It is hard to think of a man who can surpass Aristotle’s achievements in the history and development of western thought. Within the tempest in a teacup that was the famous “quarrel between the ancients and the moderns” even those who sided with the moderns acknowledged the genius of Aristotle; for those achievements are both stunning and unrivalled. They represent the very foundation of much of Western civilization.

Plato called him “the brain,” Aquinas “the Philosopher,” but Aristotle was much more than a mere philosopher. He was a scientist, astronomer, political theorist and the inventor of what is now called symbolic or formal logic. He wrote extensively on biology, psychology, ethics, physics, metaphysics and politics and set the terms of debate in all these areas right up to modern times. Indeed, his writings on justice are still required reading for undergraduates reading Law.

Of the substantial and highly influential corpus that has come down to us, there are three works which are the most widely acclaimed: 1) The Nicomachean Ethics which even today remains one of the most important and influential works on ethics ever written. They contain a discussion on virtue and its relationship to well being and happiness. It reveals a clear understanding of human nature and psychology. 2) Politics where Aristotle discusses the ideal-city state and classifies the merits and demerits of various types of government. 3) Physics where topics such as matter, form, causation, space, time and motion are discussed. This book is also interesting for its discussion of the nature of explanation; for indeed in philosophy, what can easily and superficially be explained can just as easily be ignored and rejected out of hand.

After Aristotle’s death his works were lost for some 200 years or so, but fortunately they were rediscovered in Crete by people who appreciated the vast knowledge and wisdom of classical Greece. Today we have those “barbarians of the intellect” that would burn the classics which they consider passé. That is why, in my opinion,  they are sad and philistine times. Be that as it may, Aristotle was then translated by Boethius around 500 AD. This insured that Aristotle’s influence spread throughout Syria and Islam while Christian Europe ignored him for a while in favor of Plato and Augustine’s Platonism with which it felt it had more affinity. It was not until Thomas Aquinas reconciled Aristotle’s work with Christian doctrine in the 13th century that he became influential in Western Europe too.

Aristotle was a Macedonian ethnically but a Greek in every other respect. He completely absorbed the best of Greek of culture. He received his education from age seventeen in Plato’s Academy where he remained as a sort of scholar in residence for some twenty years till Plato’s death. He later founded his own institution called the Lyceum where he would expound a philosophy altogether different both in method and content from that of his former teacher. Later he left Athens and went back to his native Macedonia where he instructed Alexander the Great. As he put it: “lets we give an opportunity to Athens to sin twice against philosophy.”

More than any other philosopher before him, Aristotle made much of observation and strict classification of data in his studies. It is for this reason that he is considered the grandfather of empirical science and scientific method. Unlike his predecessor, Plato, Aristotle always undertook his investigations by considering the regarded opinions of both experts and lay people before detailing his own arguments, assuming that some grain of truth is likely to be found in commonly held ideas. His method was rigorous and without the proselytizing tone of his predecessors.

For example, in contradistinction to both Plato and the presocratics, Aristotle rejected the idea that the many diverse branches of human inquiry could, in principle, be subsumed under one discipline based on some universal philosophic principle. Different sciences require different axioms and admit of varying degrees of precision according to their subject matter. Thus Aristotle denied that there could be exact laws of human nature, whilst at the same time maintaining that certain metaphysical categories (such as quantity, quality, substance and relation) were applicable to the description of all phenomena. Like most ancient Greeks he was skeptical of history being able to reach universal truth since it dealt with the particulars of the human enterprise which are hard to measure exactly.

If one were to mention one common thread in much of Aristotle’s work it would have to be his conception of teleology or purpose. Probably because of his preoccupation with biological studies, Aristotle was greatly impressed by the idea that both animate and inanimate behavior seems to be directed toward some final purpose (“telos” in Greek) or goal. It is common to explain the behavior of people, institutions and nations in terms of purposes and goals. Likewise modern evolutionary biology makes use of purposive explanation to account for the behavior of, for instance, genes and genetic imperatives.

Aristotle however, thought that the concept of purpose could be invoked to explain the behavior of everything in the universe. His reasoning lay in the idea that everything has a natural function and strives towards fulfilling or exhibiting that function which is its best and most natural state. It is by means of his concept of function that Aristotle then ties his ethics to his physics, claiming that the natural function of Man is to reason, and to reason well is to reason in accordance with virtue. Unlike the opposing ethical theories of Kant and Mill, both of which view actions as the subject of ethical judgments, Aristotle’s ethics focuses on the character of the agent as that which is morally good or morally bad. In the late 20th century this so called “virtue ethics” was successfully revived by Alistair Macintyre.

It has been said that if truth be told we, in our hubris, are mere dwarfs sitting on the shoulders of giants, and that allows us to see much further than we would otherwise see. One of those undisputed giants is Aristotle. As long as there exists  an authentic and vibrant cultural world within Western Civilization, Aristotle will be integral part of it. In fact were Aristotle to disappear, that would be a clear sign that we would be back in the dark ages, in Plato’s dark cave.

The information for this piece on Aristotle was largely transcribed from Philip Stokes’ encyclopedia on The Great Thinkers where the author prefaces his 100 entries with this statement: ‘As far as I am concerned everyone is welcome to read it and use it if it’s helpful.