48 Facts About Aristotle

1. Aristotle was a Greek philosopher and polymath during the Classical period in Ancient Greece.

2. Aristotle provided a complex synthesis of the various philosophies existing prior to him.

3. Aristotle was born in the city of Stagira in Northern Greece.

4. Aristotle established a library in the Lyceum which helped him to produce many of his hundreds of books on papyrus scrolls.

5. At the age of seventeen or eighteen, Aristotle moved to Athens to continue his education at Plato's Academy.

6. In 343 BC, Aristotle was invited by Philip II of Macedon to become the tutor to his son Alexander.

7. Aristotle was appointed as the head of the royal academy of Macedon.

8. Aristotle encouraged Alexander toward eastern conquest, and Aristotle's own attitude towards Persia was unabashedly ethnocentric.

9. Aristotle conducted courses at the school for the next twelve years.

10. Aristotle wrote many dialogues, of which only fragments have survived.

11. Aristotle studied and made significant contributions to "logic, metaphysics, mathematics, physics, biology, botany, ethics, politics, agriculture, medicine, dance, and theatre.

12. Aristotle disagreed with Plato on this point, arguing that all universals are instantiated at some period of time, and that there are no universals that are unattached to existing things.

13. Where Plato spoke of the forms as existing separately from the things that participate in them, Aristotle maintained that universals exist within each thing on which each universal is predicated.

14. Aristotle makes philosophy in the broad sense coextensive with reasoning, which he would describe as "science".

15. Aristotle implies that in a vacuum the speed of fall would become infinite, and concludes from this apparent absurdity that a vacuum is not possible.

16. Opinions have varied on whether Aristotle intended to state quantitative laws.

17. Aristotle describes experiments in optics using a camera obscura in Problems, book 15.

18. Aristotle was one of the first people to record any geological observations.

19. Aristotle was the first person to study biology systematically, and biology forms a large part of his writings.

20. Aristotle spent two years observing and describing the zoology of Lesbos and the surrounding seas, including in particular the Pyrrha lagoon in the centre of Lesbos.

21. Aristotle gives accurate descriptions of the four-chambered fore-stomachs of ruminants, and of the ovoviviparous embryological development of the hound shark.

22. Aristotle used the ancient Greek term pepeiramenoi to mean observations, or at most investigative procedures like dissection.

23. Philosophers of science have generally concluded that Aristotle was not interested in taxonomy, but zoologists who studied this question recently think otherwise.

24. Aristotle believed that purposive final causes guided all natural processes; this teleological view justified his observed data as an expression of formal design.

25. Aristotle believed an impression is left on a semi-fluid bodily organ that undergoes several changes in order to make a memory.

26. Aristotle believes people receive all kinds of sense perceptions and perceive them as impressions, people are continually weaving together new impressions of experiences.

27. Aristotle explains that when a person stares at a moving stimulus such as the waves in a body of water, and then looks away, the next thing they look at appears to have a wavelike motion.

28. Aristotle compares a sleeping person to a person who is overtaken by strong feelings toward a stimulus.

29. Aristotle reasoned naturalistically that instances in which dreams do resemble future events are simply coincidences.

30. Aristotle wrote several treatises on ethics, including most notably, the Nicomachean Ethics.

31. Aristotle taught that virtue has to do with the proper function of a thing.

32. Aristotle reasoned that humans must have a function specific to humans, and that this function must be an activity of the psuche in accordance with reason (logos).

33. Aristotle identified such an optimum activity of the soul as the aim of all human deliberate action, eudaimonia, generally translated as "happiness" or sometimes "well-being".

34. Aristotle conceived of politics as being like an organism rather than like a machine, and as a collection of parts none of which can exist without the others.

35. Aristotle made substantial contributions to economic thought, especially to thought in the Middle Ages.

36. Similarly, Aristotle considered making a profit through interest unnatural, as it makes a gain out of the money itself, and not from its use.

37. Aristotle gave a summary of the function of money that was perhaps remarkably precocious for his time.

38. Aristotle wrote that because it is impossible to determine the value of every good through a count of the number of other goods it is worth, the necessity arises of a single universal standard of measurement.

39. Aristotle goes on to state that money is useful for future exchange, making it a sort of security.

40. Aristotle applies the term mimesis both as a property of a work of art and as the product of the artist's intention and contends that the audience's realisation of the mimesis is vital to understanding the work itself.

41. Aristotle concludes Poetics with a discussion on which, if either, is superior: epic or tragic mimesis.

42. Aristotle was a keen systematic collector of riddles, folklore, and proverbs; he and his school had a special interest in the riddles of the Delphic Oracle and studied the fables of Aesop.

43. Aristotle contributed to almost every field of human knowledge then in existence, and he was the founder of many new fields.

44. Theophrastus was much less concerned with formal causes than Aristotle was, instead pragmatically describing how plants functioned.

45. Cautionary medieval tale held that Aristotle advised his pupil Alexander to avoid the king's seductive mistress, Phyllis, but was himself captivated by her, and allowed her to ride him.

46. These texts, as opposed to Aristotle's lost works, are technical philosophical treatises from within Aristotle's school.

47. Aristotle wrote his works on papyrus scrolls, the common writing medium of that era.

48. Aristotle's "lost" works stray considerably in characterization from the surviving Aristotelian corpus.