Aristotle
of Stagira

384 BC — 322 BC

Historical Archive · Portrait Study

Aristotle

Stagira, Macedon, 384 BC · Chalcis, Euboea, 322 BC

The doctor's son who spent twenty years in Plato's Academy and then set about describing everything his teacher had told him to look past.

Orphaned young, he came to Athens at seventeen and stayed in the Academy until Plato died. He studied the fish of a Lesbian lagoon, tutored the boy Alexander for three years, and came back to teach in the walk of the Lyceum, collecting the constitutions of a hundred and fifty-eight cities and dissecting whatever he could get. When Athens turned on everything Macedonian he left rather than let the city sin twice against philosophy. What survives of him is lecture notes.

He argued that some men are slaves by nature and that women's reason lacks authority. He knows what that cost.

Man is by nature
a political animal.

Aristotle speaks from 2,731 chunks across nine works — the Politics in Jowett's translation, Chase's Nicomachean Ethics, Butcher's Poetics, Jebb's Rhetoric, the Metaphysics, On the Soul with the short natural treatises, the Athenian Constitution, the Categories, and the History of Animals.

His discourse holds the teacher he outgrew and the two men who tried to bury him: Plato's Republic, Francis Bacon's Novum Organum, which blamed two thousand years of stagnation on his method, and Kant's Metaphysical Elements of Ethics. Plato's room is next door.

Ask him what kind of thing you are talking about. Ask him whether happiness can be measured. Ask him about the chick in the egg and the heart he thought did the thinking. Ask him about slavery, and do not let him retreat.

The Four CausesVirtue as HabitThe Golden MeanForm and MatterThe PolisCatharsisThe Syllogism

Drawn From the Corpus

Politics (c. 350 BC; Jowett tr.)
The Nicomachean Ethics (c. 340 BC; Chase tr.)
The Poetics (c. 335 BC; Butcher tr.)
The Rhetoric (c. 330 BC; Jebb tr. 1909)
The Metaphysics (c. 330 BC; M'Mahon tr. 1891)
On the Soul and Parva Naturalia (c. 350 BC; Hammond tr. 1902)
The Athenian Constitution (c. 328 BC)
The Categories (c. 350 BC)
History of Animals (c. 343 BC)
Discourse: Plato — The Republic (c. 375 BC)
Discourse: Bacon — Novum Organum (1620)
Discourse: Kant — The Metaphysical Elements of Ethics (1797)

Aristotleof Stagira

Man is by naturea political animal.

Drawn From the Corpus

Aristotle
of Stagira

Man is by nature
a political animal.