Biography aristotile greeks

Life In general, the details of Aristotle's life are not well-established. The biographies written in ancient times are often speculative and historians only agree on a few salient points. At the age of seventeen or eighteen, Aristotle moved to Athens to continue his education at Plato's Academy. In one famous example, he counsels Alexander to be "a leader to the Greeks and a despot to the barbarians".

He often lectured small groups of distinguished students and, along with some of them, such as Theophrastus , Eudemus , and Aristoxenus , Aristotle built a large library which included manuscripts, maps, and museum objects.

Biography aristotile greeks

They had a son whom Aristotle named after his father, Nicomachus. Those works that have survived are in treatise form and were not, for the most part, intended for widespread publication; they are generally thought to be lecture aids for his students. The Roman philosopher Cicero said that "If Plato's prose was silver, Aristotle's was a flowing river of gold.

He spent five years on the coast of Asia Minor as a guest of former students at Assos and Lesbos. It was here that he undertook his pioneering research into marine biology and married his wife Pythias, with whom he had his only daughter, also named Pythias. Aristotle's Works It was at the Lyceum that Aristotle probably composed most of his approximately works, of which only 31 survive.

In style, his known works are dense and almost jumbled, suggesting that they were lecture notes for internal use at his school. But if it is not possible to know the primary things, then neither can we know without qualification or in any proper way the things derived from them. Rather, we can know them instead only on the basis of a hypothesis, to wit, if the primary things obtain, then so too do the things derived from them.

The other group agrees that knowledge results only from demonstration, but believes that nothing stands in the way of demonstration, since they admit circular and reciprocal demonstration as possible. Indeed, the necessity here is apparent; for if it is necessary to know the prior things, that is, those things from which the demonstration is derived, and if eventually the regress comes to a standstill, it is necessary that these immediate premises be indemonstrable.

In Posterior Analytics ii 19, he describes the process by which knowers move from perception to memory, and from memory to experience empeiria —which is a fairly technical term in this connection, reflecting the point at which a single universal comes to take root in the mind—and finally from experience to a grasp of first principles.

This final intellectual state Aristotle characterizes as a kind of unmediated intellectual apprehension nous of first principles APo. Scholars have understandably queried what seems a casually asserted passage from the contingent, given in sense experience, to the necessary, as required for the first principles of science. Perhaps, however, Aristotle simply envisages a kind of a posteriori necessity for the sciences, including the natural sciences.

In any event, he thinks that we can and do have knowledge, so that somehow we begin in sense perception and build up to an understanding of the necessary and invariant features of the world. As he recognizes, we often find ourselves reasoning from premises which have the status of endoxa, opinions widely believed or endorsed by the wise, even though they are not known to be necessary.

Still less often do we reason having first secured the first principles of our domain of inquiry. This method he characterizes as dialectic. In fact, in his work dedicated to dialectic, the Topics, he identifies three roles for dialectic in intellectual inquiry, the first of which is mainly preparatory: Dialectic is useful for three purposes: for training, for conversational exchange, and for sciences of a philosophical sort.

That it is useful for training purposes is directly evident on the basis of these considerations: once we have a direction for our inquiry we will more readily be able to engage a subject proposed to us. It is useful for conversational exchange because once we have enumerated the beliefs of the many, we shall engage them not on the basis of the convictions of others but on the basis of their own; and we shall re-orient them whenever they appear to have said something incorrect to us.

It is useful for philosophical sorts of sciences because when we are able to run through the puzzles on both sides of an issue we more readily perceive what is true and what is false. Further, it is useful for uncovering what is primary among the commitments of a science. For it is impossible to say anything regarding the first principles of a science on the basis of the first principles proper to the very science under discussion, since among all the commitments of a science, the first principles are the primary ones.

This comes rather, necessarily, from discussion of the credible beliefs endoxa belonging to the science. This is peculiar to dialectic, or is at least most proper to it. For since it is what cross-examines, dialectic contains the way to the first principles of all inquiries. By contrast, the third is philosophically significant. In these contexts, dialectic helps to sort the endoxa, relegating some to a disputed status while elevating others; it submits endoxa to cross-examination in order to test their staying power; and, most notably, according to Aristotle, dialectic puts us on the road to first principles Top.

If that is so, then dialectic plays a significant role in the order of philosophical discovery: we come to establish first principles in part by determining which among our initial endoxa withstand sustained scrutiny. Here, as elsewhere in his philosophy, Aristotle evinces a noteworthy confidence in the powers of human reason and investigation.

Essentialism and Homonymy However we arrive at secure principles in philosophy and science, whether by some process leading to a rational grasping of necessary truths, or by sustained dialectical investigation operating over judiciously selected endoxa, it does turn out, according to Aristotle, that we can uncover and come to know genuinely necessary features of reality.

He relies upon a host of loosely related locutions when discussing the essences of things, and these give some clue to his general orientation. In speaking this way, Aristotle supposes that if we wish to know what a human being is, we cannot identify transient or non-universal features of that kind; nor indeed can we identify even universal features which do not run explanatorily deep.

Rather, as his preferred locution indicates, he is interested in what makes a human being human—and he assumes, first, that there is some feature F which all and only humans have in common and, second, that F explains the other features which we find across the range of humans. Aristotle rejects this approach for several reasons, including most notably that he thinks that certain non-essential features satisfy the definition.

Thus, beyond the categorical and logical features everyone is such as to be either identical or not identical with the number nine , Aristotle recognizes a category of properties which he calls idia Cat. Propria are non-essential properties which flow from the essence of a kind, such that they are necessary to that kind even without being essential.

For instance, if we suppose that being rational is essential to human beings, then it will follow that every human being is capable of grammar. Being capable of grammar is not the same property as being rational, though it follows from it. Aristotle assumes his readers will appreciate that being rational asymmetrically explains being capable of grammar, even though, necessarily, something is rational if and only if it is also capable of grammar.

Thus, because it is explanatorily prior, being rational has a better claim to being the essence of human beings than does being capable of grammar. Accordingly, this is the feature to be captured in an essence-specifying account of human beings APo 75a42—b2; Met. Aristotle believes for a broad range of cases that kinds have essences discoverable by diligent research.

He in fact does not devote much energy to arguing for this contention; still less is he inclined to expend energy combating anti-realist challenges to essentialism, perhaps in part because he is impressed by the deep regularities he finds, or thinks he finds, underwriting his results in biological investigation. On the contrary, he denies essentialism in many cases where others are prepared to embrace it.

One finds this sort of denial prominently, though not exclusively, in his criticism of Plato. Indeed, it becomes a signature criticism of Plato and Platonists for Aristotle that many of their preferred examples of sameness and invariance in the world are actually cases of multivocity, or homonymy in his technical terminology. In the opening of the Categories, Aristotle distinguishes between synonymy and homonymy later called univocity and multivocity.

All these locutions have a quasi-technical status for him. In cases of univocity, we expect single, non-disjunctive definitions which capture and state the essence of the kinds in question. Let us allow once more for purposes of illustration that the essence-specifying definition of human is rational animal. Then, since human means rational animal across the range of its applications, there is some single essence to all members of the kind.

By contrast, when synonymy fails we have homonymy. Very regularly, according to Aristotle, this sort of reflection leads to an interesting discovery, namely that we have been presuming a univocal account where in fact none is forthcoming. This, according to Aristotle, is where the Platonists go wrong: they presume univocity where the world delivers homonymy or multivocity.

In one especially important example, Aristotle parts company with Plato over the univocity of goodness: We had perhaps better consider the universal good and run through the puzzles concerning what is meant by it—even though this sort of investigation is unwelcome to us, because those who introduced the Forms are friends of ours. Yet presumably it would be the better course to destroy even what is close to us, as something necessary for preserving the truth—and all the more so, given that we are philosophers.

For though we love them both, piety bids us to honour the truth before our friends. Theophrastus c. When Theophrastus died Aristotle's works were hidden away and not brought to light again until the beginning of the first century B. They were then taken to Rome and edited by Andronicus first century B. The texts that survive today come from Andronicus's revisions and probably do not represent works that Aristotle himself prepared for publication.

From the time of his death until the rediscovery of these writings, Aristotle was best known for the works that today are known as the lost writings. Philosophical and scientific systems The writings that did survive, however, are sufficient to show the quality of Aristotle's achievement. The Topics and the Analytics deal with logic the study of reasoning and dialectic a method of argument and reveal Aristotle's contributions to the development of debate.

His view of nature is set forth in the Physics and the Metaphysics, which mark the most serious difference between Aristotelianism and Platonism: that all investigation must begin with what the senses record and must move only from that point to thought. As a result of this process of intellectualizing, God, who for Plato represents beauty and goodness, is for Aristotle the highest form of being and is completely lacking in materiality.

Aristotle's God neither created nor controls the universe, although the universe is affected by this God. Man is the only creature capable of thought even remotely resembling that of God, so man's highest goal is to reason abstractly, like God, and he is more truly human to the extent that he achieves that goal. Aristotle's work was often misunderstood in later times.

The scientific and philosophical systems set forth in his writings are not conclusions that must be taken as the final answer, but rather experimental positions arrived at through careful observation and analysis. During the slow intellectual climate of the Roman Empire, which ruled over much of Europe for hundreds of years after Aristotle died, and the totally unscientific Christian Middle Ages — , Aristotle's views on nature and science were taken as a complete system.