Who was Aristotle

Aristotle was one of the greatest intellectual figure of Western history. He was born in 384 BCE, Stagira, Chalcidice, Greece. He was an ancient Greek philosopher and scientist. He was the author of philosophical and scientific system that became 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 parts of science and arts, which included 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 works remained unsurpassed until the 19th century. His writings in ethics and political theory as well as in metaphysics and the philosophy of science continued to be studied, and his work remains a powerful current in contemporary philosophical debate.

Aristotle’s father, Nicomachus, was the physician of Amyntas III, king of Macedonia and grandfather of Alexander the Great. After his father’s death in 367, Aristotle migrated to Athens, where he entered the Academy of Plato. He remained there for 20 years as Plato’s pupil and colleague.

Many of the Plato’s later dialogues date from these decades, and they may reflect Aristotle’s contributions to philosophical debate at the Academy. 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.

After the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC, anti-Macedonian sentiment forced Aristotle to flee Athens. He died a little north of the city in 322, of a digestive complaint. He asked to be buried next to his wife, who had died some years before. In his last years he had a relationship with his slave Herpyllis, who bore him Nicomachus, the son for whom his great ethical treatise is named.

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