Aristotle, the cornerstone of Western civilization
by Angeliki Founta, philologist
Aristotle was an ancient Greek philosopher and scientist of the 4th century BC. His work is considered the first comprehensive system of Western Philosophy and spans a wide range of sciences, such as physics, biology, metaphysics, ethics, poetry, politics, rhetoric, and more.
His philosophy and teachings, summarized under the term Aristotelianism, have been fundamental to philosophical, theological, and scientific thought up to the present day. The Encyclopedia Britannica states about Aristotle that “he was the first genuine scientist in history […] and every subsequent scientist owes something to him.”
Aristotle’s life
The early years
From a young age, Aristotle came into contact with the sciences of biology and medicine, as he studied along his father. The Asclepiads had the custom of teaching their children anatomy from an early age.
Although information about the early years of the great philosopher’s life is scarce, biographers agree that he spent his childhood assisting his father and often visiting the palace, where he developed his first relationships with the Macedonian court.
Aristotle became an orphan at around the age of thirteen, when he lost both of his parents. At that time, his guardianship was assumed by Proxenus, a friend of his father, who lived in Atarneus in Aeolis, opposite Lesbos.
Into adulthood: Aristotle, pupil of Plato
Proxenus, who cared for Aristotle as a true father, decided to send him to Athens in 367 BCE to study under Plato. Aristotle was only 17 years old at the time and remained there until the death of his teacher in 347 BCE, for a full 20 years.
It seems that he impressed both his fellow students and Plato himself at the Academy. In antiquity, there was a humorous reputation according to which the philosopher gave Aristotle two nicknames: “the Mind” of the school and the “Reader.” It is evident that the intelligence and thirst for knowledge of the young man were remarkable.
After Plato’s death, the leadership of the Academy passed to his nephew Speusippus, although candidates for this position included both Aristotle and Xenocrates. Aristotle’s dissatisfaction with this decision seems to have been the reason he ultimately left Athens. However, it is equally likely that he was forced to leave due to the anti-Macedonian sentiment that had arisen in the city at that time. It was the period when Philip had already begun to speak of a “united Greece,” and his opponents were members of the political establishment of Athens. It was natural for a Macedonian like Aristotle, who maintained contacts with Macedonian circles, to fear for his future.
Aristotle and Xenocrates then settled in Assos, a city on the coast of Asia Minor. There, ruled Erastus and Coriscus, Platonic philosophers to whom the tyrant Hermias had ceded the city, and he himself was an old student of Plato and Aristotle.
The philosopher taught there for three years, during which he developed a close relationship with Hermias. This friendship made the tyranny of the latter fairer and milder. Thus, Aristotle, through his teaching, created a philosopher-king in line with Platonic teaching.
After Hermias’ death in 345 BCE, Aristotle settled in Lesbos with his student Theophrastus. There they researched the island’s flora and fauna. In the meantime, Aristotle married Pythias, a biologist who was either Hermias’ niece or stepdaughter, and together they had a daughter named after her mother.
In 342 BCE, Philip of Macedonia invited Aristotle to educate his son Alexander. Aristotle accepted the invitation and returned to Macedonia.
Alexander of Macedonia, pupil of Aristotle
In Macedonia, Aristotle took over the direction of the royal academy. Besides Alexander, who was then only 13 years old, the philosopher was the teacher of two other future kings, Ptolemy and Cassander. Teaching took place either in Pella, the capital of the kingdom, or in Mieza, a small village at the foot of Mount Vermio near present-day Naousa.
Aristotle taught his students history, astronomy, geography, medicine, philology, and political sciences. It seems that he tried to instill in Alexander the idea of Pan-Hellenism and directed him towards the conquest of the East. It is evident that this apprenticeship with the great philosopher shaped the character of young Alexander.
The Peripatetic School
The Platonic Academy served as the model for the organization of the Lyceum. Classes were divided into two categories: those for advanced students in the morning (“morning walk”) and classes for beginners in the afternoon (“evening walk,” “afternoon walk”). The morning teaching was purely philosophical, while the afternoon teaching focused on rhetoric.
Special mention must be made of the school’s library, which was so large and well-organized that it later became a model for the libraries of Alexandria and Pergamon. Aristotle collected maps and various instruments useful for his teaching, making the school a center for scientific research.
During these thirteen years he spent in Athens, Aristotle created the majority of his work, which is remarkable considering its volume and quality.
In Athens, he married for the second time, to a woman from Stagira named Herpyllis. Together they had a son, named Nicomachus.
This journey was interrupted in 323 BC with the death of Alexander. At that time, supporters of the anti-Macedonian party turned against Aristotle, accusing him of impiety. This forced him to seek refuge in Chalcis, in his mother’s house, before being tried. He left Theophrastus in charge of the school, not wanting to interrupt its work. He is said to have stated that he “did not want Athens to make a second mistake against a philosopher,” thus leaving hints about Socrates’ death.
Aristotle died, probably in October of 322 BC, in Chalcis, and his burial was conducted in Stagira with great honors. The respect shown by his fellow citizens to the philosopher was significant: they gave him the title of “founder” of the city and built an altar at his tomb. This site was also designated as the place for council meetings. They also established a festival in his honor, called the “Aristoteleia,” and named one of the months “Aristoteleios.”
Aristotle’s works
Aristotle was extremely prolific, and while many of his works have been handed down to us, it is speculated that they represent only a small percentage of the actual extent of his literary production.
The Alexandrians believed that Aristotle wrote about 400 works. Much of his lost work belonged to the category of public or “exoteric” lectures and took the form of dialogues. In contrast, his surviving works are written in continuous prose, as they were the notes used by the philosopher in his teaching. These are called “esoteric” or “internal.”
Typically, Aristotle’s works are classified into eight categories:
- Logical Works (Organon),
- Natural Philosophy and Metaphysics,
- Biological Works,
- Psychology or Minor Natural Works,
- Ethics,
- Politics,
- Technical Works (Rhetoric and Poetics).
Just from the titles, it is apparent that Aristotle, the “all-knowing,” as he has been called, did not limit himself to one science but attempted to explore both human beings, internally and externally, and the world more broadly. He was fascinated by every field of knowledge and zealously sought to analyze and explain it.
Some of his most famous works include the Nicomachean Ethics, Politics, Poetics (which gave us the famous definition of tragedy), and Metaphysics.
Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics
Published in 349 BC, the Nicomachean Ethics consist of ten books (compiled into three volumes by KAKTOS Publications) based on Aristotle’s lecture notes at the Lyceum. The central question is how a person achieves eudaimonia, or happiness, in life.
For Aristotle, virtue is the highest good and is distinguished into two types: intellectual and moral. Intellectual virtue is acquired through teaching and requires time and effort, while moral virtue arises from habit, or “ethos.”
The work also includes the classification of moral virtues, with Aristotle proposing twelve virtues, which should be based on a “mean” between deficiency and excess. For example, the mean between deficiency and excess of courage is true courage.
Aristotle’s aim was to provide practical guidance for achieving eudaimonia and happiness in life, creating genuinely virtuous individuals.
Aristotle’s Metaphysics
The treatise is divided into 14 books, distinguished by Greek capital letters from Alpha to Nu. The condition in which the work reached us was not good. The title seems to have been added later, perhaps by Andronicus of Rhodes (1st century BCE), who first classified and published the treatise. Aristotle himself probably referred to it simply as “First Philosophy.”
These books had an oral character. According to Plutarch, Alexander the Great was their most important listener.
Metaphysics is the first scientific inquiry into the subject of causality. Aristotle attempted to provide a scientific explanation for the principles and causes that govern the existence of every being. He recognized four causes: material, efficient, formal, and final.
The philosopher argues that these causes are necessary for the production of any result, and nothing can happen without all four. The material cause concerns the medium from which something was caused, the matter. The efficient cause refers to what caused something by acting, to the beginning of the motion. The formal cause could also be called morphic, as it relates to what happened, what characteristics it has, what kind of thing was caused. The final cause pertains to the purpose, the “end” for which something was done.
Thus, we arrive at Hylomorphism, a theory in which every natural body is governed by two basic inherent principles or states. These are the “potential state,” that is, the shapeless matter of the body that is passive, and the “actual state,” that is, the “form” that shapes the matter and gives rise to the being. For Aristotle, matter and form are therefore inseparably united.
With his ontological theory, Aristotle provides a substantial critique of Plato’s Theory of Ideas. His metaphysics turns against unified systems such as Plato’s dialectical idealism, which reduces philosophy to mathematics, or Democritus’ materialism, which reduces it to physics. Ultimately, his cosmology constitutes a synthesis of empirical science with ontology and epistemology.
Aristotle’s philosophy
Η φιλοσοφία του Αριστοτέλη είναι δύσκολο να συνοψιστεί σε λίγες μόνο παραγράφους. Ήδη αναφέρθηκαν κάποιες από τις απόψεις του για την ηθική, την αρετή και την ύπαρξη.
Political philosophy according to Aristotle
Regarding justice, Aristotle classifies it into three types: distributive, corrective, and justice of reciprocity. In each case, justice is defined as a good that does not aim at the happiness of the one who exercises it, but of the one towards whom it is exercised.
According to Aristotle, the law is often indefinite, as the legislator cannot foresee every possible case. Therefore, leniency is necessary to cover the gap, the absence of the law. Here, at an initial stage, we see the difference between the spirit and the letter of the law, which was developed almost twenty centuries later by Montesquieu.
The natural philosophy of Aristotle
Moving on to Aristotle’s natural philosophy, the philosopher seems to have believed that the world has the shape of a sphere with the Earth at its center and is uniform and eternal.
He also formulated the theory of the existence of the fifth element of nature, the quintessence. The Ionian philosophers considered that the four elements existing in nature are earth, water, fire, and air. The fifth, according to Aristotle, is called ether and is an element that is ungenerated, imperishable, incorruptible, and immutable. It is located in the “upper place” where the Divinity resides.
Science and literature according to Aristotle
Aristotle divides the art of poetry into three categories: a) stichomythia, which includes comedy, tragedy, and satirical drama, b) lyric poetry, and c) epic poetry. He argues that all these genres imitate real life, as art is imitation, but they differ in rhythm, the goodness of characters, and the way the narrative is presented.
In the same work, Aristotle describes and analyzes the parts of tragedy according to who and how much, making it one of the most important reference texts for this art in antiquity.
Aristotelianism: the Influence of Aristotle on World Philosophy
Aristotle is commonly acknowledged as one of the intellectuals who exerted the greatest influence on world history through their work. He delved into nearly all fields of human knowledge in his time and was the founder of many scientific disciplines. Therefore, it is reasonable, whether speaking of schools or individual scholars, for interest in his teachings to remain undiminished even today.
The term Aristotelianism thus encapsulates the philosophical tradition based on Aristotle’s works. It is characterized by the use of logic and inductive reasoning in the study of natural and metaphysical philosophy. Aristotelians approach and investigate the social sciences through the lens of natural law. Special emphasis is placed on cause, purpose (teleological nature), and moral virtues.
Peripatetic School
The first followers of Aristotle were members of the Peripatetic school, which he himself founded. Notable figures who attended this school included Theophrastus and Strato of Lampsacus. By the mid-3rd century BCE, the school declined, and during the Roman era, its focus shifted to preserving and defending Aristotle’s work.
With the rise of Neoplatonism, Peripatetic philosophy suffered another blow, which essentially eradicated it as a distinct school. Neoplatonists, however, attempted to incorporate and assimilate elements of Aristotle’s teachings into their own system and produced many commentaries.
Late Antiquity and the Byzantine Empire
Until the 5th century AD, Christian theology was minimally and only indirectly influenced by Aristotle. However, Aristotelian logic proved necessary for the disciplined education of theologians. Additionally, some of the philosopher’s theories developed in his works Physics and Metaphysics became equally necessary for formulating certain points of doctrine.
Thus, through both philosophical schools and specifically through the first Greek scholasticism of Saint John of Damascus in the 8th century, Aristotelianism became part of the current.
In the 9th century, with the Byzantine scientific revival, interest in Aristotle was revived. Old books were rediscovered, translated, edited, and commented on. In this effort, we owe a great deal to the preservation of so many works of the philosopher, even today.
Significant and prominent figures who worked on these texts and preserved them included Patriarch Photios of Constantinople, Michael Psellos, and his student John Italos.
Syria and the Islamic World
During the Abbasid Caliphate, the Muslim world emerged as one of the most important centers for the study of science, philosophy, medicine, and education. In Baghdad, they established the House of Wisdom, a library where people of all religions participated in recording all existing knowledge in Arabic.
At that time, Syrian scholars had already translated most of Aristotle’s works. They then proceeded to translate them into Arabic, either from Syriac or directly from Greek. This collection at the House of Wisdom, combined with the commentaries of Greeks, laid the foundations for Islamic Aristotelianism.
Al-Kindi (9th century) was the first Muslim Peripatetic philosopher, known for his efforts to introduce Greek philosophy to the Arab world. He managed to incorporate Aristotelian and Neoplatonic teachings into Islamic philosophical thought, thus introducing Muslim intellectuals to Greek philosophy.
Another important philosopher was Al-Farabi, whose influence on science and philosophy was immense and lasted for centuries. He was called “the Second Teacher,” and his knowledge was considered comparable only to that of Aristotle.
However, the most significant scholars who managed to make Aristotelian thought part of Arabic culture were Avicenna and Averroes.
In particular, Averroes, a philosopher from Cordoba and Seville, believed that Aristotle was the model given to us by nature to demonstrate the perfection of humanity. For him, Aristotelian philosophy was the Truth. Averroes analyzed and reworked Aristotle’s works, enriching them with information from earlier Greek and Arab philosophers. He rarely imposed his own views on these texts without finding support in them.
Averroes distinguished himself among Aristotle’s commentators, often writing two or three different commentaries on the same work. In total, we have 38 works from him.
Middle Ages
Aquinas referred to Aristotle as “the Philosopher.” He is credited with blending Aristotelian thought with Christianity, bringing ancient Greek philosophy into the Middle Ages.
Unfortunately, non-Christian Aristotelian and Arabic philosophy initially met with suspicion and later hostility from ecclesiastical circles. In the 13th century, the authorities in Paris banned the teaching of Aristotle’s physics, metaphysics, and psychology, as well as the works of his commentators. While this ban slowed down some studies, it also piqued the interest and curiosity of many, ultimately having the opposite effect of what was intended.
Modern Days
In the 18th and 19th centuries, many significant figures were influenced by Aristotle’s philosophy. For example, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who is said to have based his entire political philosophy on Aristotle, and Charles Darwin, who referred to the Stagirite as the greatest contributor to biology. This belief is affirmed through Darwin’s work “On the Origin of Species,” where he utilized evolutionary theories first articulated by Empedocles and Aristotle.
Finally, James Joyce considered Aristotle one of the greatest thinkers of all time, and even Karl Marx seems to have been impressed and inspired by his works.
