Aristotle

Greek philosopher and scientist, Aristotle, lived in the 4th century B.C. and is thought of as one of the most important figures from classical antiquity. Aristotle was probably the most famous member of Plato's Academy in Athens, whose writings would ultimately form the first comprehensive system of Western philosophy. His writings were not constrained to simply one field of inquiry but covered such various subjects as physics, biology, metaphysics,...

Written sometime in the 4th Century BC, Aristotle's "Rhetoric" is the definitive treatise on the art of persuasive public speaking. The art of oratorical persuasion was an essential skill for the successful politician during the days of ancient Greece and Aristotle's "Rhetoric" is considered one of the greatest works from antiquity on the subject. Like many of the surviving works attributable to Aristotle, "Rhetoric" was not intended for public dissemination,...

OUR next task is to study coming-to-be and passing-away. We are to distinguish the causes, and to state the definitions, of these processes considered in general, as changes predicable uniformly of all the things that come-to-be and pass-away by nature. Further, we are to study growth and 'alteration'. We must inquire what each of them is; and whether 'alteration' is to be, identified with coming-to-be, or whether to these different names there correspond...

THE science which has to do with nature clearly concerns itself for the most part with bodies and magnitudes and their properties and movements, but also with the principles of this sort of substance, as many as they may be. For of things constituted by nature some are bodies and magnitudes, some possess body and magnitude, and some are principles of things which possess these. Now a continuum is that which is divisible into parts always capable of...

The Categories is a text from Aristotle's Organon that enumerates all the possible kinds of things that can be the subject or the predicate of a proposition. They are "perhaps the single most heavily discussed of all Aristotelian notions". The work is brief enough to be divided, not into books as is usual with Aristotle's works, but into fifteen chapters. The Categories places every object of human apprehension under one of ten categories (known to...

Written in the fourth century BCE by Greek philosopher and scientist Aristotle, Physics set out to define the principles and causes of change, movement, and motion. For 2,000 years ― until discoveries by Galileo, Newton, and other scientists ― this treatise was the primary source for explanations of falling rocks, rising flames, the circulation of air, and other physical phenomena. Modern readers are required to bring a keen sense of criticism...

Epps has attempted to provide a translation of the Poetics to which all students could have access and thus gain a common terminology for this work. He has endeavored to make it clear enough that the average student with reasonable effort can understand the work without consulting aids.

Written in 350 BC, Aristotle's "De Anima" or "On the Soul" is not a work on spirituality, as the title would suggest, but rather a work that could be described as one of biopsychology, or a work on the subject of psychology from a biological perspective. Aristotle's exposition centers on the soul. Aristotle's soul however is not the same as the common modern spiritual conception of something distinct from the body that lives on past death. Rather...

On Interpretation is among the earliest surviving philosophical works in the Western tradition to deal with the relationship between language and logic in a comprehensive, explicit, and formal way.

We must now treat of youth and old age and life and death. We must probably also at the same time state the causes of respiration as well, since in some cases living and the reverse depend on this.