The World According to Aristotle

On the physics and philosophy of matter, the stars, and of motion

Charles Laplante, 1866

As nature therefore makes nothing either imperfect or in vain, it necessarily follows that she has made all these things for men
~ Politics, Aristotle

Aristotle was the student of Plato; Plato the student of Socrates.

For twenty years, Aristotle studied at Plato’s Academy. By all accounts, the two got along: Plato nicknamed him the “mind of the school”, and seems to have regarded him as the most promising of all his students.

In this academy, Plato taught of abstract realities, of ideal forms and of utopias. He believed our world was messy, but that underneath it lay a perfect reality hidden from casual view. One could probe this world to uncover Truth, but to do so one had to look inwards. Only through logic and reason, Plato argued, could we understand the nature of reality.

His greatest student came to disagree. Loyalty may have kept him at the academy, and perhaps kept his mouth shut too, but after Plato died, Aristotle began speaking of alternative ideas. He doubted the existence of Plato’s hidden world. Instead, he started to believe that the understanding of nature could only begin with observation.

Aristotle thus observed. His range was astonishing, and stretched far beyond what we would call physics or even science. He wrote about logic, explored the nature of reality, studied biology, and opined about happiness. He travelled greatly, roaming across Anatolia and Greece, and eventually was summoned to the court of Philip II in Macedonia.

There he was appointed tutor to Philip’s thirteen-year-old son Alexander. What he taught him remains unknown – the only book on the subject, Rhetoric to Alexander, was almost certainly written by someone else. But it was probably good: within the next two decades Alexander would become king, conquer the empires of Persia and Egypt, and march his armies into India.

While Alexander was off conquering the world, Aristotle returned to Athens. He founded his own school, the Lyceum, and gave the lectures for which he is best known today. Alexander sent back samples of plants and animals from across his empire, and Aristotle collected and sorted them. Yet, as the conqueror grew more powerful and convinced of his own divinity, Aristotle seems to have grown concerned about what his former student was doing.