Classical Greece

Aristotle

The Philosopher

Lifespan · 384 – 322 BCE

A brief orientation

Aristotle was born in Stagira, in the kingdom of Macedon, in 384 BCE. He arrived in Athens as a young man to study at Plato's Academy and remained there for roughly two decades, until Plato's death. He later spent time in Asia Minor and Lesbos, served for a period as a tutor in the Macedonian court — including, by tradition, to the young Alexander — and around 335 BCE founded his own school in Athens, the Lyceum. He left the city in 322 BCE amid the anti-Macedonian climate that followed Alexander's death, and died later the same year.

The works that survive are not the polished dialogues Aristotle is known to have written for a wider audience but the lecture-style treatises associated with the Lyceum: the Nicomachean Ethics, the Politics, the Metaphysics, the Physics, the De Anima, the Organon, the Rhetoric, the Poetics, and a substantial body of work on natural history. Their survival owes a great deal to the editorial reconstruction associated with Andronicus of Rhodes in the first century BCE. The standard reference is Immanuel Bekker's 1831 Berlin edition; passages are cited by the Bekker numbers (e.g. NE 1103a) which appear in every serious edition.

Why he matters for Virtue & Power

Aristotle gives us the working vocabulary for much of what the platform studies. The Nicomachean Ethics is the foundational treatment of virtue (aretē), practical wisdom (phronēsis) and the human good (eudaimonia); the Politics is the foundational treatment of the regime types, the citizen, and the relation between the character of a people and the constitution that fits them. He also bequeaths the form of analytic writing — argument by definition and distinction — that the Western philosophical tradition has used ever since.

Reception

The Aristotelian corpus had an extraordinarily long afterlife. It passed through the Greek commentators of late antiquity, was preserved and elaborated in the medieval Islamic world (especially through Al-Farabi, Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd), and re-entered the Latin West through translation in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, where it shaped the work of Thomas Aquinas and the scholastic tradition. The twentieth-century revival of virtue ethics has returned to him again. The standard editions and reference works for reading Aristotle today are listed on our Sources page.

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