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Home  »  library  »  BIOS  »  Aristotle (384–322 B.C.)

C.D. Warner, et al., comp.
The Library of the World’s Best Literature. An Anthology in Thirty Volumes. 1917.

Aristotle (384–322 B.C.)

Aristotle (ar’is-totl). The most renowned of Greek philosophers; born at Stagira, Macedonia, 384 B.C.; died at Chalcis, Eubœa, 322 B.C. He was for twenty years a student of philosophy in the school of Plato at Athens, but at the same time a teacher, in the meantime mastering and digesting all the accessible results of philosophical and scientific research and speculation in his time. After Plato’s death, he opened a school of philosophy at the court of Hermias, king of Atarneus in Mysia, who had been his fellow student in Plato’s Academy, and whose adopted daughter he afterwards married. At the invitation of Philip of Macedon he undertook the education of his son, Alexander. When Alexander succeeded to the throne, the philosopher returned to Athens and opened a school in the Lyceum, so called from the neighboring temple of the Lycian Apollo. From being held in the covered walk (peripatos) of the Lyceum the school obtained the name of the Peripatetic. He taught in the Lyceum for thirteen years, and to that period we owe the composition of most of his numerous writings. The number of his separate treatises is given by Diogenes Laertius as 146: only 46 separate works bearing the name of the philosopher have come down to our time. (See Critical and Biographical Introduction).