Aristotle

Aristotle produced the first systematic account of almost every field of enquiry and dominated Western thought for two thousand years. Born in Stagira in 384 BC, the son of the Macedonian king's physician, he went to Athens at seventeen and spent twenty years in Plato's Academy. He left after Plato's death, worked on marine biology at Lesbos, and in 343 BC was engaged by Philip II to tutor the thirteen-year-old Alexander. He returned to Athens in 335 BC and founded the Lyceum, whose members were called Peripatetics from the covered walk where they taught. He broke with Plato on the central point. Where Plato located reality in transcendent Forms, Aristotle held that form exists only in particular things, and that knowledge begins with observation of them. He dissected animals, classified some five hundred species, described the development of chick embryos day by day, and got the octopus's reproductive arm right — an observation dismissed until the nineteenth century. He invented formal logic with the syllogism, and it stood essentially unchallenged until the 1800s. He set out the four causes, the doctrine of the mean in ethics, the definition of tragedy and catharsis in the Poetics, and in the Politics the argument that man is a political animal — alongside a defence of natural slavery and claims about women's inferiority that were used for centuries. His physics was wrong and was believed for a very long time. He left Athens in 323 BC when anti-Macedonian feeling rose, saying he would not let the city sin twice against philosophy. He died in 322 BC.

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