Aristotle

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Aristotle (384–322 BCE) was a Greek philosopher of the classical age, a pupil of Plato and the founder of his own school at Athens, whose surviving works became the most influential body of thought in the Western and Islamic worlds for nearly two thousand years. Born at Stagira in northern Greece, he entered Plato’s Academy as a young man and remained there roughly twenty years; later he served as tutor to the future Alexander the Great, and on returning to Athens established the Lyceum, the walled garden where, by tradition, he taught while walking.

What comes down under his name is not the polished dialogues Plato wrote for the public but the working treatises of the school — terse, compressed, in places little more than lecture notes. Across them he set out to map nearly everything: the rules of valid inference, in the logic later called the Organon; the study of living things, in biological writings drawn from direct observation; ethics as the cultivation of character toward a flourishing life; and, in the works gathered as the Metaphysics, the question of being as such. Where Plato had placed the real in a realm of separate Forms, Aristotle located form within things themselves, and traced all change to four kinds of cause and to a single unmoved mover toward which the cosmos is drawn — a doctrine later religious thinkers would read as a philosopher’s approach to God.

His afterlife is stranger than his life. The treatises were partly lost, then recovered and edited in the first century BCE; in late antiquity the Neoplatonists absorbed his logic into their own system, and a paraphrase of Plotinus circulated in Arabic under the title the Theology of Aristotle, attaching his name to ideas that were not his. Through that Arabic transmission he reached Avicenna and Averroes, and through them the Latin schools of the high Middle Ages, where Thomas Aquinas labored to reconcile him with Christian doctrine and where teachers referred to him simply as “the Philosopher.”

For Western esotericism his presence is double-edged. The alchemists invoked his theory of matter — the four elements, the transmutation of qualities — and a substantial pseudo-Aristotelian literature on stones, talismans, and the Secret of Secrets travelled under his authority through the medieval period. Scholarship now distinguishes sharply between the genuine corpus and this large shadow body of spurious works, much of it Arabic in origin. What the historical Aristotle taught was sober and this-worldly: a metaphysics of substance, an ethics of measured habit. The occult Aristotle is largely a creature of his readers, who found in a name of such authority a convenient place to lodge what they already wished to say.

→ In the library: Plato — The Dialogues (Jowett, 1892)

→ Related: Avicenna · Neoplatonism · Nous · Logos · Roger Bacon