Full Name: Aristoteles.
Known as: Aristotle.

Father: Nicomachus (physician to the King of Macedonia).
Mother: Phaestis.
Children: Nicomachus, Pythias.

Date of Birth: 384 BC.
Birth Place: Stageira, Chalcidice.

Date of Death: 322 BC (aged 61 or 62).
Death Place: Euboea.
Cause of Death: Unspecified.

Gender: Male
Race or Ethnicity: White.
Occupation: Philosopher, Scientist.
Nationality: Greek.
Era: Ancient philosophy.
Region: Western philosophy.
Education: Plato's Academy, Lyceum.
School: Peripatetic school, Aristotelianism.

Notable Ideas: Golden mean, Reason, Logic, Syllogism, Passion.

Main Interests: Physics, Metaphysics, Poetry, Theatre, Music, Rhetoric, Politics, Government, Ethics, Biology, Zoology.

Aristotle, one of Plato's greatest students, was born in 384 BC. Aristotle's father was a physician to the king of Macedonia, and when Aristotle was seven years old, his father sent him to study at the Academy. He was there at the beginning as a student, then became a researcher and finally a teacher. He seemed to adopt and developed Platonic ideas while there and to have expressed them in dialogue form. When Plato died, Plato willed the Academy not to Aristotle, but to his nephew Speusippus. Aristotle then left Athens with Xenocrates to go to Assos, in Asia Minor, where he opened a branch of the Academy. This Academy focused more on biology than its predecessor which relied on mathematics.

Early Life: The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle was born circa 384 B.C. in Stagira, a small town on the northern coast of Greece that was once a seaport. Aristotle’s father, Nicomachus, was a court physician to the Macedonian king Amyntas II. Although Nicomachus died when Aristotle was just a young boy, Aristotle remained closely affiliated with and influenced by the Macedonian court for the rest of his life. Little is known about his mother, Phaestis; she is also believed to have died when Aristotle was young.

After Aristotle’s father died, Proxenus of Atarneus, who was married to Aristotle’s older sister, Arimneste, became Aristotle’s guardian until he came of age. When Aristotle turned 17, Proxenus sent him to Athens to pursue higher education. At the time, Athens was considered the academic centre of the universe. In Athens, Aristotle enrolled in Plato’s Academy, Greek’s premier learning institution, and proved an exemplary scholar. Aristotle maintained a relationship with the Greek philosopher Plato, himself a student of Socrates, and his academy for two decades. Plato died in 347 B.C. Because Aristotle had disagreed with some of Plato’s philosophical treatises, Aristotle did not inherit the position of director of the academy, as many imagined he would.

Major Writings: Aristotle wrote an estimated 200 works, most in the form of notes and manuscript drafts. They consist of dialogues, records of scientific observations and systematic works. His student Theophrastus reportedly looked after Aristotle’s writings and later passed them to his own student Neleus, who stored them in a vault to protect them from moisture until they were taken to Rome and used by scholars there. Of Aristotle’s estimated 200 works, only 31 are still in circulation. Most date to Aristotle’s time at the Lyceum.

The writings of Aristotle may be said to have embraced the whole circle of knowledge of his time. Many of them are lost; of those that remain the most important are the "Organon," or "Logic," "Rhetoric," "Poetics" and "Meteorology." His Organon or Logic is his complete development of formal reasoning and is the basis and nearly the whole substance of syllogistic or scholastic logic. This science he almost entirely created, He may also be said to have created natural science. In his great work on Animals, he amassed a stock of genuine observations and introduced a method of classification, which continues to this day. His treatises on Rhetoric and Poetics were the earliest development of the Philosophy of Criticism, and still, continue to be studied. The same remark is applicable to his elaborate work on Ethics.

The philosophy of Aristotle differed from that of Plato on many points, especially in the fundamental doctrine termed the Theory of Ideas. The Platonic "ideas" or "forms," were conceived as real existences. Aristotle was opposed to this doctrine; his whole method was in marked contrast to that of Plato and consisted of the principle that all philosophy must be founded on the observation of facts. He first established the philosophical notions of "matter," "form," "time" and "space," and first argued for the necessary existence of God as the ultimate cause of all things. No other philosopher can be named whose influence has been so far-reaching and so long continued.

Death and Legacy: In 322 B.C., just a year after he fled to Chalcis to escape prosecution under charges of impiety, Aristotle contracted a disease of the digestive organs and died. In the century following his passing, his works fell out of use but were revived during the first century. Over time, they came to lay the foundation of more than seven centuries of philosophy. Solely regarding his influence on philosophy, Aristotle’s work influenced ideas from late antiquity all the way through the Renaissance. Aristotle’s influence on Western thought in the humanities and social sciences is largely considered unparalleled, with the exception of his teacher Plato’s contributions, and Plato’s teacher Socrates before him. The two-millennia-strong ac.