Aristotle (384–322 BC)

Life

Aristotle was born at Stagira (known also as the “Stagirite”) in Northern Greece, to the family of physicians at the royal court of Macedon. At the age of 17, he moved to Athens in order to study at Plato's Academy, where he remained for 20 years until Plato's death (347 BC). Then, he moved to Assos on the coast of Asia Minor. He was welcomed there by the local tyrant Hermias, whose niece he married later. After Hermias's execution by the Persians in 345 BC, Aristotle moved to Mytilene on the island of Lesbos, where he met his most famous pupil and associate, Theophrastus. It is thought that there,Aristotle devoted a lot of his time to his empirical studies of marine biology. In 343 BC, he was invited to the royal court at Mieza by Philip II, King of Macedon, in order to become a tutor of his 13-year-old son Alexander. After 3 years of tutorship, Aristotle left his pupil, who became very soon the conqueror of the world, known [Page 275]as Alexander the Great. In 335 BC, Aristotle was back in Athens, where he set up his own school, the Lyceum. After the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC, he was forced to leave Athens. He returned to a family estate on the island Euboea, where he died the next year, at the age of 62.

Works

It is estimated (based on book catalogues in Aristotle's ancient bibliographies) that he wrote an unbelievable 550 books, the equivalent of about 6,000 modern pages. But even more impressive than the volume is the range of topics he covered: from philosophy, logic, and natural sciences to psychology, ethics, politics, and aesthetics. Unfortunately, the majority of these works were lost, and among those are all his published texts (which had a form of Platonic dialogues). What has been available for the last 2,000years, known as Corpus Aristotelicum,consists of about 2,000 modern pages, and it is a collection of various Aristotle's lecture notes, esoteric texts for his students, which were not intended for publication. Arrangements of these texts and titles of collections were done by the editor Andronicus of Rhodos, about 250 years after Aristotle's death. This explains various inconsistencies, contradictions, and general inelegance of many of Aristotle's surviving texts, including Metaphysics. This is the main reason why we cannot study Aristotle like the majority of other philosophers, such as Descartes or Kant, who have written compact philosophical treatises. Surprisingly enough, these later compilations of Aristotle's working drafts have had some of the most profound effects on the development of philosophy, science, and the whole European culture.

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