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Aristotle

Born in 384 BC, Aristotle was a Greek philosopher, a student of Plato who was, in turn, a student of Socrates before him. Together, the three of them are widely considered to be the founders of Western philosophy, as well as the greatest philosophers of ancient times. Aristotle and Plato are distinctive in that they produced texts that have been preserved while Socrates is known only through the writings of others.

Aristotle was a prolific writer of not only philosophy but also of a host of other topics such as biology, logic, metaphysics and political theory. He was an avid student of life, the first Western thinker to attempt to map out the separate sciences (we use some of the names he gave them even today.) Indeed, Aristotle’s systematic and categorized approach to understanding the world has had an undeniable legacy on the style and methods of today’s Academy.

Aristotle was a flexible philosopher who saw as his task the ongoing attendance to all the complexities of the human experience. His outlook, in fact, was firmly planted in the experiential, the material. He and Plato differed on this fundamental point, since Plato believed conversely that man gained knowledge by contemplation, by turning away from the external world. Aristotle can be looked upon as a forerunner of the empiricists who would follow in later years, and as a man who believed that the general could be understood through the particular.

Web Resources On Aristotle

IEP: Aristotle
Wikipedia: Aristotle

Book Resources On Aristotle

Aristotle for Everybody by Mortimer J. Adler
The Basic Works of Aristotle by Richard McKeon

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