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

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 " ().

Most of the still extant works of Aristotle, as well as a number of the original Greek commentaries, were translated into Arabic and studied by Muslim philosophers, scientists and scholars.

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.

Journalist Bee Wilson states that the image of a community of honey bees " occurs from ancient to modern times, in Aristotle and Plato ; in Virgil and Seneca ; in Erasmus and Shakespeare ; Tolstoy, as well as by social theorists Bernard Mandeville and Karl Marx.

These paradoxes were very well known in ancient times, some are alluded to by Eubulides ' contemporary Aristotle and even partially by Plato.

In it Anatoli manifests a wide acquaintance not only with the classic Jewish exegetes, but also with Plato, Aristotle, Averroes, and the Vulgate, as well as with a large number of Christian institutions, some of which he ventures to criticize, such as celibacy and monastic castigation, as well as certain heretics ( compare 15a, 98a, 115a ); and he repeatedly appeals to his readers for a broader cultivation of the classic languages and the profane branches of learning.

" 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.

He returned to Alexandria, and began determinedly studying the works of Aristotle under Olympiodorus the Elder ( he also began studying mathematics during this period as well with a teacher named Heron ( no relation to Hero of Alexandria who was also known as Heron ).

However, Johnson was well aware that Aristotle had only recommended the unity of action, and knew that rules must serve drama, not vice versa:

Aristotle responded to these paradoxes by developing the notion of a potential countable infinity, as well as the infinitely divisible continuum.

Empiricism ( sometimes associated with Aristotle but more correctly associated with British philosophers such as John Locke and David Hume, as well as their ancient equivalents such as Democritus ) asserts that sensory impressions are the only available starting points for reasoning and attempting to attain truth.

* The use of diving bells is recorded by the Greek philosopher Aristotle in the 4th century BC: "... they enable the divers to respire equally well by letting down a cauldron, for this does not fill with water, but retains the air, for it is forced straight down into the water.

Scientific racism began to flourish in the eighteenth century and was greatly influenced by Charles Darwin ’ s evolutionary studies, as well as ideas taken from the writings of philosophers like Aristotle ; for example, Aristotle believed in the concept of “ natural slaves ”.

That he not only wrote, but taught, is proved by the address to his hearers in the commentary on the Physica Auscultatio of Aristotle, as well as by the title of his commentary on the Categories.

But for them, we should be without the most important fragments of the writings of the Eleatics, of Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Diogenes of Apollonia, and others, which were at that time already very scarce, as well as without many extracts from the lost books of Aristotle, Theophrastus and Eudemus: but for them we should hardly be able to unriddle the doctrine of the Categories, so important for the system of the Stoics.

Double pipes, such as those used by the ancient Greeks, and ancient bagpipes, as well as a review of ancient drawings on vases and walls, etc., and ancient writings ( such as in Aristotle, Problems, Book XIX. 12 ) which described musical techniques of the time, indicate polyphony.

Individual publishers often have their own in-house variations as well, and some works are so long-established as to have their own citation methods too: Stephanus pagination for Plato ; Bekker numbers for Aristotle ; citing the Bible by book, chapter and verse ; or Shakespeare notation by play, act and scene.

Anatoli wrote the Malmad exhibiting his broad knowledge of classic Jewish exegetes, as well as Plato, Aristotle, Averroes, and the Vulgate, as well as with a large number of Christian institutions, some of which he ventures to criticize, such as celibacy and monastic castigation, as well as certain heretics and he repeatedly appeals to his readers for a broader cultivation of the classic languages and the non-Jewish branches of learning.

993a ) ( though Aristotle might as well be referring to a pronunciation ).

In the Nicomachean Ethics, written in 350 BCE, Aristotle stated that happiness ( also being well and doing well ) is the only thing that humans desire for its own sake, unlike riches, honor, health or friendship.

Ptolemy and Aristotle theorised that light either shone from the eye to illuminate objects or that light emanated from objects themselves, whereas al-Haytham ( known by the Latin name Alhazen ) suggested that light travels to the eye in rays from different points on an object.

While empirical investigations of the natural world have been described since classical antiquity ( for example, by Thales, Aristotle, and others ), and scientific methods have been employed since the Middle Ages ( for example, by Ibn al-Haytham, Abū Rayhān al-Bīrūnī and Roger Bacon ), the dawn of modern science is generally traced back to the early modern period, during what is known as the Scientific Revolution that took place in 16th and 17th century Europe.

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

Leo Strauss argued that the strong influence of Xenophon, a student of Socrates more known as an historian, rhetorician and soldier, was a major source of Socratic ideas for Machiavelli, sometimes not in line with Aristotle.

The critical thinking of Aristotle and his emphasis on the relationship between structure and function marked the beginning of physiology in Ancient Greece, while Claudius Galenus ( c. 126-199 A. D .), known as Galen, was the first to use experiments to probe the function of the body.

Its best known definition comes from Aristotle, who considers it a counterpart of both logic and politics, and calls it " the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion.

Aristotle also identifies three different types or genres of civic rhetoric: forensic ( also known as judicial, was concerned with determining truth or falsity of events that took place in the past, issues of guilt ), deliberative ( also known as political, was concerned with determining whether or not particular actions should or should not be taken in the future ), and epideictic ( also known as ceremonial, was concerned with praise and blame, values, right and wrong, demonstrating beauty and skill in the present ).

* Edwin Black was a rhetorical critic best known for his book Rhetorical Criticism: A Study in Method ( 1965 ) in which he criticized the dominant " neo-Aristotelian " tradition in American rhetorical criticism as having little in common with Aristotle " besides some recurrent topics of discussion and a vaguely derivative view of rhetorical discourse.

As Newton attests, the Principia's first law of motion was known in antiquity, even by Aristotle, although its significance, as such, went unappreciated.

The origins of what has come to be known as Occam's razor are traceable to the works of earlier philosophers such as John Duns Scotus ( 1265 – 1308 ), Maimonides ( Moses ben-Maimon, 1138 – 1204 ), and even Aristotle ( 384 – 322 BC ) ( Charlesworth 1956 ).

The first known classical logician who didn't fully accept the law of excluded middle was Aristotle ( who, ironically, is also generally considered to be the first classical logician and the " father of logic ").

The first known definition in the West is by Aristotle around 350 BC, in his book Prior Analytics, where he classified it as a material fallacy.

The camera obscura has been known to scholars since the time of Mozi ( Mo-Ti ) and Aristotle.

Most of these sophists are known today primarily through the writings of their opponents ( specifically Plato and Aristotle ), which makes it difficult to assemble an unbiased view of their practices and beliefs.

They contributed to making Aristotle known in Christian Europe.

Aristotle had postulated a symmetry of the earth, which meant that there would be equally habitable lands south of the known world.

One of Plato's students, Aristotle, is known to have also been an experimentalist, and may have taken the concept up from his teacher's teacher.

Fragments of early proofs are preserved in the works of Plato and Aristotle, and the idea of a deductive system was probably known in the Pythagorean school and the Platonic Academy.

This theory of deductive reasoning – also known as term logic – was developed by Aristotle, but was superseded by propositional ( sentential ) logic and predicate logic.