Aristotle was born at Stagira (Stageira), a Greek colony on the Macedonian peninsula Chalcidice, in the year 384 B.C. He belonged to a family in which the practice of physic was hereditary. His father, Niconachus, was the friend and physician of Amyntas II., king of Macedonia, father of Philip, and grandfather of Alexander the Great. Aristotle lost both parents while he was quite young, and was brought up under the care of Proxenus, a citizen of Atarneus, in Asia Minor, who was then settled at Stagira. It is to be conjectured that his education would take the direction of preparing him for the family profession. In after-life, he occupied himself largely in the dissecting of animals, and was acquainted with all the facts that had been derived from this source by others before him. It seems probable, however, that he early abandoned the intention of following physic as a profession, and aspired to that cultivation of universal knowledge for its own sake, in which he attained a distinction without parallel in the history of the human race.
In his 18th year (367 B.C.) he left Stagira for Athens, then the intellectual centre of Greece and of the civilised world. Plato, on whom he doubtless had his eye as his chief instructor, was then absent at Syracuse in that extraordinary episode of his life, connecting him as political adviser with the two successive Syracusan despots—Dionysius the Elder, and Dionysius the Younger—and with Dion. Aristotle, therefore, pursued his studies by books, and by the help of any other masters he could find, during the first three years of his stay. On the return of Plato, he became his pupil, and soon made his master aware of the remarkable penetration and reach of his intellect. We are told that Plato spoke of Aristotle as the 'intellect of the school.' Unfortunately, there is a total absence of precise information as to the early studies of the rising philosopher. He remained at Athens twenty years, during which the only facts recorded, in addition to his studying with Plato, are, that he set up a class of rhetoric, and that in so doing, he became the rival of the celebrated orator and rhetorical teacher, Isocrates, whom he appears to have attacked with great severity. It was in the schools of rhetoric that the young men of Athens got the principal part of their education for public life. They learned the art of speaking before the Dikasteries, or courts of law, and the public assembly, with efficiency and elegance; and incidentally acquired the notions of law and public policy that regulated the management of affairs at the time. We can easily suppose that Aristotle would look with contempt upon the shallowness—in all that regarded thought or subject matter—of the common rhetorical teaching, of which, doubtless, the prevailing excellence would lie in the form of the address, being artistic rather than profound or erudite. One of the disciples of Isocrates, defending his master against Aristotle, wrote a treatise wherein allusion is made to a work (now lost) on proverbs, the first recorded publication of the philosopher.
The death of Plato (347 B.C.) was the occasion of Aristotle's departure from Athens. It was not extraordinary or unreasonable that Aristotle should hope to succeed his master as the chief of his school, named the Academy. We now know that no other man then existing had an equal title to that pre-eminence. Plato, however, left his nephew Speusippus as his successor. We may suppose the disappointment thus arising to have been the principal circumstance that determined Aristotle to stay no longer in Athens; but there are also other reasons that may be assigned, arising out of his relations with the Macedonian royal family at a time when the Athenians and Philip had come into open enmity.
Whatever may be the explanation, he went in his thirty-seventh year, after a stay of nearly twenty years in Athens, to the Mysian town of Atarneus, opposite to the island of Lesbos. Here he lived with Hermeias, the despot of the town, a man of singular energy and ability, who had conquered his dominion for himself from the Persians, at that time masters of nearly all Asia Minor. Aristotle had taught him rhetoric at Athens, and he became in return the attached friend and admirer of his teacher. For three years the two lived together in the stronghold of Atarneus until the death of Hermeias at the hands of a treacherous enemy. Aristotle took refuge in
Mitylene, the chief city of Lesbos, taking with him Pythias, the sister or niece of Hermeias, whom he made his wife. In a noble ode he has commemorated the merits of his lost friend. His wife, Pythias, died a few years afterwards in Macedonia, leaving him a daughter of the same name. His son, Nicomachus—whose name, for whatever reason, has been given to the chief of the ethical writings that have come down to us among the works of Aristotle, the Nicomachean Ethics—was born to him at a later period of his life by a concubine.
After two years' stay at Mitylene, he was invited (in the year 342 B.C., age 42) by Philip to Macedonia, to educate his son Alexander, a boy of thirteen, who for at least three years was the pupil of Aristotle. The two parted finally when Alexander set forth on his expedition into Asia (334 B.C.), and Aristotle came from Macedonia to Athens, having recommended to the future conqueror, as a companion in his campaigns, the philosopher Callisthenes, whom he had educated along with Alexander. Now at the age of 50, he entered on the final epoch of his life; he opened a school called the 'Lyceum,' from its proximity to the temple of Apollo Lyceius. His followers came to be called the Peripatetics, either from his practice of walking up and down in the garden during his lectures, or because the place was known as 'The Walk' (Peripatos). The tradition that it was his habit to give a morning lecture to select pupils on the more abstruse subjects, and one in the evening of a more popular kind to a general audience, is based upon a mistake. This crowning period of his life lasted twelve years. After the death of Alexander, the anti-Macedonian party at Athens obtained the ascendancy, and among other consequences, an accusation was prepared against Aristotle, the pretext being impiety. With the fate of Socrates before his eyes, he chose a timely escape, and in the beginning of 322 B.C., took refuge at Chalcis in Eubœa, where, in the autumn of the same year, he died, aged 62. He had long been afflicted with indigestion, and ultimately sank under this malady.
Many of the details recorded of Aristotle's life, coming as they do from late and very uncritical authorities, must be considered uncertain; but the foregoing account may be accepted as in the main correct.
Of the numerous writings which have come down to us under the name of Aristotle, some are undoubtedly not his; some may be the products of his school, though not the direct work of the master himself. Even of his most famous and undisputed works, the structure is so irregular, and the style so unequal, that it has been with great probability supposed that they are to a large extent not finished writings, but notes and rough jottings edited by disciples, sometimes perhaps more reverent than judicious. There is indeed a story told by Strabo the geographer, who lived in the time of Augustus, that the works of Aristotle were first collected and edited by Andronicus of Rhodes (70 B.C.). How far this may account for the condition of 'our Aristotle' is a matter of dispute among scholars. We hear (e.g. from Cicero) of Dialogues written by Aristotle. Of these only a few unimportant fragments remain. They were probably written whilst he was still Plato's pupil. Those works which we possess all belong, apparently, to the last twelve years of his life (though the materials for them may have been collected previously), and it is therefore likely enough that many of them were left unfinished at his death. The commentaries written on some of these works by ancient scholars (e.g. Alexander of Aphrodisias, Themistius, Philoponus, Simplicius) during the early centuries of the Christian era, form of themselves a great mass of literature.
In the middle ages, Aristotle's philosophy became known to the learned in the Western Church, at first mainly through Arabian translations, which in their turn were translated into Latin. The Arabian philosophy (of Avicenna, 1000 A.D., and Averroës, 1150 A.D.) was based upon Aristotle, with the addition of Neoplatonic elements. At the time when what was supposed to be the Aristotelian system was (especially through the influence of Thomas Aquinas, died 1274 A.D.) dominant in Western Europe, Aristotle's works were hardly known to any one in the original; nor could they have been appreciated in an unscientific age. The Aristotelianism which the medieval schoolmen admiringly followed, and which, at a later time, Bacon and others as blindly attacked, was very different in spirit from the real philosophy of Aristotle. For the history of Aristotelianism in the middle ages, see SCHOLASTICISM.
The method and system of Aristotle are frequently supposed to be in complete contrast to those of his master Plato. It is said 'Plato was an idealist, Aristotle an empiricist,' &c. This is misleading: the difference is great in appearance mainly; and this appearance is partly due to Aristotle's habit of criticising Plato very severely, though, on the whole, the relation between the two philosophers has been well expressed by Sir Alexander Grant's phrase that 'Aristotle codified Plato.' There is certainly a great difference in temperament between them, and a very great difference in literary manner. Plato was a poet, and is always an artist, as well as a thinker, in his Dialogues. Aristotle, with the education of a physician, has the mental habits and tendencies of the man of science predominant; and while lacking Plato's inspiration and enthusiasm, has a wider, in fact, an all-embracing range of interests, and cares more for actual facts for their own sake. He appears to have projected what may be called an Encyclopædia of Philosophy, though the scheme is only imperfectly carried out in his works.
Aristotle distinguishes three kinds of thinking: (1) Theoretic; (2) Practical; (3) Productive. Corresponding to these we have three divisions of Philosophy: (1) Theoretic Philosophy is subdivided into (a) First Philosophy or Theology; (b) Mathematics; (c) Physics—i.e. the Philosophy of Nature. (2) Practical Philosophy is subdivided into (a) Ethics; (b) Economics (i.e. the practical science of household management, to which Chrematistic, the science of wealth, is only a subordinate science); (c) Politics. (3) Poetic (Productive) Philosophy, corresponding to what we should call the Philosophy of Art, would apparently be subdivided according to the different arts (painting, sculpture, poetry), but Aristotle has not specially treated of any branch except poetry.
Logic, which Aristotle himself calls 'analytic,' does not form a division of philosophy, but is rather a study of the method of scientific proof (which aims at truth). The term 'logical' Aristotle applies specially to dialectical argument (which aims at refutation of opponents). Aristotle's followers held (in opposition to the Stoics, who divided all philosophy into logic, physics, ethics) that logic was not a part of philosophy, but its 'instrument' (Organon). Hence this name was given to the Aristotelian treatises on the subject. In the subsequent history of the science, the most influential of these treatises have been the Categories (containing the famous list of ten classes of predicates, substance, quality, quantity, &c.) and the Prior Analytics (containing the doctrine of syllogistic moods and figures); but for the student of Aristotelian philosophy the most important is the Posterior Analytics, which contains his theory of knowledge and of scientific method. The defects which modern logicians have found in the Aristotelian logic are due mainly to the fact that the only science which in his day had reached a sufficiently advanced stage to have its method fairly analysed was the science of geometry. The analysis of its methods could hardly furnish an adequate account of the processes of reasoning in the less abstract sciences of nature. Formal deductive logic has hardly undergone any important modifications since Aristotle's time; but the so-called Aristotelian logicians have often had little enough of Aristotle's scientific spirit. Aristotle himself boasts with truth that in working out the theory of reasoning (syllogism is only the Greek term for 'reasoning' or 'inference') he had no predecessors.
In the Rhetoric, Aristotle deals with the art of persuasion. In this subject he had predecessors; but most subsequent treatises have added little to what he has said. This work, though usually classed along with the Poetics, since both deal with literature, may also be properly connected with the logical writings, the longest of which, the Topics, deals with dialectical argument and reasoning from probabilities.
The name Metaphysics (i.e. 'after the Physics') was given to Aristotle's discussions on 'first philosophy,' because they were placed by his editors after his books about nature. The work is in a very confused condition, and is in consequence extremely difficult. It begins with a sketch of preceding Greek philosophy, leading up to a criticism of Plato's doctrine of 'ideas' or universals. In opposition to Plato, Aristotle insists that reality is to be found only in individual things, each of which is a combination of Form (the universal element) and Matter; but his own doctrine, that knowledge can only be of universals, is the same as Plato's, though stripped of Plato's paradoxical modes of expression. His most important advance beyond Plato consists in his thoroughgoing application of the distinction of the potential and the actual. Actuality (realisation) and potentiality correspond to form and matter respectively, but the former terms are dynamical, the latter statical. All being he regards as a continuous ascending scale from mere matter (about which, because it is quite destitute of form, we can say nothing) up to the pure actuality, or 'thought thinking itself,' which he calls God. (Hence the name Theology also given to the 'first philosophy'—'first,' because it deals with the highest and ultimate problems of being.) Any individual object is intermediate between these two extremes, though at different stages—e.g. a block of marble is less formed, less actualised, than the statue made of it. In trying to understand or explain any individual object, we must consider it in four ways: (1) What are the material conditions of its existence? (2) What is its form or essential character as formed or realised? (3) Through what agency does it come into being? (4) What is the end or result attained by it? This is the famous doctrine of the 'Four Causes,' called respectively material, formal, efficient, final.
The books called the Physics deal mainly with what we should call the metaphysical aspects of movement (under which conception Aristotle includes growth and qualitative change), time, place, &c. Aristotle's application of his speculations about motion to a theory of the physical universe, exercised a bad influence (especially in the case of astronomy) on those whose admiration led them to accept his opinions as unquestionable dogmas.
The subject of mathematics he does not expressly treat himself, that science having already become sufficiently specialised and separated from the other departments of human thought. His works on Animals, though now possessing only an antiquarian interest, prove him to have been a close and acute observer of nature so far as, in the absence of all scientific aids to observation, his limited opportunities went; nor did he, as often alleged, neglect experiment, though doubtless not fully aware of its importance. Many modern biologists have been ready to bear testimony to the genuinely scientific character of his observations; and, indeed, his metaphysical theory provided him with an evolutionary conception of nature such as has only been recovered in recent times. His book On the Soul is as much a biological as a psychological treatise (for 'soul' means for him the vital principle in plants and animals, of which the thinking human soul is only the highest stage); yet in this treatise he may be regarded as the founder of psychology as a distinct science. In one of his shorter treatises, which deals with memory, he gave a first statement of the law of association of ideas.
His Ethics and Politics, though apparently less studied, at least less commented on, in antiquity than his other works, have in medieval and modern times exercised an enormous influence. Thus his conceptions of the various virtues and vices have, because of their adoption by St Thomas Aquinas and other medieval doctors, passed into European literature—e.g. in Dante, Spenser, &c. At the revival of letters, and at the Reformation, when antipathy to medieval theology caused a general disparagement of Aristotle's philosophy, Aristotle's Politics exercised a direct influence on the rise of modern political philosophy; it even helped to keep alive ideals of political liberty in an age when rulers were becoming more absolute and despotic. Aristotle is said to have made a collection of 158 'Constitutions,' as a preparation for writing his Politics: of these the most important was the Constitution of Athens (see below). The Economics are not considered to be a work of Aristotle's own. His observations on the subject are to be found in Book I. of the Politics. In his remarks on Chrematistic (Pol. i. 8-11) are to be found the first germs of the science now called 'Political Economy.'
The Poetics is an incomplete work, and contains little more than a discussion of tragedy; but even so, few, if any, books on literary criticism have had more influence—and here, as elsewhere in the case of Aristotle, partly through misunderstandings. The famous doctrine of 'the three dramatic unities' is not in the Poetics. Only the unity of plot is insisted on by him.
The great edition of Aristotle is still that of Bekker, published by the Prussian Royal Academy (Berlin, 1831-40). Aristotle is now generally quoted by scholars according to the pages, columns, and lines of this edition. Bekker's text has been reprinted at Oxford (1837; 11 vols. 8vo). The Berlin edition also includes Latin translations, Scholia edited by Brandis, and a complete Index by Bonitz. The best edition of the ancient commentaries is that published at Berlin in 25 vols. There are excellent critical texts of some parts of Aristotle (Eth., Pol., De An.) published by Teubner, Leipzig. In Germany there has been a great succession of Aristotelian scholars, who have edited, translated, and expounded portions of his writings—e.g. Bonitz (ed. Metaph.), Schwegler (ed. and trans. Metaph.), Trendelenburg (ed. De An.), Torstrik (ed. De An.), Waitz (ed. Organon), Susmühl (ed. and trans. Politics), &c. The French version of St Hilaire is readable, but untrustworthy. In English there is no good or even tolerable translation of all Aristotle. The Nicomachean Ethics has been edited with essays and commentary by Sir A. Grant, who also wrote the article 'Aristotle' in Ency. Brit., 9th ed., and Aristotle in Black- wood's series of Ancient Classics for English Readers: the best translation is by Peters. The Politics has been translated by Jowett (with introduction and notes) and by Welldon. The Rhetoric has been edited by Cope and translated by Welldon. The Poetics has been translated by Twining (printed in Donaldson's Greek Theatre) and by Wharton (Oxford 1883), edited with notes by Moore (Oxford, 1875). The De Anima has been translated and expounded by E. Wallace, who also wrote Outlines of the Philosophy of Aristotle. Poste's translation of Post. Anal. and edition of Soph. Elench., and Dr Ogle's translation of The Parts of Animals, may also be named among the few good English works on Aristotle. For general accounts of Aristotle's philosophy, besides the writings of Grant and Wallace already mentioned, there are Grote's Aristotle (though only the Organon is treated in any detail), and Zeller's History of Greek Philosophy.—The Constitution of Athens, of which only fragments had been known, was discovered almost complete in a papyrus from the Fayum in the British Museum, of which the text, followed by a fac-simile, were published by F. G. Kenyon in 1891. Improved texts were issued by Kaibel and Wilamowitz-Moellendorff (Berlin, 1891), and by Van Herwerden and Leeuwen (Leyden, 1891); and English translations by Kenyon, Dymes, and Poste. The elaborate edition by J. E. Sandys (1893) accepts the text as mainly the work of Aristotle himself, and as the book studied and quoted in antiquity as his, portions being possibly due to a pupil. Others have tried to make out that it is mainly the work of a pupil. See SOLON.