Aristotle: Athenian Constitution

About the Author

Aristotle was born in Stagira, Chalcidice, near modern-day Thessaloníki, in 384 BCE. As a young adult, he attended the academy run by Plato in Athens, where he remained for two decades as a student and then as a teacher. After Plato's death, Aristotle traveled throughout Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey), married, and became the father of a daughter. In 343 BCE Philip II of Macedon, a kingdom in northeastern Greece, invited him to become director of an academy, where Aristotle's students included Philip's son, Alexander the Great, as well as the scientist Ptolemy. Aristotle returned to Athens in 335, where he established his own academy, the Lyceum; he founded what came to be called the Peripatetic School of philosophy, from his habit of walking about while teaching. (The word peripatetic means “wandering” or “traveling by foot,” though it is also possible that the school derived its name from the peripatoi, or covered walkways, where the students met.) Although only about a third of Aristotle's written work survives, it is believed that the bulk of his works were written during this period, from 335 to 323 BCE, much as lectures for his students and not intended for publication. Late in his life, he was charged with impiety—with not holding the gods in sufficient reverence—probably because of his association with Macedon at a time when anti-Macedonian sentiment in Athens ran high. He fled to his mother's country estate, where he died in 322 BCE.

Aristotle (along with his mentor, Plato, and Plato's mentor, Socrates) holds a firm place as one of the foundational figures in Western civilization. Virtually no discipline escaped his scholarship: aesthetics, music, morality, ethics, metaphysics, logic, rhetoric, politics, physics, anatomy, biology, zoology, optics, astronomy, geography, medicine—the list could go on and on. He virtually created the study of logic. His work laid the foundation for the modern scientific method. He provided a classification of living organisms. Among his most important treatises were Physics, Metaphysics, Nicomachean Ethics, Politics, De anima, and Poetics. All this is not to say that Aristotle was not guilty of error. Modern philosophers have argued that most of the advances in thought in the modern world began with a refutation of Aristotle. Excessive devotion to Aristotle, particularly during the European Renaissance, tended to impede the development of scientific thought. Nevertheless, any statement to the effect that Aristotle was one of the most influential people ever to have lived would probably meet with few objections, and it is only a slight exaggeration to suggest that Aristotle was the last human to have known everything there was to know at the time he lived.