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Aristotle: The Philosopher of rationality
03-02-2013 10:46Aristotle was one of the world’s greatest philosophers and the most influential to the modern Western civilization, founding the way of scientific thought and logic. Aristotelis spent twenty years as student of Plato, the great Athenian philosopher to eventually reject his way of theoretical teaching and to concentrate on better understanding the material world around him.
Aristotle was born in Stagirus, a little town on the peninsula of Chalcidice in northern Greece in 384 B.C. He was son of Nicomachus and Phaestis. His father was a physician and when Aristotle was still a child his father became court physician to Amyntas II, king of Macedonia, the grandfather of Alexander the Great.
At the age of eighteen he became a student of the great philosopher Plato at the Academy in Athens and distinguished himself as a student. His interest in science and particularly in biology was only natural, for his family had a long tradition in medicine. After Plato’s death in 347 B.C. Aristotle accepted the invitation of Hermias, king of Atarneus in Mysia and became part of a philosophical circle. While there he spent a considerable part of his time studying marine biology along the Aeolic coast.
Following the assassination of Hermias by the Persians, Aristotle moved to Mytilene on the island of Lesbos, where he continued his independent biological research. He then left for Pella to become teacher to Alexander, son of Philip II of Macedonia who would become known as Alexander the Great. Aristotle gave Alexander the usual Greek education with emphasis upon Homeric poems and tragedies, philosophy and politics.
When King Philip was assassinated in 336 B.C., Aristotle returned to Athens to continue his scientific work and to start a new school in the Lyceum, a grove sacred to Apollo located to the northeast of Athens, teaching biology, history and philosophy. Because of his custom of walking up and down while lecturing, his group of students became known as the Peripatetics (peripatos = walk).
Ironically, Aristotle was charged with impiety by the Athenians, the same people who condemned Socrates to death. Aristotle retreated then to the town of Chalcis in Euboea accompanied by several of his followers and died there the following year, in 322 B.C.
Aristotle classified the sciences, adding to the scientific data in many fields, particularly in biology. He encouraged and developed ideas in ethics and politics and developed logic as a science of reasoning, becoming the very cornerstone of the modern western science and civilization.
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