Aristotle was born in Stagira in northern
Greece in 384 b.c.e. His father was a doctor
at the court of Amyntas III of Macedon, father of Philip II of Macedon
and grandfather of Alexander the Great. In 367, Aristotle moved
to Athens to study at Plato’s Academy, where he stayed for twenty years.
Aristotle left the Academy in 347, the year Plato died, and some
have speculated that he felt snubbed that Plato did not choose him
as his successor. The more likely explanation, however, is that anti-Macedonian
sentiment was on the rise in Athens, causing Aristotle to fear being
persecuted for his associations with King Philip’s court.
Over the next four years, Aristotle traveled about the
eastern Aegean, studying and teaching. During this time, he conducted
a remarkable array of experiments and observations in the biological sciences.
In 343, he was summoned back north to Macedonia to be the personal
tutor to King Philip’s son, the young Alexander the Great. We do
not know the precise relationship between Aristotle and Alexander,
though their relationship has been the subject of much speculation
and mythmaking over the centuries.
As the Macedonians came to dominate Greece, Aristotle returned
to Athens and set up his own philosophical school at the Lyceum,
where he taught from 335 until 323. What we have of Aristotle’s
writings are mostly lectures he gave at the Lyceum in these years.
Their dry style and uneven structure is due partly to the fact that
they were lecture notes never intended for publication and partly
to the fact that they were patched together into their present form
by editors many centuries after Aristotle’s death. Aristotle published
many popular works admired for their lively style, but none of these
have survived.
Historically, Aristotle lived in the twilight years of
the Greek city-state. Ancient Greece consisted of a number of independent
city-states, of which Athens was the most significant. Though the
city-states relied on slave labor and the disenfranchisement of
women, the male citizens established one of the earliest forms of
democracy, and in the span of less than two hundred years they managed
to establish what the Western world still looks to as the basis
of its political institutions, philosophy, mathematics, drama, art,
and architecture. Because slaves and noncitizen workers performed
the bulk of the city’s labor, male citizens enjoyed a great deal
of leisure time. This leisure provided the opportunity for open
inquiry into the nature of the world, and teachers like Aristotle
were not uncommon.
Aristotle’s writings show that he was well versed in Platonic
philosophy. The centerpiece of Plato’s philosophy is his Theory
of Forms, according to which the objects of experience are just
shadows of a higher world of Forms that lie beyond sensory experience. For
example, the various things we see in this world that we call beautiful
have beauty because they participate in the Form of Beauty, which
is itself immaterial and eternal. In Plato’s view, the purpose of
philosophy is to train the intellect to see beyond appearances and
to grasp the higher world of Forms.
Counterbalancing the idealism of Plato’s philosophy is
Aristotle’s background as the son of a doctor. Aristotle was probably brought
up to pursue a medical career, and his writings on biology show
a very sharp understanding of anatomy. Throughout his writings,
Aristotle refers to biology as a paradigm for making sense of the
world, much as Plato refers to mathematics. This emphasis on biology
leads Aristotle to favor close observation of natural phenomena
and careful classification as the keys to making sense of things.
As a result, his philosophy is much more empirically oriented than
Plato’s, and Aristotle rejects the idea that we can only make sense
of this world by appealing to invisible entities beyond it.
Aristotle’s influence on subsequent generations is immense.
Only Plato can compare in importance. Though Aristotle’s works were lost
to the West for many centuries, they were preserved by Arab scholars
and transmitted back to Europe in the Middle Ages. Thanks mostly
to the work of St. Thomas Aquinas, Aristotle’s writings carried
an authority in the late Middle Ages that was second only to the
Bible. His work in logic and biology was not significantly improved
upon until the nineteenth century. Though modern science and philosophy
found their legs by rejecting or disproving many of Aristotle’s
results, his methods continue to have a deep influence on philosophical
and scientific thought.
Aristotle’s published writings were all lost or destroyed
in the centuries after his death, and what we have are lectures,
or notes on lectures, that Aristotle gave at the Lyceum. These works
were first collected two centuries after Aristotle’s death by Andronicus
of Rhodes. As a result, not only do we not know the chronology of Aristotle’s
writings, but we are also unsure if Andronicus arranged them in
the order that Aristotle had intended, or if all the works collected
by Andronicus were written by Aristotle. We can also be quite confident
that what Andronicus collected constitutes less than one-third of
all of Aristotle’s writings. Even this small portion is impressive:
Aristotle’s works are as vast as they are challenging.
