Aristotle


Aristotle was born in the summer of 384 BC in the small Greek township of Stagira (or Stagirus, or Stageirus), on the Chalcidic peninsula of Macedonia, in northern Greece. (For this reason Aristotle is also known as the "Stagirite.") His father, Nicomachus, was court physician to Amyntas III, king of Macedonia, father of Philip II, and grandfather of Alexander the Great. As a doctor's son, Aristotle was heir to a scientific tradition some 200 years old. The case histories contained in the Epidemics of Hippocrates, the father of Greek medicine, may have introduced him at an early age to the concepts and practices of Greek medicine and biology. As a physician, Nicomachus was a member of the guild of the Asclepiads, the so-called sons of Asclepius, the legendary founder and god of medicine.

Because medicine was a traditional occupation in certain families, being handed down from father to son, Aristotle in all likelihood learned at home the fundamentals of that practical skill he was afterward to display in his biological researches. Had he been a medical student he would have undergone a rigorous and varied training: he would have studied the role in therapy of diet, drugs, and exercise; he would have learned how to check the flow of blood, apply bandages, fit splints to broken limbs, reset dislocations, and make poultices of flour, oil, and wine. It is not known for certain that Aristotle actually acquired these skills; it is known that medicine and its history were later studied in the Lyceum, Aristotle's own institute in Athens, and that later, in a snobbish vein, he considered a man sufficiently educated if he knew the theory of medicine without having gained experience practicing it.

This early connection with medicine and with the rough-living Macedonian court largely explains both the predominantly biological cast of Aristotle's philosophical thought and the intense dislike of princes and courts to which he more than once gave expression. While Aristotle was still a youth, his father died, and the young man became a ward of Proxenus, probably a relative of his father. He was sent to the Academy of Plato at Athens in 367 and remained there for 20 years. These years formed the first of three main periods in Aristotle's intellectual development, years dominated by the formative influence of Plato and his colleagues in the Academy. Aristotle doubtless interested himself in the whole range of the Academy's activities. It is known that he devoted some time to the study of rhetoric, and he wrote and spoke for the Academy in its battles against the rival school of Isocrates.
After Plato's death in 348/347 his nephew Speusippus was named as head of the Academy. Aristotle shortly thereafter left Athens--in disgust, it is sometimes claimed, at not being appointed Plato's successor. This interpretation of his motive, however, lacks foundation, for evidence suggests that he was ineligible to be the school's head because of his status as a resident alien who could not hold property legally. It is more likely that his departure from Athens may have been linked with an anti-Macedonian feeling that arose in Athens after Philip had sacked the Greek city-state of Olynthus in 348. Aristotle's 12-year absence from Athens nevertheless indicates that he valued more the circle of friends who accompanied him on his travels--chief among them Theophrastus of Eresus, his pupil, colleague, and eventual successor as head of the Lyceum--than he did his membership in the Platonic Academy.
With him went another Academy member of note, Xenocrates of Chalcedon, whose lethargy became the target of Plato's ridicule. Plato reportedly contrasted it with Aristotle's more energetic manner: "The one needs a spur, the other a bridle. At Assus, Hermeias of Atarneus, a Greek soldier of fortune, had first acquired fiscal and then political control of northwestern Asia Minor, as a vassal of Persian overlords. After a visit to the Athenian Academy he invited two of Plato's graduates to set up a small branch to help spread Greek rule as well as Greek philosophy to Asian soil. Aristotle came to this new intellectual centre. To this period may belong the first 12 chapters of Book 7 of Aristotle's Politics. There he sketches the connection between philosophy and politics, namely, that the highest purpose of a city-state (polis) is to secure the conditions in which those who are capable of it can live the philosophical life. Aristotle's espousal of an enlightened oligarchy, nonetheless, actually constituted an advance over the political concepts flourishing at the time and it should be viewed in its context as a positive development in the establishment of the noble civilization created by the Greeks.
At about the same time, Aristotle composed the work, now lost, On Kingship, in which he clearly distinguishes the function of the philosopher from that of the king.
Aristotle was on good terms with his patron, Hermeias, and married his niece, Pythias. She bore Aristotle a daughter, whom he called by her mother's name. In the Politics, Aristotle prescribed the ideal ages for marriage--37 for the husband and 18 for the wife. Because Aristotle was himself 37 at this time, it is tempting to guess that Pythias was 18. Pythias did not live long, however; and after her death Aristotle chose another companion, Herpyllis (whether concubine or wife is uncertain), by whom he then had a son, Nicomachus. After three years at the young Assus Academy, Aristotle moved to the nearby island of Lesbos and settled in Mytilene, the capital city. With his friend Theophrastus, a native of that island, he established a philosophical circle patterned after the Athenian Academy. There his centre of interest shifted to biology, in which he undertook pioneering investigations. In his biological researches he focused on a new type of causation, namely teleological. According to Aristotle, natural organisms--plants and animals--have natural ends or goals, and their structure and development can only be fully explained when these goals are understood. To admit the existence of such ends, or aims, in nature is to argue teleologically or to admit the idea of a final cause. Teleology, and theory in general, is important in Aristotle's biology; but it is always, in principle at least, subordinate to observation. Thus, confessing his ignorance of the mode of generation of bees, Aristotle wrote in his treatise On the Generation of Animals.
The facts have not yet been sufficiently established. Associated with his researches into plant and animal life were his reflections on the relation of the soul to the body. As revealed by his tract On the Soul, Aristotle distanced himself from the Platonic conception of the soul as an independently existing substance that is only temporarily resident in the body. With some acknowledgment to Plato, he then proceeded to define the soul as the form of the body and the body as the matter of the soul.
In late 343 or early 342 Aristotle, at about the age of 42, was invited by Philip II of Macedon to his capital at Pella to tutor his 13-year-old son, Alexander. As the leading intellectual figure in Greece, Aristotle was commissioned to prepare Alexander for his future role as a military leader. As it turned out, Alexander was to dominate the Greek world and defend it against the Persian Empire. Using the model of the epic Greek hero, as in Homer's Iliad, Aristotle attempted to form Alexander as an embodiment of the classical valour of an Ajax or Achilles enlightened by the latest achievement of Greek civilization, philosophy. With his firm conviction of the superiority of Greeks over foreigners, he instructed Alexander to dominate the barbarians--i.e., non-Greeks--and to hold them in servility by refraining from any physical intermixture with them. Despite this advice, however, Alexander later 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.
In other ways too the influence that Aristotle had on Alexander was negligible. Although later, on his return to Athens, Aristotle enjoyed considerable political and economic support from the Macedonians and perhaps received assistance in the organization of his biological researches, it is not likely--as some have held--that Alexander collected and dispatched to Aristotle specimens of rare animals from Persia and India; in fact, Alexander's first penetration of the valley of the Indus did not occur until 328/327, less than six years before Aristotle's death. Indeed, the relation between the two was embittered by the execution of Aristotle's nephew, the historian Callisthenes of Olynthus, who was charged with treason while accompanying Alexander to Persia early in 328 in order to write a chronicle of the campaign. It has even been reported that Alexander meditated revenge on Aristotle himself because he was a blood relative of the victim. Clearly, in matters of political ideology, a gulf separated Aristotle and Alexander. Aristotle showed no awareness of the fundamental changes that Alexander's conquests were bringing to the Greek world; indeed, he was opposed in principle to Alexander's imperial policy because it diminished the importance of the city-state. On the other hand, Alexander gratified his tutor by rebuilding the town of Stagira, Aristotle's birthplace, which Philip II had destroyed earlier.
After three years at the Macedonian court, Aristotle withdrew and returned to his paternal property at Stagira (c. 339).
Aristotle remained in Stagira until 335, when, nearing 50 years of age, he once again returned to Athens. At this time the presidency of the Academy became vacant by the death of Speusippus, and Xenocrates of Chalcedon, his old associate in biological research, was elected to the post. Although Aristotle appears never to have wholly severed his links with the Academy, he nonetheless opened, in 335, a rival institution in the Lyceum, a gymnasium attached to the temple of Apollo Lyceus, situated in a grove just outside Athens. The place had for some time been frequented by other teachers--Plato even mentions it as having been one of Socrates' haunts--and the name of the temple came to be applied to Aristotle's school in particular. But it was probably only after Aristotle's death that the school, under Theophrastus, acquired extensive property. The chief difference between the new school and the Academy was that the scientific interests of the Platonists centred on mathematics whereas the main contributions of the Lyceum lay in biology and history.
On the death of Alexander the Great in 323 a brief but vigorous anti-Macedonian agitation broke out in Athens. Aristotle, who had long-standing Macedonian connections and was a friend of Antipater, the Macedonian regent of Athens, felt himself in danger. There he died in the following year from a stomach illness at the age of 62 or 63. It was reported that he abandoned Athens in order to save the Athenians from sinning twice against philosophy (referring to Socrates as the earlier victim).