In a small Greek township of Stagira, Aristotle was born in the summer of 384 B.C., on the Chalcidie Peninsula of Macedonia in Northern Greece. Nichomachus, his father was a court physician to the king of Macedonia, Amyrstas III, who happened to be the grandfather of Alexander the Great.
Aristotle in all likelihood learnt at home the fundamentals of the practical skill he displayed later on in his biological researches.
The early connection with medicine and with the rough-living court of Macedonian largely explains the predominantly biological cast of Aristotle’s philosophical thought and the intense dislike of princes and courts to which he gave expression more than once.
At a young age Aristotle’s father died and became a word of Proxenus. He was sent to Academy of Plato at Athens in 367 B. C. and remained there for 20 years. These years formed the first of three main periods in Aristotle’s intellectual development, the period dominated by the formative influence of Plato and his colleagues in the Academy.
Aristotle took keen interest in the activities of the Academy. He devoted some time to study rhetoric and he wrote and spoke for the Academy in its battles against the rival school of Isocrates.
In about 348/347 B.C. Plato died, and shortly thereafter Aristotle left Athens in disgust, at not being appointed Plato’s successor. Absence of Aristotle for 12 years from Athens nevertheless indicates that he valued more the circle of friends who accompanied him during his travels, chief of them was Theophrastus of Eresus, his pupil; colleague and eventual successor as head of the Lyceum.
After his visit to the Athenian Academy, Aristotle invited two of Plato’s graduates to set up a small branch to help spread Greek rule as well as Greek philosophy to Asian soil. Aristotle came to this new intellectual centre. Therefore first 12 chapters of Book 7 of Aristotle’s ‘Politics’ are attributed to this period.
Simultaneously, Aristotle composed "On Kingship" in which he distinguished clearly the function of the philosopher from that of the king. He differed from Plato’s quote – for the better, it is said-by teaching that it is.
Aristotle said : ‘Not merely unnecessary for king to be a philosopher, but even a disadvantage. Rather a king should take the advice of true philosophers. Then he would fill his reign with good deeds, not with good words."
Aristotle had good terms with his patron, Hermias, and married his niece Pythias, and became father of a daughter. Aristotle prescribed the ideal ages for marriage - 37 for the husband and 18 for the wife, in his work ‘Politics’.
Aristotle ordered in his will that "Wherever they bury me, there the bones of Pythias shall be laid in accordance with her own instructions".
Of course, Pythias did not live long, and after her death, Aristotle choose another companion, Herpyllis, by whom, he had a son.
Aristotle then moved to Mytilene, the capital of Lesbos, after staying there for 3 years at the young Assus Academy, established a philosophical circle patterned after the Athenian Academy, with his friend Theophrastus, a native of that island. His centre of interest shifted to biology, in which he undertook pioneering investigations.
In his biological researches he focused on a new type of causation, namely theleological studies.
According to Aristotle, natural organism-plants and animals have natural ends or goals, and their structure and development can only be fully explained when these goals are understood.
Aristotle in his treatise, ‘On the generation of Animals’ wrote "The facts have not yet been sufficiently established. If ever they are, then credit must be given to observation rather than to theories, and to theories only insofar as they are confirmed by the observed facts."
When Aristotle researched into plants and animal life they were associated with his reflections on the relation of the soul to the body.
With some acknowledgement to Plato, Aristotle defined the soul as the form of the body and the body as the matter of the soul.
In about B.C. 342 when he was 42, Philip II of Macedonia invited him to teach his son Alexander, who was 13 years old, to prepare him for his future role as a military leader.
Using the model of the Greek epic hero in Homer’s ‘Iliad’, Aristotle attempted to shape Alexander as an embossment of the classical valor of an Ajax or Achilles enlightened by the latest achievement of Greek civilization and philosophy.
He instructed Alexander to dominate the Barbarians i.e. non-Greeks and to hold them in servility by refraining from any physical intermixture with them.The influence that Aristotle had on Alexander was negligible.
Later on returning to Athens, Aristotle enjoyed considerable political and economic support from Macedonians and received help in the organization of his biological researches.
In political ideology, a gulf separated Aristotle and Alexander. Aristotle opposed in principle Alexander’s imperial policy, because it diminished the importance of the city-state.
In about 339 B.C., Aristotle withdraws from Macedonian court and returned to his paternal property at Stagira. There he confirmed the association of his philosophical circle including Theophrastus and other pupils of Plato.
Until 335 B.C., approaching 50 Aristotle remained in Stagira, and then again went back to Athens.He opened in 335 B.C., a rival institution in the Lyceum, a gymnasium attached to the temple of Apollo Lyceus, situated in a grove just outside Athens.
Aristotle had given instruction in the ‘Peripatos, or covered walkway, of the gymnasium, hence the school was very important to Aristotle because, by co-ordinating the work of a number of scholars, he was able for the next 12 years to organize it as a centre for speculation and research in every field of inquiry and to give lectures on a wide range on a wide range of philosophical and scientific questions.
Alexander the Great died in 323 B.C., And due to vigorous anti-Macedonian agitation in Athens, Aristotle feared danger to himself. Hence he left Athens and withdrew to his mother’s estates in Charlie’ on the island of Euboea.He died there in the following year from a stomach illness at the age of 62.
384 BC Aristotle was born at Stagira
367 BC Aristotle migrated to Athens and joined Plato’s Academy
356 BC Birth of Alexander the Great
347 BC Death of Plato; Aristotle left Athens for the court of Hermias at Atarneus, and settled at Assos
345 BC Aristotle moved to Mytilene on Lesbos (and later returned to Stagira)
343 BC Philip of Macedonia invited him to Mieza to tutor Alexander
341 BC Death of Hermias
336 BC Philip was killed and Alexander was crowned
335 BC Aristotle returned to Athens and began teaching in the Lyceum
323 BC Death of Alexander the Great
322 BC Aristotle left Athens for Chalcis, where he died.
• For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.
• Most people would rather give than get affection.
• Personal beauty is a greater recommendation than any letter of reference.
• The ideal man bears the accidents of life with dignity and grace, making the best of circumstances.
• What it lies in our power to do, it lies in our power not to do.
• The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.
• We give up leisure in order that we may have leisure, just as we go to war in order that we may have peace.
• Wicked men obey out of fear; good men, out of love.
• The moral virtues, then, are produced in us, neither by nature nor against nature. Nature, indeed, prepares in us the ground for their reception, but their complete formation is the product of habit.
• The aim of the wise is not to secure pleasure, but to avoid pain.
• The generality of men are naturally apt to be swayed by fear rather than reverence, and to refrain from evil rather because of the punishment that it brings than because of its own foulness.
• One must learn by doing the thing, for though you think you know it, you have no certainty until you try.
• The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.
• Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.
• There is a foolish corner in the brain of the wisest man.
• Friends are an aid to the young, to guard them from error; to the elderly, to attend to their wants and to supplement their failing power of action; to those in the prime of life, to assist them to noble deeds.
• The search for truth is in one way hard and in another way easy, for it is evident that no one can master it fully or miss it wholly. But each adds a little to our knowledge of nature, and from all the facts assembled there arises a certain grandeur.
• Happiness is an expression of the soul in considered actions.
• The beauty of the soul shines out when a man bears with composure one heavy mischance after another, not because he does not feel them, but because he is a man of high and heroic temper.
• Happiness depends on ourselves.
• We should behave to our friends as we would wish our friends to behave to us.
• Wishing to be friends is quick work, but friendship is a slow-ripening fruit.
• In poverty and other misfortunes of life, true friends are a sure refuge.
• Now that practical skills have developed enough to provide adequately for material needs, one of these sciences which are not devoted to utilitarian ends has been able to arise in Egypt, the priestly caste there having the leisure necessary for disinterested research.
• The whole is more than the sum of its parts.
• The so-called Pythagoreans, who were the first to take up mathematics, not only advanced this subject, but saturated with it, they fancied that the principles of mathematics were the principles of all things.
• To Thales the primary question was not what do we know, but how do we know it.
• The mathematical sciences particularly exhibit order, symmetry, and limitation; and these are the greatest forms of the beautiful.
• If this is a straight line , then it necessarily ensues that the sum of the angles of the triangle is equal to two right angles, and conversely, if the sum is not equal to two right angles, then neither is the triangle rectilinear.
• It is not once nor twice but times without number that the same ideas make their appearance in the world.
• The chief forms of beauty are order and symmetry and definiteness, which the mathematical sciences demonstrate in a special degree.
• There are things which seem incredible to most men who have not studied mathematics.
• While those whom devotion to abstract discussions has rendered unobservant of the facts are too ready to dogmatize on the basis of a few observations.
• Dignity does not consist in possessing honors, but in deserving them.
• All virtue is summed up in dealing justly.
• Equality consists in the same treatment of similar persons.
• It is the mark of an instructed mind to rest satisfied with the degree of precision to which the nature of the subject admits and not to seek exactness when only an approximation of the truth is possible.
• A true friend is one soul in two bodies.
• What is a friend ? A single soul dwelling in two bodies.
• Without friends, no one would want to live, even if he had all other goods.
• It is easy to perform a good action, but not easy to acquire a settled habit of performing such actions.
• Happiness is a sort of action.
• Hope is a waking dream.
• No excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of madness.
• Good has two meanings: it means that which is good absolutely and that which is good for somebody.
• The ideal man bears the accidents of life with dignity and grace, making the best of circumstances.
• All men seek one goal : success or happiness. The only way to achieve true success is to express yourself completely in service to society. First, have a definite, clear, practical ideal—a goal, an objective. Second, have the necessary means to achieve your ends—wisdom, money, material and methods. Third, adjust all your means to that end.
• Suffering becomes beautiful when anyone bears great calamities with cheerfulness, not through insensibility but through greatness of mind.
• The ultimate value of life depends upon awareness and the power of contemplation rather than upon mere survival.
• It is not always the same thing to be a good man and a good citizen.
• Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence.
• Different men seek...happiness in different ways and by different means.
• We become just by performing just actions, temperate by performing temperate actions, brave by performing brave actions.
• Life is full of chances and changes, and the most prosperous of men may...meet with great misfortunes.
• Quality is not an act. It is a habit.
• In practical matters the end is not mere speculative knowledge of what is to be done, but rather the doing of it. It is not enough to know about Virtue, then, but we must endeavor to possess it, and to use it, or to take any other steps that may make us good.
• Men acquire a particular quality by constantly acting in a particular way.
• We learn by doing.
• The arousing of prejudice, pity, anger, and similar emotions has nothing to do with the essential facts, but is merely a personal appeal to the man who is judging the case.
• Learning is an ornament in prosperity, a refuge in adversity, and a provision in old age.
• Men have a sufficient natural instinct for what is true, and usually do arrive at the truth.
• Character may almost be called the most effective means of persuasion.
• There is something of the marvelous in all things of nature.
• It is not once nor twice but times without number that the same ideas make their appearance in the world.
• The body is most fully developed from thirty to thirty-five years of age, the mind at about forty-nine.
• Hippocrates is an excellent geometer but a complete fool in everyday affairs.
• But Nature flies from the infinite, for the infinite is unending or imperfect, and Nature ever seeks an end.
• Our account does not rob mathematicians of their science, by disproving the actual existence of the infinite in the direction of increase, in the sense of the untraceable. In point of fact they do not need the infinite and do not use it. They postulate any that the finite straight line may be produced as far as they wish.
• We cannot ... prove geometrical truths by arithmetic.
• The chief forms of beauty are order and symmetry and definiteness, which the mathematical sciences demonstrate in a special degree.
• There are things which seem incredible to most men who have not studied mathematics.
• While those whom devotion to abstract discussions has rendered unobservant of the facts are too ready to dogmatize on the basis of a few observations.
• A nose which varies from the ideal of straightness to a hook or snub may still be of good shape and agreeable to the eye.
• The continum is that which is divisible into indivisibles that are infinitely divisible Physics.
• The mathematical sciences particularly exhibit order, symmetry, and limitation; and these are the greatest forms of the beautiful.
• Wit is cultured insolence.
• It is well to be up before daybreak, for such habits contribute to health, wealth, and wisdom.
• All human actions have one or more of these seven causes : chance, nature, compulsion, habit, reason, passion, desire.
• The quality of life is determined by its activities.
• He who has never learned to obey cannot be a good commander.
• It concerns us to know the purposes we seek in life, for then, like archers aiming at a definite mark, we shall be more likely to attain what we want.
• I count him braver who overcomes his desires than him who conquers his enemies; for the hardest victory is over self.
• Change in all things is sweet.
• Education is the best provision for old age.
• Man is by nature a political animal.
• There was never a genius without a tincture of madness.
• It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
• No excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of madness.
• All who have meditated on the art of governing mankind have been convinced that the fate of empires depends on the education of youth.
• He who hath many friends hath none.
• It is better for a city to be governed by a good man than by good laws.
• No one loves the man whom he fears.
• The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.
• Those who educate children well are more to be honored than parents, for these only gave life, those the art of living well.
Aristotle is known today, as a profoundly systematic thinker. After all, philosophy is nothing, if it is not systematic, and his system – his ‘world picture’ – has for centuries. Aristotle’s scientific doctrines are never presented in an axiomatic fashion. On the aporetic interpretation, the treatises represent the essence of Aristotle’s philosophy : his occasional reflections on systematization are not to be taken too seriously – they are ritual gestures towards a platonic notion of science, evidence of Aristotle’s own fundamental convictions.
Aristotle has said quite enough to enable us to see how, in a perfect world, he would have presented and organized the scientific knowledge, he had industriously amassed. But his systematic plans are plans for a complete science, and he could not live long enough to discover everything.
Science is about real things, which is knowledge rather than fantasy. The question of ontology is : what are the fundamental items with which science must concern itself ? And Aristotle devoted much attention to this question. Most of his ontological thoughts are found in the ‘Metaphysics’.
Aristotle thought that most of the key terms of philosophy were ambiguous. In the ‘Sophistical Refutations’ he spent some time in expounding and solving sophistical puzzles that are based on ambiguity, and Book V of the ‘Metaphysics’, sometimes called Aristotle’s "Philosophical Lexicon’, is a set of short essays on the different senses of a number of philosophical terms.
According to Aristotle, there can be, four kinds of change : a thing can change in respect of substance, of quality, of quantity and of place.
And that, in every change there is an initial state and an end state may be granted; and the states must be distinct, or else no change will have occurred.
Aristotle had much more to say about change. Change takes place in time and space, and the Physics offers intricate theories about the nature of time, of place and empty space. Since space and time are infinitely divisible, Aristotle analyzed the notion of infinity. He discussed a number of particular problems concerning the relation of motion to time, including a brief treatment of Zero’s celebrated paradoxes of motion.
Saying about ‘Cause’ Aristotle said : ‘Not all explanations need actually have that specific form’; but he held that all explanations can be couched in that form, and that the form exhibits the nature of causal connections most perspicuously.
