Pupil of Plato, tutor to Alexander the Great, and master of the Lyceum, Aristotle is probably the most well-known of the Greek philosophers, and best deserving to be called a polymath. His studies of the natural world laid the foundation for the later development of the natural sciences, and his thinking has shaped the mind of the Christian Church more than most Christian realize as a result of Thomas Aquinas' synthesis of his philosophy with Scriptures.
Aristotle was born in the Macedonian town of Stagira (not far from Thessalonica) to the personal physician of King Philip II of Macedonia, the ambitious king who, by the time of his death, had conquered and united all of Greece except for Sparta. His father died when he was still a boy. At age 17 Aristotle was sent to Athens where he studied under Plato. Passed over for succession to Plato as head of the Academy, Aristotle left Athens, married, wrote, and eventually became tutor to the son of King Philip, the young man who would inherit the throne from his father and become Alexander the Great. Not wanting to travel east with his student, Aristotle returned to Athens and opened his own school, the famous Lyceum. When Alexander died, the Macedonian government in Athens was quickly overthrown and Aristotle, being so closely associated with Alexander, became a persona non grata with the new regime. He left Athens, retired to the island of Euboea, where he died.
Though a disciple of Plato, Aristotle eventually came to part ways with his teacher's other-worldy metaphysics of forms and became essentially empirical in his approach. Aristotle was a keen observer of nature and may well be called the first systematic biologist for his writings on the natural world. His writings, however, lacked coherence, for the simple reason that he did not write to be published; what we have of his writings are rather his personal notes, written to help him teach rather than to be read, or notes copied down by his students as he taught. Fundamental to his thinking is that the world had no beginning or creator; it was eternal. Nonetheless, the world was governed by natural laws of logic and necessity, of cause and effect, laws that even God (not that he believed in one) could not disobey, overlook, or overcome. His idea of a god was as "the unmoved mover," i.e., the first cause in the great chain of cause and effect that results in existence.
Aquinas' affection with Aristotle resulted from the historical fact that the ancient church at Antioch was Aristotelian in its philosophical methods. The Nestorians introduced it to the Arabs when the latter conquered the region. There Aristotle was "cherished, studied and improved, until in the twelfth century Spanish scholars translated his works from Arab into Latin. The rediscovery of Aristotle in the West provoked a theological revolution which challenged the whole basis of classical orthodoxy and eventually resulted in the new synthesis of Thomas Aquinas" (Gerald Bray).
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