Aristotle

Aristotle (384–322 BCE) Greek philosopher. Aristotle was a student of Plato and the tutor of the young Alexander the Great. He established his own school of philosophy in Athens in 335 BCE. This was called the ‘peripatetic school’ after his tendency to walk up and down as he talked.

Aristotle’s twenty-two surviving treatises were compiled as lecture notes and range over logic, physics, metaphysics, astronomy, meteorology, biology, ethics and politics. His best known political work is Politics (1958), a comprehensive study of the nature of political life and the forms it might take. In describing politics as the ‘master science’, he emphasized that it is in the public not private domain that human beings strive for justice and live the ‘good life’. Aristotle’s taxomony of forms of government led him to prefer those that aim at the common good over those that benefit sectional interests, and to recommend a mixture of democracy and oligarchy, in the form of what he called polity. The communitarianism of Politics, in which the citizen is portrayed as strictly part of the political community, is qualified by an insistence upon choice and autonomy in works such as Nicomachean Ethics. In the middle ages, Aristotle’s work became the foundation of Islamic philosophy, and it was later incorporated into Christian theology.