Aristotle

Aristotle was born in 384 BCE at Stagira, in the north of Greece. At seventeen he entered Plato’s Academy in Athens, where he studied for twenty years; he later tutored the young Alexander the Great, and founded his own school, the Lyceum, whose members were called Peripatetics for the covered walks in which they taught.

No mind of antiquity ranged more widely. He is credited with the first systematic study of logic, setting down forms of reasoning that governed Western thought into the nineteenth century; and he was the first to study living things systematically, describing some five hundred kinds of animal from patient observation.

He wrote on nearly everything — physics and the heavens, the soul, ethics and politics, poetry and rhetoric, and the nature of being — building much of the vocabulary in which later ages would think. His distinctions of matter and form, of the potential and the actual, shaped philosophy for millennia.

He died in 322 BCE. His work passed through Islamic and Christian scholarship alike, and “the Philosopher,” as the medievals simply called him, remains among the most influential thinkers who ever lived. Honored among the Great Ones of every civilization; kept here so the memory is never lost.