The word `` mimesis '' ( `` imitation '' ) is usually associated with Plato and Aristotle.

But Aristotle kept the principle of levels and even augmented it by describing in the Poetics what kinds of character and action must be imitated if the play is to be a vehicle of serious and important human truths.

For both Plato and Aristotle artistic mimesis, in contrast to the power of dialectic, is relatively incapable of expressing the character of fundamental reality.

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.

In his study Samuel Johnson, Joseph Wood Krutch takes this line when he says that what Aristotle really means by his theory of catharsis is that our evil passions may be so purged by the dramatic ritual that it is `` less likely that we shall indulge them through our own acts ''.

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

Though Aristotle wrote many elegant treatises and dialogues ( Cicero described his literary style as " a river of gold "), it is thought that the majority of his writings are now lost and only about one-third of the original works have survived.

It is during this period in Athens from 335 to 323 BC when Aristotle is believed to have composed many of his works.

A widespread tradition in antiquity suspected Aristotle of playing a role in Alexander's death, but there is little evidence for this.

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.

Aristotle is referred to as " The Philosopher " by Scholastic thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas.

It is Martin Heidegger, not Nietzsche, who elaborated a new interpretation of Aristotle, intended to warrant his deconstruction of scholastic and philosophical tradition.

The secondary literature on Aristotle is vast.

Aristotle ( 384-322 BC ) understood that sound consisted of contractions and expansions of the air " falling upon and striking the air which is next to it ...", a very good expression of the nature of wave motion.

On the Soul ( De anima ) is a treatise on the soul written along the lines suggested by Aristotle in his own De anima.

The work is a discussion of ethical issues based on Aristotle, and contains responses to questions and problems deriving from Alexander's school.

It is noteworthy that Socrates ( Plato, Phaedo, 98 B ) accuses Anaxagoras of failing to differentiate between nous and psyche, while Aristotle ( Metaphysics, Book I ) objects that his nous is merely a deus ex machina to which he refuses to attribute design and knowledge.

We know little more of the life of Andronicus, but he is of special interest in the history of philosophy, from the statement of Plutarch, that he published a new edition of the works of Aristotle and Theophrastus, which formerly belonged to the library of Apellicon, and were brought to Rome by Sulla with the rest of Apellicon's library in 84 BC.

Payment for jurors was introduced around 462 BC and is ascribed to Pericles, a feature described by Aristotle as fundamental to radical democracy ( Politics 1294a37 ).

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.

Aristotle is also quite frequently quoted in Alexander's works.

Aristotle categorized the virtues as moral and intellectual.

The Western tradition of inquiry into the existence of God began with Plato and Aristotle, who made arguments for God's existence that would now be categorized as cosmological arguments.

Aristotle categorized causality into four subsets in the Metaphysics, which is an integral part of Thomism:

Thus, although many religions may not recognize the difference, for Aristotle and many philosophers hubris is altogether an entirely different thing from pride.

In Book VII, Aristotle discusses self-mastery, or the difference between what people decide to do, and what they actually do.

Instead, at the invitation of some Florentine humanists he set up a temporary school to lecture on the difference between Plato and Aristotle.

Buridan used the theory of impetus to give an accurate qualitative account of the motion of projectiles but he ultimately saw his theory as a correction to Aristotle, maintaining core peripatetic beliefs including a fundamental qualitative difference between motion and rest.

One important difference between Epicurus ’ eudaimonism and that of Plato and Aristotle is that for the latter virtue is a constituent of eudaimonia, whereas Epicurus makes virtue a means to happiness.

To this difference, consider Aristotle ’ s theory.

Aristotle mentions him as nearly contemporary with Pythagoras, but distinguishes between the stoicheia () of opposites, under which the Pythagoreans included all things ; and the double principle of Alcmaeon, according to Aristotle, less extended, although he does not explain the precise difference.

* Nader El-Bizri, " Avicenna's De Anima between Aristotle and Husserl ," in The Passions of the Soul in the Metamorphosis of Becoming, ed.

Aristotle had arrived at the real distinction between matter and form, metaphysical components whose interpenetration produces the paradox.

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.

According to Aristotle, air is both hot and wet and occupies a place between fire and water among the elemental spheres.

According to Aristotle, water is both cold and wet and occupies a place between air and earth among the elemental spheres.

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 ).

The idea that a definition should state the essence of a thing led to the distinction between nominal and real essence, originating with Aristotle.

It depicts pagan sages at the foot of the Tree of Jesse, with Galen between the Sibyl and Aristotle.

Originally Aristotle divided all living things between plants, which generally do not move fast enough for humans to notice, and animals.

Against the conventionalism that the distinction between nature and custom could engender, Socrates and his philosophic heirs, Plato and Aristotle, posited the existence of natural justice or natural right ( dikaion physikon, δικαιον φυσικον, Latin ius naturale ).

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.

Derrida utilized, like Heidegger, references to Greek philosophical notions associated with the Skeptics and the Presocratics, such as Epoché and Aporia to articulate his notion of implicit circularity between premises and conclusions, origins and manifestations, but-in a manner analogous in certain respects to Gilles Deleuze-presented a radical re-reading of canonical philosophical figures such as Plato, Aristotle and Descartes as themselves being informed by such " destabilizing " notions.

In ancient medicine there was a dispute between the one-seed theory, expounded by Aristotle, and the two-seed theory of the 2nd century A. D. Roman physician Galen.

The contemporary neo-Aristotelian and neo-Sophistic positions on rhetoric mirror the division between the Sophists and Aristotle.

Plato and Aristotle both explored the relationship between signs and the world, and Augustine considered the nature of the sign within a conventional system.

Aristotle distinguished between four causes, or four explanations, that each answer the question " why?

Aristotle distinguished between infinity in respect to addition and in respect to division.

Aristotle also distinguished between actual and potential infinities.

For six years he lectured on mathematics and dialectics, apparently dividing his time between Oxford and Paris, and helped introduce the study of Aristotle.

A ducal commission, appointed to find a way of ending the interminable strife between rival academic parties, asked Eck to prepare fresh commentaries on Aristotle and Petrus Hispanus.

Furthermore, Aristotle documented anatomical and behavioral differences between fish and marine mammals.

Philosophers, mathematicians, and others ancient and modern such as Aristotle, Plato, Frege, Wittgenstein, Russell etc., have made a distinction between thought corresponding to reality, coherent abstractions, and that which cannot even be rationally thought.