The Books He Never Meant You to Read
Aristotle wrote many treatises and dialogues intended for publication, and almost all of them are gone. Only around a third of his original output survives, and here is the twist: none of what we have was intended for publication.
What reached us reads like the working material of a teacher, not a polished book for the public. That is part of why his prose can feel dense and clipped compared to Plato's.
His range was extraordinary. His writings span the natural sciences, philosophy, linguistics, economics, politics, psychology and the arts. He provided a complex synthesis of the various philosophies that came before him, and his works contain the earliest known systematic study of logic. He has been called the first scientist.
Orphan, Then Mind of the School
Aristotle was born in 384 BC in Stagira, Chalcidice, about 55 km (34 miles) east of modern-day Thessaloniki. His father Nicomachus was personal physician to King Amyntas of Macedon, which likely explains his lifelong pull toward biology and medicine.
Both parents died while he was young and a guardian, Proxenus of Atarneus, raised him. At around seventeen or eighteen he moved to Athens to study at Plato's Academy, where he stayed for nearly twenty years and became distinguished as both researcher and lecturer. Plato reportedly nicknamed him "mind of the school".
He left Athens around 348/47 BC after Plato's death, traditionally because he was disappointed with the Academy's new direction under Plato's nephew Speusippus. At Assos and then the island of Lesbos he and his colleague Theophrastus carried out extensive research in botany and marine biology.
Tutor to a Future Conqueror
In 343/42 BC, Philip II of Macedon invited Aristotle to Pella to tutor his thirteen-year-old son, Alexander. The lessons took place at the private school of Mieza, in the gardens of the Nymphs on a royal estate.
Alexander's education probably covered ethics and politics along with standard literary texts such as Euripides and Homer. Aristotle gave him an annotated copy of the *Iliad*, which is said to have become one of Alexander's most prized possessions. Other prominent nobles, including Ptolemy and Cassander, may have sat in on the lectures.
The tutoring likely lasted only a few years, ending around the time Alexander turned sixteen and was appointed regent of Macedon. Aristotle's own view of the wider world was firmly ethnocentric: he advised Alexander to be "a leader to the Greeks and a despot to the barbarians".
The Library That Made the Books Possible
Back in Athens, Aristotle founded the Peripatetic school of philosophy at the Lyceum, and with it the wider Aristotelian tradition that followed. That tradition laid groundwork for the development of modern science.
Crucially, he established a library at the Lyceum. Having a collection of texts on hand is what allowed him to produce hundreds of books on papyrus scrolls, a scale of output that was very hard to achieve without one.
It is worth noting how little we actually know about the man himself. The details of his life are not well established, ancient biographies of him are often speculative, and historians agree on only a handful of salient points. The work survived far better than the biography.
Fifteen Centuries as Simply The Philosopher
Few thinkers have held authority this long. Aristotle's views profoundly shaped medieval scholarship, and the influence of his physical science ran from late antiquity through the Early Middle Ages and into the Renaissance.
He was not replaced systematically until the Enlightenment and the arrival of theories such as classical mechanics. He shaped Judeo-Islamic philosophies during the Middle Ages and Christian theology, including the scholasticism of the Catholic Church. Medieval Muslim scholars called him "The First Teacher". Medieval Christians such as Thomas Aquinas called him simply "The Philosopher".
His grip on logic continued well into the 19th century, studied by scholars like Peter Abelard and Jean Buridan. His ethics never stopped being influential and has gained renewed attention with the modern rise of virtue ethics. His teachings and methods of inquiry remain a live subject of philosophical discussion today.
