Aristotle

Aristotle was an ancient Greek philosopher and polymath whose surviving works range across logic, metaphysics, ethics, politics, rhetoric, biology, and poetics. Born in Stagira in northern Greece in 384 BC to Nicomachus, a physician at the Macedonian court, he traveled to Athens around age seventeen and entered Plato's Academy, where he studied and taught for nearly twenty years.

After Plato's death in 347 BC he left Athens, traveled to Assos and Lesbos, and conducted some of the earliest systematic biological research in the lagoons of the eastern Aegean. Around 343 BC King Philip II of Macedon invited him to tutor the young Alexander, the future Alexander the Great, at Mieza. He returned to Athens in 335 BC and founded his own school, the Lyceum, where his followers became known as the Peripatetics.

His extant treatises were probably lecture notes preserved by students and editors. The logical works gathered as the Organon, including the Prior Analytics and the Categories, founded formal logic. The Nicomachean Ethics developed an account of virtue, practical wisdom, and human flourishing, while the Politics analyzed forms of government. The Physics, Metaphysics, and De Anima shaped European and Islamic philosophy for two millennia, and the Poetics remained a central reference for literary theory.

After Alexander's death in 323 BC, anti-Macedonian sentiment in Athens led to charges of impiety against Aristotle. He withdrew to Chalcis on the island of Euboea, where he died in 322 BC.

The name Aristotle comes from the Greek Aristoteles, formed from elements meaning best and purpose. He carried it through a body of work foundational to Western philosophy and science.