Aristotle works

Aristotle was born in 385 BC in Stagira, a city located on the northern coast of the Aegean, east of Chalkidiki. He could not be influenced by his father, who was a doctor, since he was very young when he lost him. He spent many years in Plato’s school, which he entered in 367. When the master died, he was, with other students of Plato, including Xenocrates, in Assos in Aeolis with the tyrant Hermias of Atameus . He lived there for several years, not without benefiting from the political experience of Hermias, who had to maneuver between the two powers of the day, Macedonia and Persia. In 343, he was at Mitylene on the island of Lesbos; it was then that he was called by Philip, king of Macedonia, to his court in Pella, to be entrusted with the education of young Alexander; he acquired powerful friendships among the Macedonians, including that of Antipater; his own nephew Callisthenes was among the friends of Alexander, of whom he was subsequently the victim. When he returned, in 335, to Athens where the national party, reduced to silence after the political decline of the city, nevertheless still existed, this metic must have been known as a supporter of Macedonia. He did not return to the Academy, but founded a new school at the Lycée, where he taught for thirteen years. When Alexander died (323), the Athenian national party, still led by Demosthenes, forced him to leave the city; he retired to Chalcis, in Euboea, to a property inherited from his mother, where he died in 322, at age 63. Life very different from that of Plato; it is no longer the high-born Athenian, political to the depths of his soul, who does not separate philosophy from the government of the city; it is the man of study who isolates himself from the city in speculative research, who makes politics itself an object of scholarship and history, much more than an opportunity to act. From Plato we only know the writings he intended for the public, and we know almost everything about his teaching; of Aristotle, on the contrary, only tiny fragments remain of works written for a wide audience; what we have of him are courses that he wrote either for teaching at the Lyceum, or perhaps for lessons that he undoubtedly gave at Assos, before becoming Alexander’s tutor. : notes written by a teacher for himself, without any search for literary perfection, sometimes simple points of reference for oral development, where even, when these collections were published after his death, student notes could have slipped in .

These works can be classified as follows:

1° Children’s works intended for a wide audience (which Aristotle himself calls exoteric discourses), dialogues to which the appreciation of Cicero speaking of the golden river of his eloquence could be applied. Only a few fragments remain, collected by V. Rose. It is Eudemus, dialogue on the immortality of the soul; Protrepticus, addressed to a prince of Cyprus, Themison, to which perhaps responds the speech of a student of Isocrates, Demonakos; the author of this speech complains of those who engage in disinterested study and turn away from the practice of business; finally the treatise on Philosophy or The Good, which dates from the time when Aristotle broke away from the school of Plato; it already contained, after a history of philosophical thought, a critique of the theory of ideas, and ended with an astral theology in which the divinity of the stars was demonstrated.

2° Collections of scientific works:

The logical collection known as the Organon: Categories; Of Interpretation (on judgments); Topics (on the rules of discussion); Refutation of Sophisms; First Analytics (on the syllogism in general); Second Analytics (on the demonstration); we can add Rhetoric and Poetics.

The collection on first philosophy entitled Metaphysics; this work in twelve books (numbered in Greek capitals), plus an additional book (α) to the first, is not in one piece. We must consider separately book α, a sort of preliminary to physics, which is by Pasicles, a nephew of Eudemus; the book Δ, vocabulary indicating the various meanings of philosophical terms; books II, Z, Θ, which form a treatise on the substance, to which I is added and which is continued by M (chapters 1 to 9, 1086 to 20); the books, A, B, Γ, E, M (since 1086 to 20), N, which date from an earlier period when Aristotle still counts himself among the Platonists, although he criticizes the theory of ideas; book K (1-8) appears to be a student’s notebook, relating to the same period as the previous group and summarizing the books of this group; finally Λ is a theological treatise, an overall treatise on the various substances, which is sufficient in itself (one must except chapter 8, very special research** on the number of celestial spheres necessary to explain the movement of the planets and which refers to the astronomer Calippus, who reformed the Attic calendar in 330).

Works on nature: Physics, the oldest parts of which appear to be books I, II, VII, and VIII; From Heaven, which its reference to the dialogue On Philosophy (1.9) undoubtedly dates back quite a bit; Of Generation and Corruption; the Meteors, of which the fourth and last book has sometimes been suspected: the Mechanics (the authenticity of which remains possible according to Carteron, La Notion de Force dans le Système d’Aristotle, 1923, p. 265).

The collection of biological works, very important for the history of science: Parts of Animals; From the Generation of Animals, with the small treatises On the Walking of Animals and On the Movement of Animals; From the History of Animals. The collection is linked to the great treatise On the Soul and the works which follow it, Sensation and Sensitive, Memory and Reminiscence, Sleep, Dreams, Divination by Dreams, Length and Brevity of Life , Youth and Old Age, Breathing; .

The collection of moral and political works: The Ethics of Eudemus, the first, closest to Plato; Nicomachean Ethics; Politics which betrays two different inspirations: on the one hand that of books H and Θ which contain the theory of an ideal State, of which A, B,  Γ are the introduction; on the other hand that of group Δ, E, Z, positive political research starting from a very vast historical induction; it is from the last era of Aristotle, from the time when he described the constitutions of a hundred cities, of which only the first, the Constitution of Athens, has been found.

Finally, we must add some apocrypha which have slipped into the collection of works, and which are products of the work of the School, one of which, the Problems, is of first-rate interest; another is there Great Moral (1).

• (l) The problem of classification is different from that of the chronology of works on which W. Jaeger and F. Nuyens arrive at quite different conclusions. The principle lies in the progressive detachment that Aristotle demonstrates from the Platonic theory of the soul.

Source: Émile Bréhier(1951). Histoire de la philosophie, Presses Universitaires de France. Translation and adaptation by © 2023 Nicolae Sfetcu