Aristotle

Aristotle Aristotle was a Greek philosopher and was born in 348 B.C. He studied under another philopsopher Plato and later tutored Alexander the Great at the Macedonian court. In 335 B.C. he opened a school in the Athenian Lyceum. During the anti-macedonian agitation after Alexander's death Aristotle fled to Chalcis where he later died in 322 B.C. His extant writings, largely in the form of lecture notes made by his students, include the Organum (treatises of logic); Physics; Metaphysics; De Anima (on the soul); Nicomachean Ethics and Eudemian Ethics; Politics: De Poetica: Rhetoric; and works biology and physics. Aristotle held philosophy to be the the discerning, through the use of systematic logic as expressed in Syllogisms, of the self-evident, changeless first principles that form the basis of all knowledge. He taught that knowledge of a thing requires an inquiry into causality and that the "final cause"-the purpose or function of the thing-is primary. This is a direct quote from his works (translated): "The highest good for the individual is the complete exercise of the specifically human function of rationality. In contrast to the Platonic belief that a concrete reality partakes of a from but does not embody it with the exception of the Prime Mover (God), form has no separate existence but is immanent in matter." Aristotle's work was lost following the decline of the Roman Empire but was reintroduced to the West through the work of Arab and Jewish scholars, becoming the basis of medieval scholasticism. In my opinion Aristotle was one of the greatest and most important of the philosophers and scientists of the world's history.