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 first Greek Christians to comment extensively on Aristotle were John Philoponus, Elias, and David in the sixth century, and Stephen of Alexandria in the early seventh century.

The Italian poet Dante says of Aristotle in the first circles of hell,

In 1989 the first part of his On Aristotle Metaphysics was published as part of the Ancient commentators project.

While Aristotle likewise identifies the first two characteristics, St. Thomas conceives of the third as an appropriation from principles developed by neo-Platonic and Augustinian thinkers.

The challenge to the assumption that beauty was central to art and aesthetics, thought to be original, is actually continuous with older aesthetic theory ; Aristotle was the first in the Western tradition to classify " beauty " into types as in his theory of drama, and Kant made a distinction between beauty and the sublime.

He was part of the generation that first grappled with the writings of Aristotle.

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.

Plato and Aristotle, depicted here in Raphael's The School of Athens, both developed first cause arguments.

Plato ( c. 427 – 347 BC ) and Aristotle ( c. 384 – 322 BC ) both posited first cause arguments, though each had certain notable caveats.

Aristotle argued against the idea of a first cause, often confused with the idea of a " prime mover " or " unmoved mover " ( or primus motor ) in his Physics and Metaphysics.

Aristotle's famous argument was contrary to the atomist's depiction of a non-eternal cosmos which, he argued, would require an efficient first cause, a notion that Aristotle took to demonstrate a critical flaw in their reasoning.

In what he called " first philosophy " or metaphysics, Aristotle did intend a theological correspondence between the prime mover and deity ( presumably Zeus ); functionally, however, he provided an explanation for the apparent motion of the " fixed stars " ( now understood as the daily rotation of the Earth ).

Ancient Greek philosophers such as Hippocrates and Aristotle were among the first to record observations on natural history.

The word energy derives from the Greek, which possibly appears for the first time in the work of Aristotle in the 4th century BCE.

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 ").

Aristotle ( Metaphysics 983b – 987a ) believed that the question of first causes may even have started with Hesiod ( Theogony 116 – 53 ) and Homer ( Iliad 14. 201, 246 ).

His principal translation embraced the first five books of Averroes ' " intermediate " commentary on Aristotle's Logic, consisting of the Introduction of Porphyry and the four books of Aristotle on the Categories, Interpretation, Syllogism, and Demonstration.

Authors are in disagreement as to when exactly the games were first instituted: Aristotle is said to have ranked the Lykaion games fourth in order of institution after the Eleusinia, the Panathenaia, and the Argive games, while Pausanias argues for the Lykaian competition ’ s priority to the Panathenaia.

Aristotle spoke about a ' first philosophy ' which was the most general science and a ' second philosophy ' which dealt with nature ( or ' physis ').

However, Aristotle himself did not call the subject of these books " Metaphysics ": he referred to it as " first philosophy.

The first known philosopher, according to Aristotle, is Thales of Miletus, who taught that all things derive from a single first cause or Arche.