Essay/Term paper: Aristotle

Essay, term paper, research paper:  Science Research Papers

Aristotle


Aristotle was a Greek philosopher and was born in 348 B.C. He studied
under another philopsopher Plato and later tutored Alexander the Great at the
Macedonian court. In 335 B.C. he opened a school in the Athenian Lyceum. During
the anti-macedonian agitation after Alexander's death Aristotle fled to Chalcis
where he later died in 322 B.C. His extant writings, largely in the form of
lecture notes made by his students, include the Organum (treatises of logic);
Physics; Metaphysics; De Anima (on the soul); Nicomachean Ethics and Eudemian
Ethics; Politics: De Poetica: Rhetoric; and works biology and physics.
Aristotle held philosophy to be the the discerning, through the use of
systematic logic as expressed in Syllogisms, of the self-evident, changeless
first principles that form the basis of all knowledge. He taught that knowledge
of a thing requires an inquiry into causality and that the "final cause"-the
purpose or function of the thing-is primary.

This is a direct quote from his works (translated):

"The highest good for the individual is the complete exercise of the
specifically human function of rationality. In contrast to the Platonic belief
that a concrete reality partakes of a from but does not embody it with the
exception of the Prime Mover (God), form has no separate existence but is
immanent in matter."

Aristotle's work was lost following the decline of the Roman Empire but
was reintroduced to the West through the work of Arab and Jewish scholars,
becoming the basis of medieval scholasticism.

In my opinion Aristotle was one of the greatest and most important of
the philosophers and scientists of the world's history.