Aristotle (384–322 B.C.)

Aristotle, a Greek philosopher and protégé of Plato, is considered the Father of the Scientific Method, the creator of formal logic, and one of the greatest thinkers in the history of the Western world. He was born in Stagiros in northeastern Greece near the neighboring kingdom of Macedonia. In 367 B.C. he traveled to Athens and joined Plato's philosophical school, the Academy. Aristotle remained in the Academy for approximately 20 years, first as a student and, later, as a teacher. One of the subjects he taught was rhetoric (rhe¯torike¯). Notes used for his lectures on rhetoric at the Academy are thought to form, in large part, the contents of what is today the text titled Rhetoric. Around the time of Plato's death in 347 B.C., Aristotle left Athens. Over the next 3 or 4 years, he researched the natural history of the eastern Aegean Sea coast and apparently began work on lecture notes that would later be compiled into the text known today as Politics.

Sometime in 343 or 342 B.C., Aristotle joined the court of King Philip of Macedonia. Aristotle's father, Nicomachus, had served as personal physician to Philip's father, King Amyntas. Aristotle tutored the king's teenage son, Alexander, who later became the Macedonian hegemon, Alexander the Great. However, Aristotle only remained on as royal tutor until 340 B.C. Two years later, Philip's army defeated the Greek city-states at the Battle of Chaeronea. Following Philip's assassination in 336 B.C., Alexander ascended the throne, and Aristotle maintained positive relations with him for the next decade.

[Page 43]In 335 B.C. Aristotle founded a school of philosophy in the Lyceum, a gymnasium attached to the temple of Apollo Lyceus, just outside of Athens. Aristotle's proclivity for walking the colonnaded portico (peripatos) while teaching his students resulted in the school's common name, the Peripatetic School. At the Lyceum, Aristotle maintained an open library that was encyclopedic in scope and included his writings on rhetoric, logic, politics, ethics, psychology, biology, zoology, physics, meteorology, metaphysics, and poetry. Aristotle accepted Macedonian subsidies for his school and made no secret of his friendship with Antipater, an Alexandrian general appointed by the Macedonian king to serve as ambassador to Athens and later as regent over Greece. Thus, when the sudden death of Alexander the Great in 323 B.C. resulted in increased anti-Macedonian sentiments, Aristotle fled to the ancient city of Chalcis on the island of Euboea, leaving his school and its library under the direction of one of his students, Theophrastus. Aristotle died the following year.

Unfortunately, much of what Aristotle published during his lifetime has been lost, and most of the extant texts of Aristotle's works, including Rhetoric and Politics, are thought to be compilations of Aristotle's lecture notes combined, in some cases, with the writings of some of his students. Aristotle's notes on rhetoric seem to have been made available to the public in an organized hand-written format by Andronicus of Rhodes in the mid-first century B.C., but this work was not widely published in print form in the Western world until the latter part of the 15th century A.D.

...