2. ▸ Aristotle was a Greek philosopher and polymath
(a person of wide knowledge or learning).
▸ He belongs to Classical period in Ancient Greece.
▸ He was born in 384 BCE and died in 322 BCE.
▸ His father, Nicomachus, was the physician
▸ Aristotle was an orphaned at a young age
▸ His teacher was Plato.
▸ Aristotle started a school Lyceum known
as Peripatetic school in Athens.
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Aristotle’s
Lyceum in
Athens
3. ▸ Even after the intellectual revolutions of
the Renaissance, the Reformation, and
the Enlightenment, Aristotelian concepts
remained embedded in Western thinking.
▸ He was the first genuine scientist in history.
▸ He identified the various scientific disciplines and
explored their relationships to each other.
▸ Aristotle's philosophy stresses biology, instead of
mathematics like Plato.
▸ He believed the world was made up of individuals
(substances) occurring in fixed natural kinds
(species).
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4. ▸ He is the founder of zoology
▸ He was a tutor to royalty
▸ Aristotle married Pythias and had a daughter
whom he also named Pythias
▸ Aristotle contributed to the classification of
animals
▸ He contributed to Physics
▸ He also contributed to Psychology
▸ Aristotelian ethics outline the different social and
behavioural virtues of an ideal man.
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5. ▸ In Aristotle’s view, “man is a political animal.”
▸ Aristotle’s intellectual range was vast, covering
most of the sciences and many of the arts,
including biology, botany, chemistry, ethics, history
, logic, metaphysics, rhetoric, philosophy of
mind, philosophy of science, physics, poetics,
political theory, psychology, and zoology.
▸ Like his master Plato, Aristotle wrote initially
in dialogue form, and his early ideas show a
strong Platonic influence.
▸ His dialogue Eudemus, for example, reflects the
Platonic view of the soul as imprisoned in the body
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6. ▸ According to Aristotle, the dead are more blessed
and happier than the living, and to die is to return
to one’s real home.
▸ Aristotle claims, The best form of philosophy is the
contemplation of the universe of nature; it is for this
purpose that God made human beings and gave
them a godlike intellect.
▸ Aristotle always acknowledged a great debt to Plato.
▸ Aristotle’s biological works must be regarded as a
stupendous achievement
▸ Aristotle’s works, though not as polished as Plato’s,
are systematic in a way that Plato’s never were.
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7. ▸ Aristotle divided the sciences into three kinds:
productive (engineering and architecture),
practical (ethics and politics) , and theoretical
(physics, mathematics, and theology).
▸ Aristotle’s writings fall into two groups: those that
were published by him but are now almost
entirely lost, and those that were not intended for
publication but were collected and preserved by
others.
▸ Aristotle’s writings show that even he realized
that there is more to logic than syllogistic.
▸ Aristotle thought, would be those that define the
proper subject matter of a science
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8. ▸ Rhetoric, for Aristotle, is a topic-
neutral discipline that studies the possible means
of persuasion.
▸ The Poetics is much better known than
the Rhetoric, though only the first book of the
former, a treatment of epic and tragic poetry,
survives.
▸ Aristotle is realistic, utilitarian, commonsensical.
▸ By any reckoning,
Aristotle’s intellectual achievement is
stupendous.
▸ He was the first genuine scientist in history.
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