Philosopher of Living Things
From Plato’s Academy to a Lesbos lagoon and his own school, he asked why things are as they are, then looked inside them.
Philosopher, Naturalist & Teacher
Aristotle wanted to know why things are as they are: why a bronze statue exists, why a fish has no lungs, why a tragedy grips its audience. He answered by sorting, comparing and arguing, and sometimes by opening an animal on the table. Start with the short first book of Parts of Animals, then follow him from Plato’s Academy to a lagoon on Lesbos and the lecture notes of the Lyceum.
Aristotle was born in 384 BC at Stagira, a small city in the Macedonian region of north-eastern Greece. Diogenes Laertius, writing centuries later, names his parents as Nicomachus and Phaestis and says his father was a physician and friend of King Amyntas of Macedon. At about seventeen he went to Athens and joined Plato’s Academy. By Diogenes’ count he stayed twenty years, and he remained until Plato’s death in 347.
In those years he also wrote for readers beyond the school: dialogues and other polished works meant for circulation. Only fragments survive. Cicero compared Aristotle’s prose to a flowing river of gold. That praise is hard to recognise in the compressed treatises we now read, which is itself evidence: it belonged to a body of writing that has almost entirely vanished.
The ancient Lives need careful handling. Diogenes passes on the note that Aristotle lisped and, “so they say,” had slender calves; he records quarrels between earlier biographers and sets dates against each other. He is still valuable, because he copied documents as well as anecdotes. Read him the way he presents himself, as a collector of earlier reports.
Life of AristotleA much later ancient Life that mixes documents, gossip and disagreements between earlier writers. It also preserves the text of Aristotle’s will.Read the ancient LifeAfter Plato died, Aristotle left Athens for Assos in Asia Minor, where Hermias was his host and patron, and married Pythias, a niece of Hermias. There he began research on marine animals. After about three years he moved to the nearby island of Lesbos and worked with Theophrastus, who later became his successor: broadly, Aristotle took the animals and Theophrastus the plants. Their collaboration is one of the founding partnerships of biology.
The animal books show the method in use. Aristotle, or people working under his direction, dissected a wide variety of animals; the treatises refer to diagrams that are now lost. He consulted bee-keepers, fishermen and sponge divers, and he usually says who said what. In the History of Animals, fishermen call the starfish “a great pest in the Strait of Pyrrha”; a sea urchin from the same straits is best eaten in winter. On the octopus he reports that “some assert” the male has a sexual organ in one tentacle, and that fishermen name it so, while keeping the claim at arm’s length. He followed a chick in the egg day by day: on the fourth day the heart appears as a small blood-spot.
How much was done on Lesbos is a scholarly question, not a settled fact. In 1948 H. D. P. Lee set Werner Jaeger’s late dating of the zoology against D’Arcy Thompson’s view that it belonged to Aristotle’s middle years; the research probably continued at the Lyceum. A 2018 survey in Mediterranean Marine Science finds his marine groupings arranged on at least three levels, many of them still matching modern classes, with names that passed into scientific nomenclature. The Loeb volume gives these books in Greek with Peck’s English.
In 343 Philip II of Macedon asked Aristotle to teach his son Alexander. Very little is securely known about what followed. The teaching probably lasted two or three years, though some historians allow up to eight. The fullest account is Plutarch’s Life of Alexander, written in the Roman period more than four centuries later. Plutarch says Philip gave master and pupil the precinct of the Nymphs near Mieza, where visitors in his own day were shown Aristotle’s stone seats and shady walks, and that Philip resettled Stagira, which he had earlier destroyed.
Plutarch also tells a revealing story. Once in Asia, Alexander supposedly wrote to complain that Aristotle had published the advanced teaching meant for pupils; Aristotle replied that those doctrines were published and not published, because his treatise on metaphysics was a memorandum for those already trained. Whether the letters are genuine cannot be shown. The story still captures something real about the surviving works: they read like teaching material that assumes a listener in the room.
What Alexander took from Aristotle, and what Aristotle thought of Alexander’s conquests, are questions the evidence cannot settle. It is better to leave the famous pairing uncertain than to fill it with invented scenes.
Plutarch, Life of Alexander 7The main ancient account of Aristotle teaching Alexander at Mieza, written centuries afterwards. Read it as Plutarch’s story, not a classroom record.Read Plutarch’s accountAristotle returned to Athens in 335 and founded his school at the Lyceum, one of the city’s gymnasia; his followers became known as the Peripatetics. The school studied an exceptional range of subjects and collected manuscripts. Strabo later called Aristotle the first person known to have made a collection of books. Remains of a palaestra identified with the Lyceum were excavated in central Athens and opened to the public in 2014.
One of his teaching tools is still useful. In Physics II he lists four senses of “cause,” meaning the different answers to “why?” There is what a thing is made of, like the bronze of a statue; its form or defining structure, like the ratio 2:1 that makes an octave; the source of the change, like the father of a child; and the end it serves, as when someone walks about for health. Aristotle held that a full explanation usually needs all four, and challenged readers to find a fifth.
The Prior Analytics builds the first systematic theory of deduction. A syllogism, in A. J. Jenkinson’s translation, is discourse in which certain things being stated, something else “follows of necessity.” The model case is simple: if every A is B and every B is C, every A is C. From there Aristotle maps the valid forms and proves general rules, for instance that nothing follows from two negative premises.
The ethical lectures start from practice. “We become just by doing just acts,” Aristotle argues, as people become builders by building. Virtue is a mean “relatively to us,” in Ross’s wording: a ration that is too little for the athlete Milo would be too much for a beginner. Courage sits between rashness and cowardice, but finding it in a particular case takes judgment, not a formula. Comparing W. D. Ross with Adam Beresford shows how translation shapes these arguments.
The Politics compares the constitutions of many Greek cities and asks which arrangements help citizens live well. It also defends slavery: Aristotle claims some people are slaves by nature because they lack the capacity to deliberate, and he gives women a deliberative capacity “without authority,” justifying male rule in the household. Modern scholars point out that he offers little evidence for either claim. They belong in any honest account of his thought, not in a footnote.
The Poetics treats tragedy as something made. Plot is “the soul of a tragedy”; a whole “has a beginning, a middle, and an end.” The strongest effects come from reversal and recognition happening together, as when the messenger in Oedipus means to reassure the king and instead reveals who he is. Poetry, Aristotle says, is more philosophical than history because it shows what kinds of things happen, not only what did.
Alexander died in 323, and anti-Macedonian feeling rose in Athens. Diogenes reports that Aristotle was charged with impiety; he left for Chalcis on Euboea, where he died in 322, apparently of natural causes, at about sixty-three. Diogenes mentions one writer’s claim that he took aconite and sets it aside. An often-repeated anecdote has him refusing to let Athens sin twice against philosophy; it is not in Diogenes’ Life.
Diogenes says he came across Aristotle’s will and copies it. Antipater is named executor. Herpyllis, the mother of his son Nicomachus, is to be cared for “in memory of me and of the steady affection” she had shown him. Pythias’s bones are to be laid with his, “in accordance with her own instructions.” Several enslaved members of the household are to be freed, some when his daughter marries, others “if they deserve it.” The document shows real care for particular people inside a household built on the slavery the Politics defends.
Theophrastus inherited the school and its library. Of perhaps two hundred works attributed to Aristotle, about thirty-one survive, and most read like lecture notes, drafts and research records written for an inner circle. The polished dialogues that ancient readers admired are the part that was lost. Readers today meet Aristotle mainly through the texts he wrote for teaching.
Strabo tells the most dramatic version of what happened next. The books passed to Neleus of Scepsis, whose heirs hid them underground from book-hunting kings until damp and worms had damaged them; the collector Apellicon bought them and filled the gaps badly; Sulla carried the library to Rome. Plutarch adds that Andronicus of Rhodes received copies through the grammarian Tyrannion, published the treatises and drew up their lists. Andronicus is credited with the first reliable edition in the first century BC, though he was not solely responsible for the revival of Aristotle and his edition’s date is still debated. Byzantine scribes later copied the texts by hand, as in the twelfth-century manuscript shown here.
In 1882 William Ogle sent Charles Darwin his translation of Parts of Animals. Darwin replied that Linnaeus and Cuvier had been his two gods, “but they were mere school-boys to old Aristotle.” In the same letter he found it curious that Aristotle did not know “muscles as the means of movement.” That balance suits the books: they are wrong in places, persistently curious, and still open on the dissecting table. Leroi’s The Lagoon makes the modern case at full length.
William Ogle’s 1882 translation · MIT Internet Classics Archive
A short way in: why study the humbler animals, why dichotomous division fails, and the story of Heraclitus at the kitchen stove. This is the translation Darwin thanked Ogle for.Read Book ID’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s translation · MIT Internet Classics Archive
Watch Aristotle sort fishermen’s reports from his own observations: the starfish of the Strait of Pyrrha and the disputed mating arm of the octopus are here.Read free textR. P. Hardie and R. K. Gaye’s translation · MIT Internet Classics Archive
The four senses of “cause,” with the bronze statue, the octave, the father and the walk taken for health.Read free textA. J. Jenkinson’s translation · MIT Internet Classics Archive
The first systematic theory of deduction begins with a definition of the syllogism; the opening chapters are terse but give the method plainly.Read free textW. D. Ross’s translation · MIT Internet Classics Archive
Habit, practice and the mean “relatively to us,” including the athlete Milo and his rations.Read free textH. Rackham’s 1934 Loeb translation, with Bywater’s Greek text · Perseus Digital Library
Move between the English and the Greek one section at a time; useful when a key word such as aretē seems to change shape between translations.Read free textS. H. Butcher’s translation · MIT Internet Classics Archive
The free route to plot as “the soul of a tragedy,” and to reversal and recognition in Oedipus.Read free textDiogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers 5.1 · R. D. Hicks’s Loeb translation · Perseus Digital Library
A much later ancient Life that mixes documents, gossip and disagreements between earlier writers. It also preserves the text of Aristotle’s will.Read the ancient LifeBernadotte Perrin’s Loeb translation · Lexundria
The main ancient account of Aristotle teaching Alexander at Mieza, written centuries afterwards. Read it as Plutarch’s story, not a classroom record.Read Plutarch’s accountH. C. Hamilton and W. Falconer’s 1903 translation · Perseus Digital Library
The dramatic ancient story of Aristotle’s books: buried at Scepsis, damaged, sold to Apellicon and carried to Rome.Read Strabo’s accountBernadotte Perrin’s Loeb translation · Lexundria
A few lines on Sulla’s seizure of Apellicon’s library and Andronicus of Rhodes publishing the treatises and drawing up lists of them.Read Plutarch’s account22 February 1882 · Darwin Correspondence Project letter 13697
Darwin’s thanks for Ogle’s Parts of Animals, with its comparison to Linnaeus and Cuvier and a frank note on Aristotle’s ignorance of “muscles as the means of movement.”Read Darwin’s letter
Alexander the GreatAristotle’s pupil for a few years in Macedon; the ancient sources for their relationship are late and thin, which makes the comparison more interesting.
Charles DarwinDarwin read Ogle’s Parts of Animals in 1882 and ranked Aristotle above his own heroes Linnaeus and Cuvier; compare two naturalists who sorted living things by careful observation.
Galileo GalileiGalileo’s telescope and his measurements of motion challenged the Aristotelian heavens and physics still taught in his day: a good place to watch the tradition argued with.
