Aristotle Tee

Aristotle (384–322 BCE) was a Greek philosopher and polymath who studied under Plato at the Academy for nearly twenty years before striking out on his own intellectual path. Born in Stagira, he later served as tutor to the young Alexander the Great before returning to Athens to found the Lyceum, his own school of philosophy. Aristotle's surviving works cover an astonishing range of subjects: logic, metaphysics, physics, biology, ethics, politics, aesthetics, and rhetoric. He essentially invented the discipline of formal logic, and his system of syllogistic reasoning dominated the field for over two millennia. In his Nicomachean Ethics he argued that the highest human good is eudaimonia—often translated as happiness or flourishing—achieved through the cultivation of virtue and practical wisdom. His Politics analyzed different forms of government and argued that humans are by nature political animals. In natural philosophy he was a pioneering empiricist, cataloguing hundreds of animal species through careful observation. His influence on medieval Islamic and Christian philosophy was enormous, and his ideas shaped virtually every branch of Western intellectual inquiry.