Aristotle

Greek philosopher (384–322 BC), born in Stagira, in Macedonia, son of a physician at the royal court, trained for twenty years at Plato's Academy in Athens as his pupil, and tutor to Alexander the Great before founding his own school in Athens, the Lyceum, where he gave his lectures walking through its colonnaded gardens — hence the 'peripatetic' tradition his school came to be known by. His work, transmitted mostly in the form of treatises and lecture notes rather than works finished for publication, spans virtually every field of knowledge known in his time and constitutes, alongside Plato's, the foundation of all later Western philosophy. In logic, he created history's first formal system of inference with his theory of the syllogism, set out in the Organon. In metaphysics, he developed his theory of the four causes (material, formal, efficient and final) and the central notion of actuality and potentiality to explain change and motion, in a deliberate departure from Plato's theory of separate Forms, arguing instead that forms exist inherent within things themselves. In ethics, the Nicomachean Ethics defines happiness (eudaimonia) as the supreme human good, attainable through the virtuous exercise of reason and the cultivation of a balanced character according to the 'mean' between vicious extremes. In politics, he systematically analysed and classified the existing Greek constitutions, arguing that man is by nature a 'political animal'. He also founded biology as a discipline of systematic empirical observation, wrote on rhetoric and poetics — his analysis of Greek tragedy remains an obligatory reference — and his influence, transmitted through medieval Arab commentators such as Avicenna and Averroes, decisively shaped both medieval Christian scholasticism and Western science well into the early modern era.

23 works

• Aristotle's History of Animals
• Metaphysics EN
• On Breathing
• On Dreams (Aristotle)
• On Life and Death
• On Longevity and Shortness of Life
• On Memory and Reminiscence
• On Prophesying by Dreams
• On Sleep and Sleeplessness
• On the Movement of Animals
• On the Progression of Animals
• On the Soul
• On the Soul (gr)
• On Youth and Old Age
• Politics A Treatise on Government
• Posterior Analytics (Bouchier)
• Rhetoric (Treatise on Rhetoric)
• The Athenian Constitution
• The Categories
• The Nicomachean ethics of Aristotle
• The Physics, Vol. I (Books I-IV)
• The Physics, Vol. II (Books V-VIII)
• The Poetics of Aristotle