Aristotle

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Aristotle : biography

384 BC – 322 BC

Aristotle was appointed as the head of the royal academy of Macedon. During that time he gave lessons not only to Alexander, but also to two other future kings: Ptolemy and Cassander.Peter Green, Alexander of Macedon, 1991 University of California Press, Ltd. Oxford, England. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data, p.58–59 Aristotle encouraged Alexander toward eastern conquest, and his attitude towards Persia was unabashedly ethnocentric. In one famous example, he counsels Alexander to be "a leader to the Greeks and a despot to the barbarians, to look after the former as after friends and relatives, and to deal with the latter as with beasts or plants".

By 335 BC he had returned to Athens, establishing his own school there known as the Lyceum. Aristotle conducted courses at the school for the next twelve years. While in Athens, his wife Pythias died and Aristotle became involved with Herpyllis of Stagira, who bore him a son whom he named after his father, Nicomachus. According to the Suda, he also had an eromenos, Palaephatus of Abydus.William George Smith,Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology, vol. 3,

It is during this period in Athens from 335 to 323 BC when Aristotle is believed to have composed many of his works. Aristotle wrote many dialogues, only fragments of which survived. The works that have survived are in treatise form and were not, for the most part, intended for widespread publication, as they are generally thought to be lecture aids for his students. His most important treatises include Physics, Metaphysics, Nicomachean Ethics, Politics, De Anima (On the Soul) and Poetics.

Aristotle not only studied almost every subject possible at the time, but made significant contributions to most of them. In physical science, Aristotle studied anatomy, astronomy, embryology, geography, geology, meteorology, physics and zoology. In philosophy, he wrote on aesthetics, ethics, government, metaphysics, politics, economics, psychology, rhetoric and theology. He also studied education, foreign customs, literature and poetry. His combined works constitute a virtual encyclopedia of Greek knowledge. It has been suggested that Aristotle was probably the last person to know everything there was to be known in his own time.

Near the end of Alexander’s life, Alexander began to suspect plots against himself, and threatened Aristotle in letters. Aristotle had made no secret of his contempt for Alexander’s pretense of divinity, and the king had executed Aristotle’s grandnephew Callisthenes as a traitor. A widespread tradition in antiquity suspected Aristotle of playing a role in Alexander’s death, but there is little evidence for this.Peter Green, Alexander of Macedon, 1991 University of California Press, Ltd. Oxford, England. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data, p.379,459

Upon Alexander’s death, anti-Macedonian sentiment in Athens once again flared. Eurymedon the hierophant denounced Aristotle for not holding the gods in honor. Aristotle fled the city to his mother’s family estate in Chalcis, explaining, "I will not allow the Athenians to sin twice against philosophy,"Vita Marciana 41, cf. Aelian Varia historica 3.36, Ingemar Düring, Aristotle in the Ancient Biographical Tradition, Göteborg, 1957, T44a-e. a reference to Athens’s prior trial and execution of Socrates. He died in Euboea of natural causes within the same year: 322 BC. Aristotle named chief executor his student Antipater and left a will in which he asked to be buried next to his wife.Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt by Hildegard Temporini, Wolfgang Haase

Thought

Logic

With the Prior Analytics, Aristotle is credited with the earliest study of formal logic, and his conception of it was the dominant form of Western logic until 19th century advances in mathematical logic. Kant stated in the Critique of Pure Reason that Aristotle’s theory of logic completely accounted for the core of deductive inference.