Aristotle

By Emre Yıldırım

If Plato dreamed of a world beyond this one, Aristotle set out to catalogue this one. The son of a Macedonian court physician, born at Stagira in 384 BCE, joined Plato's Academy at seventeen and stayed twenty years — the most brilliant student of the most brilliant teacher, and eventually his most formidable critic.

When Plato died in 347, Aristotle left Athens and spent years in Asia Minor and Lesbos, dissecting marine animals and classifying everything he could lay hands on. Then came the commission that made him famous beyond philosophy: King Philip II of Macedon hired him to tutor the thirteen-year-old prince Alexander. For three years Aristotle taught the future conqueror of the world — Homer, ethics, politics, medicine — before returning to Athens in 335 to found his own school, the Lyceum, in a grove dedicated to Apollo Lyceus. His habit of lecturing while walking gave his followers their name: the Peripatetics, the walkers-about.

What he produced there beggars belief. The surviving works — perhaps a fifth of what he wrote — fill some two thousand pages and founded entire disciplines. The Organon created formal logic: the syllogism, the rules of valid inference, the toolkit of rational argument used, with refinements, for the next two thousand years. The Physics and the biological treatises attempted the first systematic natural science, based on observation — wrong about much, pioneering in method. The Metaphysics asked what it means for anything to exist. The Nicomachean Ethics defined the good life as activity of the soul in accordance with virtue, with happiness as flourishing rather than pleasure, and gave us the doctrine of the mean. The Politics analyzed constitutions and declared man "a political animal." The Poetics dissected tragedy and gave criticism its founding vocabulary: catharsis, hamartia, the unities.

Aristotle rejected Plato's Forms: there is no separate world of Justice itself, only just acts, just men, just laws. Universals live in particulars, and knowledge begins with the senses. It was the empiricist's charter, and it made him the philosopher of the working scientist. When anti-Macedonian feeling flared in Athens after Alexander's death in 323, Aristotle fled to Chalcis, remarking that he would not let Athens "sin twice against philosophy." He died there a year later, at sixty-two, having organized more of human knowledge than any single mind before or since. His lost dialogues, praised by Cicero for their golden eloquence, remind us that the dry lecture-notes we possess are the working papers of a mind that also wrote beautifully — the treatises are the skeleton; the living animal is gone.

Impact on civilization

Aristotle's logic was the undisputed instrument of rational thought for two thousand years, from the Stoics through medieval scholasticism to the threshold of modern symbolic logic. His works, preserved and commented on by Islamic philosophers — Avicenna, Averroes — and fused with Christian theology by Thomas Aquinas, became the intellectual operating system of the medieval university and the foundation of the scientific method's emphasis on observation and classification. His ethics of virtue and flourishing shaped moral philosophy from the Stoics to contemporary virtue ethics; his Politics founded political science; his Poetics founded literary criticism. No thinker did more to make the world intelligible by dividing it into subjects and studying each in turn. He also gave the West its first great model of the research institution: the Lyceum's library, museum, and collective investigation prefigure the university and the laboratory. When modern science classifies, defines, and seeks causes, it walks the path Aristotle cut through the forest of facts.