Aristotle | Biography, Works, Quotes, Philosophy, Ethics, & Facts | Britannica (2024)

Greek philosopher

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Also known as: Aristoteles

Written by

Anthony J.P. Kenny Sir Anthony Kenny has been Pro-Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford, Master of Balliol College, Oxford, Chairman of the Board of the British Library, and President of the British Academy. He is...

Anthony J.P. Kenny,

Anselm H. Amadio Chaplain; Instructor in Philosophy, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago. Staff Writer, Philosophy and Religion, Encyclopædia Britannica, Chicago, 1970–73.

Anselm H. AmadioAll

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Last Updated: Article History

Quick Facts

Greek:
Aristoteles
Born:
384 bce, Stagira, Chalcidice, Greece
Died:
322, Chalcis, Euboea
Also Known As:
Aristoteles
Founder:
Lyceum
Notable Works:
“Categories”
“Eudemian Ethics”
“History of Animals”
“Metaphysica”
“Nicomachean Ethics”
“Ode to Virtue”
“On Generation and Corruption”
“On Interpretation”
“On the Generation of Animals”
“On the Heavens”
“On the Parts of Animals”
“On the Soul”
“Organon”
“Physics”
“Poetics”
“Politics”
“Posterior Analytics”
“Prior Analytics”
“Protrepticus”
“Rhetoric”
“Sophistical Refutations”
“Topics”
Subjects Of Study:
biology
zoology
Aristotelianism
category
dialectic
ekthesis
element
entelechy
enthymeme
fallacy
golden mean
hylomorphism
idea
nous
oligarchy
polis
predicable
prime mover
rhetoric
soul
syllogistic
table of opposites
teleology
universal

See all related content

Top Questions

What did Aristotle do?

Aristotle was one of the greatest philosophers who ever lived and the first genuine scientist in history. He made pioneering contributions to all fields of philosophy and science, he invented the field of formal logic, and he identified the various scientific disciplines and explored their relationships to each other. Aristotle was also a teacher and founded his own school in Athens, known as the Lyceum.

Read more below:Doctrines

formal logicLearn more about formal logic.

Where did Aristotle live?

After his father died about 367 BCE, Aristotle journeyed to Athens, where he joined the Academy of Plato. He left the Academy upon Plato’s death about 348, traveling to the northwestern coast of present-day Turkey. He lived there and on the island of Lésbos until 343 or 342, when King Philip II of Macedonia summoned him to the Macedonian capital, Pella, to act as tutor to Philip’s young teenage son, Alexander, which he did for two or three years. Aristotle presumably lived somewhere in Macedonia until his (second) arrival in Athens in 335. In 323 hostility toward Macedonians in Athens prompted Aristotle to flee to the island of Euboea, where he died the following year.

Read more below:Life

Alexander the GreatRead more about Alexander the Great, a student of Aristotle.

Who were Aristotle’s teachers and students?

Aristotle’s most famous teacher was Plato (c. 428–c. 348 BCE), who himself had been a student of Socrates (c. 470–399 BCE). Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, whose lifetimes spanned a period of only about 150 years, remain among the most important figures in the history of Western philosophy. Aristotle’s most famous student was Philip II’s son Alexander, later to be known as Alexander the Great, a military genius who eventually conquered the entire Greek world as well as North Africa and the Middle East. Aristotle’s most important philosophical student was probably Theophrastus, who became head of the Lyceum about 323.

Read more below:Life: The Lyceum

TheophrastusLearn more about Aristotle’s student Theophrastus.

How many works did Aristotle write?

Aristotle wrote as many as 200 treatises and other works covering all areas of philosophy and science. Of those, none survives in finished form. The approximately 30 works through which his thought was conveyed to later centuries consist of lecture notes (by Aristotle or his students) and draft manuscripts edited by ancient scholars, notably Andronicus of Rhodes, the last head of the Lyceum, who arranged, edited, and published Aristotle’s extant works in Rome about 60 BCE. The naturally abbreviated style of these writings makes them difficult to read, even for philosophers.

Read more below:Writings

Andronicus Of RhodesLearn more about Andronicus of Rhodes.

How did Aristotle influence subsequent philosophy and science?

Aristotle’s thought was original, profound, wide-ranging, and systematic. It eventually became the intellectual framework of Western Scholasticism, the system of philosophical assumptions and problems characteristic of philosophy in western Europe during the Middle Ages. In the 13th century St. Thomas Aquinas undertook to reconcile Aristotelian philosophy and science with Christian dogma, and through him the theology and intellectual worldview of the Roman Catholic Church became Aristotelian. Since the mid-20th century, Aristotle’s ethics has inspired the field of virtue theory, an approach to ethics that emphasizes human well-being and the development of character. Aristotle’s thought also constitutes an important current in other fields of contemporary philosophy, especially metaphysics, political philosophy, and the philosophy of science.

Read more below:Legacy

St. Thomas AquinasLearn more about St. Thomas Aquinas.

Aristotle (born 384 bce, Stagira, Chalcidice, Greece—died 322, Chalcis, Euboea) was an ancient Greek philosopher and scientist, one of the greatest intellectual figures of Classical antiquity and Western history. He was the author of a philosophical and scientific system that became the framework and vehicle for both Christian Scholasticism and medieval Islamic philosophy. Even after the intellectual revolutions of the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment, Aristotelian concepts remained embedded in Western thinking.

Aristotle’s intellectual range was vast, covering most of the sciences and many of the arts, including biology, botany, chemistry, ethics, history, logic, metaphysics, rhetoric, philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, physics, poetics, political theory, psychology, and zoology. He was the founder of formal logic, devising for it a finished system that for centuries was regarded as the sum of the discipline; and he pioneered the study of zoology, both observational and theoretical, in which some of his work remained unsurpassed until the 19th century. But he is, of course, most outstanding as a philosopher. His writings in ethics and political theory as well as in metaphysics and the philosophy of science continue to be studied, and his work remains a powerful current in contemporary philosophical debate.

This article deals with Aristotle’s life and thought. For the later development of Aristotelian philosophy, see Aristotelianism. For treatment of Aristotelianism in the full context of Western philosophy, see philosophy, Western.

Life

The Academy

Aristotle was born on the Chalcidic peninsula of Macedonia, in northern Greece. His father, Nicomachus, was the physician of Amyntas III (reigned c. 393–c. 370 bce), king of Macedonia and grandfather of Alexander the Great (reigned 336–323 bce). After his father’s death in 367, Aristotle migrated to Athens, where he joined the Academy of Plato (c. 428–c. 348 bce). He remained there for 20 years as Plato’s pupil and colleague.

Many of Plato’s later dialogues date from these decades, and they may reflect Aristotle’s contributions to philosophical debate at the Academy. Some of Aristotle’s writings also belong to this period, though mostly they survive only in fragments. Like his master, Aristotle wrote initially in dialogue form, and his early ideas show a strong Platonic influence. His dialogue Eudemus, for example, reflects the Platonic view of the soul as imprisoned in the body and as capable of a happier life only when the body has been left behind. According to Aristotle, the dead are more blessed and happier than the living, and to die is to return to one’s real home.

Britannica QuizPhilosophy 101

Another youthful work, the Protrepticus (“Exhortation”), has been reconstructed by modern scholars from quotations in various works from late antiquity. Everyone must do philosophy, Aristotle claims, because even arguing against the practice of philosophy is itself a form of philosophizing. The best form of philosophy is the contemplation of the universe of nature; it is for this purpose that God made human beings and gave them a godlike intellect. All else—strength, beauty, power, and honour—is worthless.

It is possible that two of Aristotle’s surviving works on logic and disputation, the Topics and the Sophistical Refutations, belong to this early period. The former demonstrates how to construct arguments for a position one has already decided to adopt; the latter shows how to detect weaknesses in the arguments of others. Although neither work amounts to a systematic treatise on formal logic, Aristotle can justly say, at the end of the Sophistical Refutations, that he has invented the discipline of logic—nothing at all existed when he started.

Aristotle | Biography, Works, Quotes, Philosophy, Ethics, & Facts | Britannica (3)

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During Aristotle’s residence at the Academy, King Philip II of Macedonia (reigned 359–336 bce) waged war on a number of Greek city-states. The Athenians defended their independence only half-heartedly, and, after a series of humiliating concessions, they allowed Philip to become, by 338, master of the Greek world. It cannot have been an easy time to be a Macedonian resident in Athens.

Within the Academy, however, relations seem to have remained cordial. Aristotle always acknowledged a great debt to Plato; he took a large part of his philosophical agenda from Plato, and his teaching is more often a modification than a repudiation of Plato’s doctrines. Already, however, Aristotle was beginning to distance himself from Plato’s theory of Forms, or Ideas (eidos; see form). (The word Form, when used to refer to Forms as Plato conceived them, is often capitalized in the scholarly literature; when used to refer to forms as Aristotle conceived them, it is conventionally lowercased.) Plato had held that, in addition to particular things, there exists a suprasensible realm of Forms, which are immutable and everlasting. This realm, he maintained, makes particular things intelligible by accounting for their common natures: a thing is a horse, for example, by virtue of the fact that it shares in, or imitates, the Form of “Horse.” In a lost work, On Ideas, Aristotle maintains that the arguments of Plato’s central dialogues establish only that there are, in addition to particulars, certain common objects of the sciences. In his surviving works as well, Aristotle often takes issue with the theory of Forms, sometimes politely and sometimes contemptuously. In his Metaphysics he argues that the theory fails to solve the problems it was meant to address. It does not confer intelligibility on particulars, because immutable and everlasting Forms cannot explain how particulars come into existence and undergo change. All the theory does, according to Aristotle, is introduce new entities equal in number to the entities to be explained—as if one could solve a problem by doubling it. (See below Form.)

Travels

When Plato died about 348, his nephew Speusippus became head of the Academy, and Aristotle left Athens. He migrated to Assus, a city on the northwestern coast of Anatolia (in present-day Turkey), where Hermias, a graduate of the Academy, was ruler. Aristotle became a close friend of Hermias and eventually married his ward Pythias. Aristotle helped Hermias to negotiate an alliance with Macedonia, which angered the Persian king, who had Hermias treacherously arrested and put to death about 341. Aristotle saluted Hermias’s memory in “Ode to Virtue,” his only surviving poem.

While in Assus and during the subsequent few years when he lived in the city of Mytilene on the island of Lesbos, Aristotle carried out extensive scientific research, particularly in zoology and marine biology. This work was summarized in a book later known, misleadingly, as The History of Animals, to which Aristotle added two short treatises, On the Parts of Animals and On the Generation of Animals. Although Aristotle did not claim to have founded the science of zoology, his detailed observations of a wide variety of organisms were quite without precedent. He—or one of his research assistants—must have been gifted with remarkably acute eyesight, since some of the features of insects that he accurately reports were not again observed until the invention of the microscope in the 17th century.

The scope of Aristotle’s scientific research is astonishing. Much of it is concerned with the classification of animals into genus and species; more than 500 species figure in his treatises, many of them described in detail. The myriad items of information about the anatomy, diet, habitat, modes of copulation, and reproductive systems of mammals, reptiles, fish, and insects are a melange of minute investigation and vestiges of superstition. In some cases his unlikely stories about rare species of fish were proved accurate many centuries later. In other places he states clearly and fairly a biological problem that took millennia to solve, such as the nature of embryonic development.

Despite an admixture of the fabulous, Aristotle’s biological works must be regarded as a stupendous achievement. His inquiries were conducted in a genuinely scientific spirit, and he was always ready to confess ignorance where evidence was insufficient. Whenever there is a conflict between theory and observation, one must trust observation, he insisted, and theories are to be trusted only if their results conform with the observed phenomena.

In 343 or 342 Aristotle was summoned by Philip II to the Macedonian capital at Pella to act as tutor to Philip’s 13-year-old son, the future Alexander the Great. Little is known of the content of Aristotle’s instruction; although the Rhetoric to Alexander was included in the Aristotelian corpus for centuries, it is now commonly regarded as a forgery. By 326 Alexander had made himself master of an empire that stretched from the Danube to the Indus and included Libya and Egypt. Ancient sources report that during his campaigns Alexander arranged for biological specimens to be sent to his tutor from all parts of Greece and Asia Minor.

Aristotle | Biography, Works, Quotes, Philosophy, Ethics, & Facts | Britannica (2024)

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