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Aristotle
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| Aristotle (384–322 BC) |
"Not really," replied the thinker, "I did not mind one word you said."
Contents
Supporting "well medleys" are presupposed
throughout:Aristotle Biography
Aristotle was together with Plato the most influential philosopher of the western tradition.Aristotle was born at Stagira in Macedonia on the northwest coast of the Aegean Sea, as the son of Nicomachus, the court physician to the king of Macedonia and grandfather of Alexander the Great. When Aristotle was seventeen he entered Plato's academy in Athens, and remained there until Plato's death. Aristotle then accepted the invitation of Hermias to live at Assos.
When Hermias died in 345, Aristotle married his niece, Pythias. Aristotle was himself 37 at this time - and he taught in the Politics that the ideal ages for marriage was 37 for the husband and 18 for the wife . . . Pythias bore him a daugher, and did not live long. After she died, he lived with Herpyllis, and had a son, Nicomachus, with her. Herpyllis outlived Aristotle.
After three years at Assos, Aristotle went to Mytilene on the island of Lesbos, and focused on biology. In Aristotle's biology observations is before theory. Thus, he wrote in On the Generation of Animals:
The facts have not yet been sufficiently established. If ever they are, then credit must be given to observation rather than to theories . . .In late 343 or early 342 Philip II invited Aristotle to return to the Macedonian court. Between 343/2 and 340 he acted as the tutor to the young Alexander the Great, who gave his teacher a large sum of money to set up a school in Athens. Alexander had been instructed by Aristotle to refrain from any physical intermixture with the barbarians, i.e., non-Greeks, and that Greeks were superior. But Alexander became committed to intermarriage; he chose a wife from the Persian nobility and forced his high-ranking officers and encouraged his troops to do likewise. So he and Aristotle did not quite agree.
Aristotle withdrew and returned to his paternal property at Stagira around 339 BC. And in 335 Aristotle returned to Athens where he founded a school, the Lyceum, which was very important to him. There they dissected animals and studied the habits of insects, etc. As it is said, "the science of observation" - observing rigorously, calmly and skillfully - was something new to the Greeks. And hampered by lack of instruments, the thinkers at the Lyceum were not always correct in their conclusions. Anyway, at the Lyceum Aristotle organized and conducted research on many subjects, and built the first great library of antiquity. Aristotle sorted branches of knowledge into physics, metaphysics, psychology, rhetoric, poetics, and logic.
In later years he renounced some of Plato's theories. And he considered a man sufficiently educated if he knew the theory of medicine without having gained experience practicing it . . . When Alexander died in 325, anti-Macedonian feeling in Athens made Aristotle retire to Chalcis on the island of Euboea, to his mother's estates there. He died in 322 from a stomach illness.
His work remains a powerful current even in contemporary philosophical debate. Some of his concepts and ideas have remained embedded in Western thinking "all the time". For one thing he designed a system of logic, and pioneered the study of zoology. His writings in philosophy, ethical and political theory, metaphysics and the philosophy of science are still widely taught for various reasons.
Aristotle Works
"There is nothing as practical as a good theory," said Kurt Lewin
Aristotle, who was writing about two centuries after the death of the thinker Thales of Miletus, shows Thales as entrepreneur.People often taunted Thales, saying that all his wisdom had failed to make him rich. Thales responded by buying up all the olive presses in Miletus in a year when his knowledge of meteorology made him predict a bumper crop of olives. By charging monopolistic prices for the use of his newly acquired presses, he became extremely wealthy in one season. Having proved his point, Thales then sold all the presses again and returned to philosophy.
The Socratic Doctrine
Plato was giving a reading of Socrates' last day. The dialogue was moving and solemn. But as Plato was reading, his audience gradually melted away. In the end, Aristotle alone was left.The anecdote was probably made to signal that Aristotle was quite spellbound by the Socratic doctrine of immortality as expounded by Plato.
Extremely Philosophical Equals Practical
We will seek to remedy lack of familiarity with Aristotle. Then, as we become more philosophically oriented with or without great luck on our side, we attain to some hard-won, practical outputs aimed at bread-winning, which is a good thing.To win time for this favourable enterprise, we may choose to ignore some folks and then we hand all over to good people for the sake of humanity - but perhaps none of it is very easy to accomplish. That is our program, at any rate, derived from the small anecdotes above. - Tormod Kinnes, philosopher
Gist from On Dreams by Aristotle
We can best obtain a scientific view of the nature of the dream and the manner in which it originates by regarding it in the light of the circumstances attending sleep. [Aristotle, On Dreams 2]Some persons . . . return answers to questions put to them in sleep. [Aristotle, On Dreams 3]
It is not surprising that, as age advances, a dream should at length appear. [Aristotle, On Dreams 3]
The dream is a sort of presentation, and, more particularly, one which occurs in sleep. [Aristotle, On Dreams 3] ¤
It is plain . . . that . . . 'dreaming', is no mere exercise of opinion . . . [Aristotle, On Dreams I]
We must . . . investigate the subject of the dream. [Aristotle, On Dreams I] (5) [TTT]
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CLICK on 'Literature' for the references of about 2000 works.
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