Person

Aristotle

Aristotle

Greek philosopher (384–322 BC), student of Plato, tutor to Alexander the Great, and founder of the Lyceum in Athens — one of the most influential thinkers in the Western tradition, and the subject of John Sellars‘s Aristotle: Understanding the World’s Greatest Philosopher.

As Sellars frames him in John Sellars on Aristotle, the Four Causes, and Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle is best understood first and foremost as a biologist — a natural scientist bent on understanding organisms and how they work — who fused that down-to-earth empiricism with the refined metaphysics he inherited, and then challenged, from twenty years as Plato’s brightest student at the Academy. His signature habit of mind is to complicate: to take a predecessor’s tidy answer and say ‘it is not as simple as that’, then refine his own reply once, twice, three times, so that a reader can watch him think a problem through. No one in history, Sellars notes, invented more academic disciplines — formal logic among them — and to the medieval scholastics who built on him, Thomas Aquinas above all, he was known simply as ‘the philosopher’.

In the wiki

  • John Sellars on Aristotle, the Four Causes, and Nicomachean Ethics — a full survey: actuality and potentiality (the acorn and the oak) as Aristotle’s answer to Parmenides on change; hylomorphism (form as the structure of matter) against both Plato’s independent Forms and Democritus’s reductive atomism; the four causes read as four kinds of explanation, with final cause (telos) reconciled with Darwinian function; the soul as the form of a living body; and the Nicomachean Ethics on virtue and flourishing

See also