Ancient Philosophy · Part 15 · Athens · B2
Aristotle I: Logic and Living Things
Part 15 of Ancient Philosophy: Plato’s greatest pupil invented formal logic and founded biology. He dissected animals, classified hundreds of species, and made discoveries that nobody believed for two thousand years, as well as mistakes that nobody questioned for just as long. Classifying (is a kind of, belongs to, is divided into, is classified as), with Philo, Sophia, Marcos and Demetria.
Tonight, the man later scholars will simply call “the Philosopher”: Aristotle.
Plato’s pupil, who disagreed with him about almost everything.
Everything: logic, animals, stars, poetry, politics, the soul. Tonight, the first two: how to reason, and how to look at a living thing.
Aristotle was born in 384 BCE in Stagira, in northern Greece; his father was a doctor at the Macedonian court. At seventeen he went to Athens and studied in Plato’s Academy for twenty years, until Plato’s death. He then spent several years on the coasts of Asia Minor and on the island of Lesbos, studying living things, and became tutor to the young Alexander of Macedon.
In 335 BCE he returned to Athens and founded his own school, the Lyceum; his followers were called Peripatetics, perhaps because they discussed philosophy while walking. When Alexander died in 323 BCE, Aristotle left Athens, reportedly saying he would not let the Athenians sin twice against philosophy. He died the next year.
The works that survive are mostly his lecture notes, compressed and difficult. His polished dialogues, which Cicero praised as a “golden river” of style, are almost entirely lost.
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