- Despite a paucity of contemporary information about Aristotle’s life and affairs, our ancient sources are only too happy to supply missing details and additional colour, much of it centred on his relationship with his teacher, Plato. Aristotle left Athens at around the time of Plato’s death, for Assos, on the northwest coast of present-day Turkey, where he carried on his philosophical activity, augmented by intensive marine biological research. He returned to Athens for his second and final stay in 335. Once there, Aristotle established his own school in the Lyceum. This second period of residency in Athens was an astonishingly productive one for Aristotle. His works range widely across an astonishing number of fields, from aesthetic theory and argumentation theory to epistemology, ethics, logic, metaphysics, music, medicine, meteorology, pedagogy, philosophy of science, theology, and zoology. All these areas Aristotle pursued with genuine, unselfconscious zeal, under a general rubric of his own invention.
- IF restricted in its appeal to widely attested facts only, Aristotle’s biography would be pleasingly brief: he was born in Stagira, in Macedon, in 384 BC; at some point as a young man he came to Athens and associated himself with Plato’s Academy; around the time that Plato died in 347 BC, he left Athens for Assos, in Asia Minor, settling there for three years, followed by another two in nearby Lesbos; he returned to Macedon in 343 BC, perhaps at the behest of Philip, the father of Alexander the Great; thereafter he returned to Athens in 335 BC to head his own school, the Lyceum; and finally he left Athens for a second time in 323 BC, upon the death of Alexander, a year or so before his death, which befell him of natural causes in Chalcis in 322 BC at the age of 62. Beyond that, speculation creeps in, some grounded and plausible, some flighty and fanciful. Indeed, even prior to the onset of speculation, what is ‘widely attested’ is not universally affirmed: several of the contentions even in this skeletal summary are strenuously denied by credible sources.
- Aristotle’s philosophical life began in Athens, when he came to be associated with Plato’s Academy. In all likelihood, he went to Athens as a young man of about 18 in 367 BC, having been raised in Macedon, in what is now northeastern Greece. He was born to Nicomachus, a physician in the court of King Amyntas II, and Phaistis, a woman with family origins in Euboia, an island in the Aegean Sea, where Aristotle’s own life was to end in 332. Because his parents died when he was still a boy, Aristotle was raised by a family relation, perhaps his uncle, Proxenus, who came from Atarneus, near Assos, the town to which Aristotle travelled after the death of Plato. Not much is known of Aristotle’s childhood, though two features of his birth likely proved consequential. First, his lifelong interest in biology presumably found its formative influences in the practices of the medical guild to which his father belonged, the Asclepiadae, who carried out detailed anatomical inquiries, including dissections, and who reportedly trained their sons in these same practices.
- Aristotle’s relationship to Plato during this period and beyond is at least obliquely on display in some of these writings. Sometimes Aristotle describes himself as a member of Plato’s circle, even when criticizing Plato’s views; other times, in equally critical veins, he disassociates himself from Plato and his teachings, (p. 6) writing as if from an opposing camp. Aristotle’s life. Perhaps, though, Aristotle simply maintained a deep respect for the teachings of Plato and other Academicians even while seeking to undermine them. Indeed, that he regards Plato’s views as worthy of discussion already reflects some indication of his attitude towards their worth. Aristotle evinces both genuine affection and critical distance, presumably because he reveres and respects Plato, even while concluding that one of his signature theses is unsustainable. We do not, then, need to regard Aristotle as ‘the foal who kicked its mother,’ an ingrate too ill mannered and truculent to revere his magnanimous teacher.10 It is true that he can be at times rather caustic, as once when he mocks Plato’s theory of Forms,11 but in the main his time in the Academy left him honouring Plato as ‘a man whom the wicked have no place to praise: he alone, unsurpassed among mortals, has shown clearly by his own life and by the pursuits of his writings that a man becomes happy and good simultaneously.’
The period of Aristotle’s life following his time in Asia Minor has been a source of rich speculation for historians, though, again, we have little determinate or reliable data upon which we may rely. Aristotle was called or invited by Philip, king (p. 7) of Macedon, in 342, to return to Pella, the seat of Macedonian power where he had presumably visited as a boy. Almost all historians accept that during this period Aristotle offered tuition to Philip’s son Alexander, later the Great. There was a private school at Mieza, the royal estate near Pella, and Aristotle might well have taught Alexander there. The tuition began when Alexander was 13, and probably lasted only two or three years. It is possible that it carried on for a longer period, though this seems unlikely since Alexander was already serving as a deputy military commander for his father by the age of 15. Aristotle did, however, remain in Macedon for another five or so years, perhaps back in Stagira, the city of his birth, until the death of Philip by assassination in 336. During his second sojourn in Athens, Aristotle’s wife Pythias died, and he formed a new relationship, whether into formal marriage or not remains unclear, with Herpyllis, who was also a native of Stagira. They had a child, Nicomachus, after whom his Nicomachean Ethics is named. Aristotle withdrew to Chalcis on the island of Euboia, in 323, likely because of a resurgence of anti-Macedonian feeling in Athens, always present in an undercurrent there and flooding forth after the death of Alexander the Great. Aristotle’s real and perceived associations with Macedon would have made life in Athens just then unpleasant if not precarious for him.
- A year after his departure from Athens, Aristotle died in Chalcis on the island of Euboia, presumably of natural causes. That presumption notwithstanding, a charming aetiology of Aristotle’s death helps bring into sharp relief the credibility of many of the sources relied upon in constructing even this minimal biography. According to a story preferred by the Church Fathers,16 Aristotle died in a revealing sort of way: maniacally devoted to the pursuit of explaining natural phenomena (p. 8) and deeply frustrated by his inability to explain the tidal currents he observed in the straight of Euripus, the channel separating Euboia from mainland Greece, he grew morose and moribund. Aristotle died of terminal curiosity.
- Stories such as this capture something authentically Aristotelian: his writings are broadly cast, arrestingly deep, and coursing with curiosity. The works we possess today range widely across an astonishing number of fields, including aesthetic theory, argumentation theory, astronomy, botany, biology, category theory, cosmology, epistemology, ethics, government, history of thought, literary theory, logic, mathematics, metaphysics, music, medicine, meteorology, pedagogy, philosophy of science, political theory, psychology, physics, rhetoric, semantic theory, political history, theology, and zoology. All these areas Aristotle pursued with genuine, unselfconscious zeal, under a general rubric of his own invention. He distinguishes three broad categories of inquiry. The first class is theoretical, comprising disciplines pursuing knowledge for its own sake; the second is practical, including ethics, politics, and all study concerned with conduct and goodness in action, whether individual or societal; and the third is productive, covering those sciences and crafts which aim at the creation of beautiful or useful objects, broadly conceived so as to include drama and dance (on Aristotle’s characterisations of the sciences, see Top. 145a15–16; Phys. 192b8–12; DC 298a27–32, DA 403a27–b2; Met. 1025b25, 1026a18–19, 1064a16–19, b1–3; EN 1139a26–28, 1141b29–32). With one glaring exception, Aristotle’s extant works slot reasonably well into this classificatory schema. Thus, among the theoretical works are the Metaphysics, the Physics, and De Anima; among the practical works are the Nicomachean Ethics, the Eudemian Ethics, and the Politics; and among the productive works are the Rhetoric and Poetics.
- The glaring exception is the family of works which came to be known as Aristotle’s Organon, roughly the tools for study rather than the objects of study (organon = tool, in Greek): logic, dialectic, argument theory, philosophy of science, and the doctrines of propositions and terms. These include The Categories, De Interpretatione, Prior and Posterior Analytics, Topics, and Sophistical Refutations. The relation of these works to the rest of Aristotle’s writings gave rise to a series of lively controversies in later Aristotelianism, though Aristotle himself shows no reflexive awareness of the wellsprings of these controversies. Instead, he simply treats the subjects pursued in his Organan as matters worthy of concern in their own right and then puts his tools to work in his practical, productive, and theoretical sciences.
