Aristotle

384-322 BCE · Greek (Stagira, Macedon) · Ethics, Metaphysics, Politics, Logic, Natural Philosophy

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.

Aristotle came to Athens at seventeen to study under Plato and stayed for twenty years — yet when his teacher died, the Academy passed to another, and Aristotle left to chart his own course. He dissected animals, catalogued constitutions, and tutored the boy who would become Alexander the Great before founding his own school at the Lyceum. Where Plato looked beyond the world to eternal Forms, Aristotle turned to the world itself, convinced that understanding begins with careful attention to particular things.

Topics Aristotle addresses

• eudaimonia
• the doctrine of the mean
• arete
• phronesis
• the function argument
• theoria
• the four causes
• substance
• hylomorphism
• form and matter
• actuality and potentiality
• final causation
• teleology
• the unmoved mover
• the ten categories
• syllogistic logic
• demonstrative science
• first principles
• nous
• the polis as natural community
• man as a political animal
• natural slavery
• the active intellect
• psyche

Converse with Aristotle on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in Aristotle's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.