Who Was Aristotle? Logic, Nature, and Virtue, Summarized

Who Aristotle was

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy dates Aristotle’s birth to 384 B.C.E., in the northeastern Greek city of Stagira, part of the Macedonian sphere at the time. He died at sixty-three in Chalcis, on the island of Euboea, in 322 B.C.E., having retired there the year before.

At seventeen, according to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Treccani gives eighteen), he moved to Athens and joined the Academy, the school founded by Plato, himself a former student of Socrates: he studied there for twenty years, and the Stanford Encyclopedia adds that he stayed connected to the school until Plato died, in 347 B.C.E., in the Athens described in the Recap on ancient Greece (the differences between the two philosophers are in the Recap on Aristotle and Plato). In 343 B.C.E., according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Aristotle moved to Pella, the Macedonian capital, at the request of King Philip, who wanted him to teach his thirteen-year-old boy, Alexander. Treccani dates the same assignment to between 343 and 342 B.C.E., while the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy sums it up simply: Philip hired Aristotle to tutor the boy who would become Alexander the Great. Back in Athens, Aristotle founded the Lyceum, his own school, between 335 and 334 B.C.E., according to Treccani.

Logic and the Organon

Ancient commentators, not Aristotle himself, grouped several of his treatises under the title Organon, “Instrument,” treating them as his complete body of work on logic, explains the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy in its entry on Aristotle’s Logic. That is where the syllogism appears: for Aristotle, an argument in which, given certain premises, something else follows by necessity.

Practical example: a syllogism can be boiled down to one pattern — if every A is B, and C is an A, then C is B, by necessity, whatever we substitute for A, B, and C. It is this logical necessity, not the particular content of the premises, that carries the whole theory.

Treccani confirms that the syllogism is the standard form of Aristotelian reasoning, and the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy credits Aristotle as the first to build a formal system of reasoning — one of the reasons he is seen as the founder of Western logic.

In later antiquity, through the work of his commentators, this logic became the dominant system and passed on to the Arabic traditions and to medieval Latin thought, reports the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy; the rival Stoic logic of Chrysippus, developed around the same time, did not survive in its original texts.

Natural philosophy

In his natural philosophy, notes the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Aristotle joins logic with observation to reach general causal claims: he does not stop at watching nature, he looks for its causes using the same tools as rigorous argument.

Aristotle’s physics, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy specifies, looks at the natural universe as a single whole and leans toward conceptual puzzles tied to nature. The same source draws a line between theoretical science, knowledge sought for its own sake, and practical science, aimed instead at action; Treccani lists the fields this inquiry covered, among them metaphysics, physics, biology, and psychology.

Ethics and Aristotle’s legacy

In his ethics, according to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Aristotle argues that becoming virtuous is the only way to reach eudaimonia. Treccani describes virtue as a settled disposition of the will to act a certain way, a thread the Nicomachean Ethics picks up in closer detail.

Aristotle’s works left a deep mark on ancient and medieval thought, according to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy; the Stanford Encyclopedia adds that they shaped centuries of philosophy from later antiquity through the Renaissance. Treccani goes further, crediting Aristotle’s thought with dominating Western culture until the seventeenth century.