Aristotle (, Aristotélēs ) ( 384 BC – 322 BC ) was a Greek philosopher and polymath, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great.

Aristotle was well known among medieval Muslim intellectuals and revered as المعلم الأول-" The First Teacher ".

Aristotle, whose name means " the best purpose ," was born in Stageira, Chalcidice, in 384 BC, about east of modern-day Thessaloniki.

Aristotle was trained and educated as a member of the aristocracy.

Soon after Hermias ' death, Aristotle was invited by Philip II of Macedon to become the tutor to his son Alexander in 343 BC.

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

Aristotle encouraged Alexander toward eastern conquest, and his attitude towards Persia was unabashedly ethnocentric.

It has been suggested that Aristotle was probably the last person to know everything there was to be known in his own time.

With the Prior Analytics, Aristotle is credited with the earliest study of formal logic, and his conception of it was the dominant form of Western logic until 19th century advances in mathematical logic.

Although his respect for Aristotle was diminished as his travels made it clear that much of Aristotle's geography was clearly wrong, when the old philosopher released his works to the public, Alexander complained " Thou hast not done well to publish thy acroamatic doctrines ; for in what shall I surpass other men if those doctrines wherein I have been trained are to be all men's common property?

Aristotle was one of the most revered Western thinkers in early Islamic theology.

The title " teacher " was first given to Aristotle by Muslim scholars, and was later used by Western philosophers ( as in the famous poem of Dante ) who were influenced by the tradition of Islamic philosophy.

With the loss of the study of ancient Greek in the early medieval Latin West, Aristotle was practically unknown there from c. AD 600 to c. 1100 except through the Latin translation of the Organon made by Boethius.

Throughout European history, philosophers such as Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, among others, contemplated the possibility that souls exist in animals, plants, and people ; however, the currently accepted definition of animism was only developed in the 19th century by Sir Edward Tylor, who created it as " one of anthropology's earliest concepts, if not the first ".

Albertus was the first to comment on virtually all of the writings of Aristotle, thus making them accessible to wider academic debate.

Most modern knowledge of Aristotle was preserved and presented by Albertus.

His industry in every department was great, and though we find in his system many gaps which are characteristic of scholastic philosophy, his protracted study of Aristotle gave him a great power of systematic thought and exposition.

The press was started by Aldus based on his love of classics, and at first printed new copies of Plato, Aristotle, and other Greek and Latin classics.

200 AD ) was a Peripatetic philosopher and the most celebrated of the Ancient Greek commentators on the writings of Aristotle.

His commentaries on Aristotle were considered so useful that he was styled, by way of pre-eminence, " the commentator " ( ὁ ἐξηγητής ).

He was a student of the two Stoic, or possibly Peripatetic, philosophers Sosigenes and Herminus, and perhaps of Aristotle of Mytilene.

By the 6th century Alexander's commentaries on Aristotle were considered so useful that he was referred to as " the commentator " ().

The Chicago contingent of modern critics follow Aristotle so far in this direction that it is hard to see how they can compare one poem with another for the purpose of evaluation.

For one thing, Aristotle mentions that plays may corrupt the audience.

Together with Plato and Socrates ( Plato's teacher ), Aristotle is one of the most important founding figures in Western philosophy.

Russell notes that these errors make it difficult to do historical justice to Aristotle, until one remembers how large of an advance he made upon all of his predecessors.

He apprehended well the views of each of the two philosophers and Aristotle and brought them under one and the same nous and transmitted philosophy without conflicts to all of his disciples, and especially to the best of those acquainted with him, Plotinus, Origen, and their successors.

Aristotle ( ca 350 BC ) was one of the first in recorded history to make a formal distinction between ordinary law and constitutional law, establishing ideas of constitution and constitutionalism, and attempting to classify different forms of constitutional government.

Thomas Aquinas ( c. 1225 – 1274 ), a theologian in Medieval Europe, adapted the argument he found in his reading of Aristotle and Avicenna to form one of the most influential versions of the cosmological argument.

To be truly human, one had to be an active citizen to the community, which Aristotle famously expressed: “ To take no part in the running of the community's affairs is to be either a beast or a god !” This form of citizenship was based on obligations of citizens towards the community, rather than rights given to the citizens of the community.

Aristotle was considered to give a more important position to sense perception than Plato, and commentators in the middle ages summarized one of his positions as " nihil in intellectu nisi prius fuerit in sensu " ( Latin for " nothing in the intellect without first being in the senses ").

Early medieval writers often had fuzzy and imprecise impressions of both Ptolemy and Aristotle and relied more on Pliny, but they felt ( with one exception ), little urge to assume flatness.

Prior to this work, the concept of a set was a rather elementary one that had been used implicitly since the beginnings of mathematics, dating back to the ideas of Aristotle.

" Whereas Aristotle states that one or other of two contradictory propositions must be false, the Kantian law states that a particular kind of proposition is in itself necessarily false.

This is one of the fallacies identified by Aristotle in his Organon.

Whereas the " higher " law Aristotle suggested one could appeal to was emphatically natural, in contradistinction to being the result of divine positive legislation, the Stoic natural law was indifferent to the divine or natural source of the law: the Stoics asserted the existence of a rational and purposeful order to the universe ( a divine or eternal law ), and the means by which a rational being lived in accordance with this order was the natural law, which spelled out action that accorded with virtue.

" To support these findings, the assembled judges ( as reported by Coke, who was one of them ) cited as authorities Aristotle, Cicero, and the Apostle Paul ; as well as Bracton, Fortescue, and St. Germain.

Kant claimed it was Hume ’ s skepticism about the nature of inductive reasoning and the conclusions of rationalist metaphysicians ( Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz ) that " roused him from his dogmatic ( i. e. rationalist ) slumbers " and spurred him on to one of the most far reaching re-evaluations of human reason since Aristotle.

He is sometimes credited, mainly starting in the 19th century, as one of the earliest European advocates of the modern scientific method inspired by the works of Aristotle and later pseudo-Aristotelian works, like the works of Muslim scientist Alhazen.

" No one in the history of civilization has shaped our understanding of science and natural philosophy more than the great Greek philosopher and scientist Aristotle ( 384-322 BC ), who exerted a profound and pervasive influence for more than two thousand years " — Gary B. Ferngren

Aristotle argued for the existence of one or more unmoved movers to serve as nature's role models and constant inspiration ( see Prime Mover and Daimon ).

So Aristotle suggested only one unity — that of action — but the prevalent interpretation of his Poetics during the Middle Ages already inclined toward interpreting his comment on time as another " unity ".

Aristotle ( peri ouravou, i. 9, 15 ) says: " The period which includes the whole time of one's life is called the aeon of each one.

To explain such patterns, one might conclude, per Aristotle, that emergent structures are more than the sum of their parts on the assumption that the emergent order will not arise if the various parts simply interact independently of one another.