Aristotle

Aristotle was born in Stagira, on the northern coast of the Aegean, around 384 BCE, the son of Nicomachus, court physician to the Macedonian king Amyntas III. He arrived in Athens at seventeen and entered Plato's Academy, where he stayed for twenty years until Plato's death in 347 BCE. He left Athens, traveled, did marine biology on Lesbos that was not surpassed in detail for two thousand years, and was eventually summoned to the Macedonian court to tutor the thirteen-year-old prince who would become Alexander the Great. What Alexander absorbed is unknowable; the conqueror's later behavior is not an obvious advertisement for his teacher's ethics.

In 335 BCE he returned to Athens and founded the Lyceum, a school in the grove of Apollo Lyceus, where he taught for the next twelve years. The school was known for the peripatetic method — Aristotle apparently lectured while walking under the colonnades with his students — and produced an extraordinary research program. Botany, zoology, meteorology, astronomy, logic, metaphysics, ethics, politics, rhetoric, poetics: Aristotle either invented these disciplines as systematic fields or reorganized them so thoroughly that his categories were authoritative in the Latin and Arabic worlds for the next eighteen centuries.

The break with Plato is the central intellectual fact about him. Plato's Forms — the eternal abstract patterns of which physical objects were only shadowy copies — Aristotle rejected. He thought you arrived at general truths by observing particular cases, dissecting actual cuttlefish, watching actual citizens deliberate, reading actual tragedies. The Nicomachean Ethics argues that virtue is a habit cultivated through practice and that flourishing (eudaimonia) requires not just right action but the material and social conditions that make right action possible. The Politics analyzes 158 constitutions empirically before proposing the mixed regime as least bad. The Poetics — surviving only in fragmentary form, the book on comedy lost — gave Western literary criticism most of its working vocabulary, including mimesis, catharsis, and the unities.

The works that survive are mostly not what Aristotle published. His polished dialogues, praised in antiquity for their style, are almost entirely lost. What we have are his lecture notes — terse, technical, often elliptical, sometimes contradicting themselves because they were revised over years of teaching. Reading Aristotle is reading the working papers of a working scientist.

The complications are real. The Politics defends natural slavery: some human beings, Aristotle argues, are slaves "by nature" and fit to be ruled. His remarks on women — their deliberative faculty present but "without authority" — were used to license female subordination throughout the Christian and Islamic Middle Ages. He fled Athens in 322 BCE under threat of prosecution, reportedly saying he would not let the city sin twice against philosophy, and died on Euboea later that year. He was sixty-two. The Lyceum continued without him; the categories he set down continued for considerably longer.