Learning about Aristotle

Aristotle was born in 384 BCE at Stagirus, a now extinct Greek colony and seaport on the coast of Thrace. His father Nichomachus was court physician to King Amyntas of Macedonia, and from this began Aristotle's long association with the Macedonian Court, which considerably influenced his life. While he was still a boy his father died. At age 17 his guardian, Proxenus, sent him to Athens, the intellectual center of the world, to complete his education. He joined the Academy and studied under Plato, attending his lectures for a period of twenty years. In the later years of his association with Plato and the Academy he began to lecture on his own account, especially on the subject of rhetoric. At the death of Plato in 347, the pre-eminent ability of Aristotle would seem to have designated him to succeed to the leadership of the Academy. But his divergence from Plato's teaching was too great to make this possible, and Plato's nephew Speusippus was chosen instead. At the invitation of his friend Hermeas, ruler of Atarneus and Assos in Mysia, Aristotle left for his court. He stayed three years and, while there, married Pythias, the niece of the King.
In later life he was married a second time to a woman named Herpyllis, who bore him a son, Nichomachus. At the end of three years Hermeas was overtaken by the Persians, and Aristotle went to Mytilene. At the invitation of Philip of Macedonia he became the tutor of his 13 year old son Alexander (later world conqueror); he did this for the next five years. Both Philip and Alexander appear to have paid Aristotle high honor, and there were stories that Aristotle was supplied by the Macedonian court, not only with funds for teaching, but also with thousands of slaves to collect specimens for his studies in natural science. These stories are probably false and certainly exaggerated.
http://www.iep.utm.edu/aristotl/

Aristotle work on papyrus

Aristotle was more interested in science than Socrates or Plato, maybe because his father was a doctor. He wanted to use Socrates' logical methods to figure out how the real world worked; therefore Aristotle is really the father of today's scientific method. Aristotle may have been the first person to suggest (correctly) that the way your eyes worked was that light bounced off objects into your eyes; he figured this out by using a camera obscura - an early kind of camera invented in China, about fifty years before Aristotle used it. As Aristotle noticed, the bigger the box, the bigger the image will be. Experiments with the camera obscura convinced Aristotle that your eyes worked like the camera obscura - as indeed they do - and therefore that light entered your eyes to make the image, rather than rays coming out of your eyes to find objects (like bats using sonar) as many scientists thought.

Aristotle was especially interested in biology, in classifying plants and animals in a way that would make sense. This is part of the Greek impulse to make order out of chaos: to take the chaotic natural world and impose a man-made order on it.

When Alexander was traveling all over West Asia, he sent messengers to bring strange plants back to Aristotle for his studies (perhaps in some ways imitating the gardens of the Assyrian kings). Aristotle also tried to create order in peoples' governments. He created a classification system of monarchies, oligarchies, tyrannies, democracies and republics which we still use today.

When Alexander died in 323 BC, though, Demosthenes and other men led revolts against Macedonian rule in Athens. People accused Aristotle of being secretly on the side of the Macedonians (and maybe he was; he was certainly, like Plato, no democrat). He left town quickly (Theophrastus took over the Lyceum), and spent the last years of his life in Euboea, among his mother's family. Aristotle died of some sort of stomach problem when he was 62.

Aristotle firmly believed that we have a duty to know. That is what humans are there for, and that the spirit of enquiry is what leads them to happiness. He was convinced it is the closest that humans can come to being immortal.