384-322 B.C., Greek philosopher. He studied (367-347 B.C.) under Plato and later (342-339 B.C.) 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
(323 B.C.) to Chalcis, where he died. His extant writings, largely in the form
of lecture notes made by his students, include the Organum (treatises on Logic); Physics; Metaphysics; De Anima [on the soul]; Nicomachean Ethics and
Eudemian Ethics; Politics; De Poetica; Rhetoric; and works on biology and physics.
Aristotle held philosophy to be 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. 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
form but does not embody it, the Aristotelian system holds that, 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 Rome but was
reintroduced to the West through the work of Arab and Jewish scholars, becoming the
basis of medieval Scholasticism.