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Aristotle

Aristotle

Aristotle, son of a physician, was born in Stagira and sent as a teenager to seek an education in Athens. There he studied under Plato, and, after twenty years at the school of Academe, by way of a spell as tutor to the future Alexander the Great, he returned to Athens to found his own school of philosophy at the Lyceum, whose colonnades, the 'peripatos' gave Aristotle's followers their name of the 'Peripatetics'.

Although deeply influenced by Plato, Aristotle is far from uncritical. He abandons his mentors' concept that absolute truth is 'out there' in the shape of 'The Forms of Reality' in favour of a much more down-to-earth approach to understanding based on observation more than on reasoning. This empirical rather than idealist approach runs through all his huge output of works on logic, politics, biology, physics, medicine, and, here in one of his most famous works, the Ethics.

There is little of Plato's precise step-by-step reasoning here, but rather an attempt at precise observation of the human condition with the entirely practical hope of making that condition better. Aristotle's approach is clear and it is straightforward. He does not so much open the world up to investigation as say 'this is the way things are'. No wonder the medieval church took Aristotle to their hearts as The philosopher, the fount and the measure of all knowledge about the universe for the first thousand years of the Christian West. No wonder, equally, that Francis Bacon, that founder of modern science, called him both 'negligent' and a 'dictator'.

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