Aristotle Stagirite (384-322 BC) — the great ancient Greek philosopher and scientist, a student of Plato, the founder of the Peripatetic school.
Born in Stagira, a Greek city on the east coast of the Chalkidiki peninsula. His father Nicomachus was a court physician and personal friend of the Macedonian king Amyntas II, and their children, the young Aristotle and the heir to the throne Philip, often spent time together. When Aristotle was 15 years old, his father died, his uncle Proxenus was appointed guardian, who probably told Aristotle about Plato and his Academy. At the age of 17 he came to Athens and from 367 to 347 was at the Platonic Academy, first as a student, then as a teacher. After the death of Plato, he leaves Athens and spends almost 14 years (347-334) wandering. The most significant episode of this period is his pedagogical work with the heir to the Macedonian throne, Alexander, son of Philip of Macedon (from 343/342 to 340/39). In 334, Aristotle returned to Athens and founded his own philosophical school, the Lyceum. He died of illness in exile, leaving Athens in the face of a threat from an anti-Macedonian public. According to the will, he was buried in his native Stagira.
Essays
The legacy of Aristotle consisted of two types of writings:
1) prepared by him for publication and intended for the general public, the so-called. «exoteric»;
2) so-called. «esoteric» — lecture material intended for students who have spent more than one year at school.
From the first group of works (mostly dialogues), minor fragments have survived, the second group of works (mainly scientific treatises) constitutes the modern corpus of Aristotelian writings. During the life of Aristotle, esoteric texts were not published and were generally little available for study until they were first published in Ser. XNUMXst century BC. Alexandrian peripatetic scientist Andronicus of Rhodes.
The Aristotelian Corpus includes works on logic: Categories, Hermeneutics, Analysts, Topeka (collectively called the Organon); physics: Physics, About the sky, About the emergence and destruction, Meteorology; a cycle of treatises on zoology (History of animals, On the origin of animals, On the parts of animals, etc.) and psychology (On the soul, On sensory perception, On memory, etc.), first philosophy (Metaphysics), ethics and politics (Nicomachean ethics, Evdemova ethics, Politics, Athenian polity), rhetoric and poetics. A number of Aristotle’s works have been irretrievably lost, in the modern corpus there are a number of pseudo-Aristotelian treatises as Aristotelian ones (On the World, On Flowers, On Indivisible Lines, On Virtue, etc.)
Andronicus not only published and edited the manuscripts, but also re-formed individual works. The most striking example is the creation of a single work from several thematically related books called Metaphysics (in Greek, “books coming after physics”).