo and Copernicus disproved his geocentric model of the solar system, while anatomists such as William Harvey dismantled many of his biological theories.
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Viewed by many as the founding figure of Western philosophy, Socrates B. The Athenian philosopher Plato c. In his written dialogues he conveyed and expanded on the ideas and techniques of his teacher Socrates.
The Academy he The so-called golden age of Athenian culture flourished under the leadership of Pericles B. The Persians attacked the town and Hermias was captured and executed. Aristotle escaped and stopped on the island of Lesbos on his way to Macedonia. It was more than a passing visit for he remained there for about a year and must have had the group of scientists from Assos with him for they continued their biological researches there.
Macedonia was now at peace with Athens, for Philip had made a treaty in BC. The often quoted story that he became tutor to the young Alexander the Great , the son of Philip, is almost certainly a later invention as was pointed out by Jaeger, see [ 16 ]. Grayeff in [ 12 ] suggests that Philip saw in Aristotle a future head of the Academy in Athens.
Certainly this would have suited Philip well for Speusippus, the then head of the Academy , was strongly opposed to Philip and strongly encouraging Athens to oppose the rise of Macedonia. The treaty between Athens and Macedonia began to fall apart in BC and preparations for war began. The following year Speusippus died but Aristotle, although proposed as head of the Academy , was not elected. The position went to Xenocrates and Philip lost interest in his support for Aristotle.
He moved back to his home in Stagirus and took with him to Stagirus his circle of philosophers and scientists. Aristotle did not marry again after the death of his wife but he did form a relationship with Herpyllis, who came from his home town of Stagirus. It is not clear when they first met but together they had a son, Nicomachus, named after Aristotle's father. Philip was now at the height of his power but, as so often happens, that proved the time for internal disputes. Aristotle supported Alexander, Philip's son who soon became king.
Alexander decided on a policy similar to his father in regard to Athens and sought to assert his power by peaceful means. Alexander protected the Academy and encouraged it to continue with its work.
At the same time, however, he sent Aristotle to Athens to found a rival establishment. He arrived in the city with assistants to staff the school and a large range of teaching materials he had gathered while in Macedonia; books, maps, and other teaching material which may well have been intended at one stage to support Aristotle in his bid to become head of the Academy.
The Academy had always been narrow in its interests but the Lyceum under Aristotle pursued a broader range of subjects. Prominence was given by Aristotle to the detailed study of nature and in this and all the other subjects he studied [ 6 ] :- His own researches were carried out in company, and he communicated his thoughts to his friends and pupils, never thinking to retain them as a private treasure-store.
He thought, indeed, that a man could not claim to know a subject unless he was capable of transmitting his knowledge to others, and he regarded teaching as the proper manifestation of knowledge. Whether the works that come down to us are due to Aristotle or to later members of his school was questioned by a number of scholars towards the end of the 19 th century. The reasons are discussed by Jaeger [ 16 ] , but in this work Jaeger argues that the apparent differences in the approach by Aristotle in different works can be explained by his ideas developing over a number of years.
Grayeff [ 6 ] examines certain texts in detail and again claims that they represent developments in the ideas of Aristotle's school long after his death.
He writes:- According to a tradition which arose about two hundred and fifty years after his death, which then became dominant and even today is hardly disputed, Aristotle in these same years lectured - not once, but two or three times, in almost every subject - on logic, physics, astronomy, meteorology, zoology, metaphysics , theology, psychology, politics, economics, ethics , rhetoric, poetics; and that he wrote down these lectures, expanding them and amending them several times, until they reached the stage in which we read them.
However, still more astounding is the fact that the majority of these subjects did not exist as such before him, so that he would have been the first to conceive of and establish them, as systematic disciplines. After the death of Alexander the Great in BC, anti-Macedonian feeling in Athens made Aristotle retire to Chalcis where he lived in the house which had once belonged to his mother and was still retained by the family. He died the following year from a stomach complaint at the age of It is virtually impossible to give an impression of Aristotle's personality with any certainty but the authors of [ 2 ] write:- The anecdotes related of him reveal him as a kindly, affectionate character, and they show barely any trace of the self-importance that some scholars think they can detect in his works.
His will, which has been preserved, exhibits the same kindly traits; he makes references to his happy family life and takes solicitous care of his children, as well as his servants.
Barnes [ 6 ] writes:- He was a bit of a dandy, wearing rings on his fingers and cutting his hair fashionably short. He suffered from poor digestion, and is said to have been spindle-shanked. He was a good speaker, lucid in his lectures, persuasive in conversation; and he had a mordant wit. His enemies, who were numerous, made him out to be arrogant and overbearing. As a man he was, I suspect, admirable rather than amiable. We have commented above on the disputes among modern scholars as to whether Aristotle wrote the treatises now assigned to him.
We do know that his work falls into two distinct parts, namely works which he published during his lifetime and are now lost although some fragments survive in quotations in works by others , and the collection of writings which have come down to us and were not published by Aristotle in his lifetime.
We can say with certainty that Aristotle never intended these 30 works which fill over printed pages to be published. They are certainly lecture notes from the courses given at the Lyceum either being, as most scholars believe, the work of Aristotle, or of later lecturers. Of course it is distinctly possible that they are notes of courses originally given by Aristotle but later added to by other lecturers after Aristotle's death.
Certainly [ 2 ] :- The form, titles, and order of Aristotle's texts that are studied today were given to them by Andronicus almost three centuries after the philosopher's death, and the long history of commentary upon them began at this stage.
What do these works contain? There are important works on logic. Aristotle believed that logic was not a science but rather had to be treated before the study of every branch of knowledge. Aristotle's name for logic was "analytics", the term logic being introduced by Xenocrates working at the Academy.
Aristotle believed that logic must be applied to the sciences [ 6 ] :- The sciences - at any rate the theoretical sciences - are to be axiomatised. What, then, are their axioms to be?
What conditions must a proposition satisfy to count as an axiom? By what rules will theorems be deduced from axioms? Those are among the questions which Aristotle poses in his logical writings, and in particular in the works known as Prior and Posterior Analytics.
It is possible that his father served at the Macedonian court the political leaders of Macedonia, an ancient empire as physician to Amyntas II died c. At the age of seventeen Aristotle went to Athens, Greece, and joined Plato's c. There he remained for twenty years.
Although his respect and admiration for Plato was always great, differences developed which ultimately caused a break in their relationship. Aristotle married the niece of Hermias, a woman named Pythias, who was killed by the Persians some time thereafter. In B. Aristotle made his way to the court of Philip of Macedon c. There Aristotle became tutor to Alexander c. Little 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 gave 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 around B.
Under the protection of Antipater c. Also known as the Peripatetic School, the school took its name from its colonnaded walk a walk with a series of columns on either side. The lectures were divided into morning and afternoon sessions. The more difficult ones were given in the morning, and the easier and more popular ones were given in the afternoon. Aristotle himself led the school until the death of Alexander in B. He went to Chalcis, Greece, where he died the following year of intestinal problems.
His will, preserved in the writings of Diogenes Laertius third century C. Aristotle produced a large number of writings, but few have survived. His earliest writings, consisting for the most part of dialogues writings in the form of conversation , were produced under the influence of Plato and the Academy. Most of these are lost, although the titles are known from the writings Aristotle. They were a wide variety of works written for the public, and they dealt with popular philosophical themes.
The dialogues of Plato were undoubtedly the inspiration for some of them, although the fall out between Plato and Aristotle reveals itself to a certain extent in these works, too.
A 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.
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