Stagira

Aristotle was born in the year 384, fifteen years after the trial of Socrates.

He was born in the northern part of Greece in a city called Stagira, which is part of what is now called Macedonia.

It was called that then.

When he was about your age, when he was seventeen or thereabouts, maybe slightly younger than many of you, he was sent by his father to do what you are doing.

A WORD TO THE READER the student who has come to philosophy under the spur of plato's eloquence will need some encouragement to face the more practical and prosaic work of aristotle if he finds the following essay difficult and unattractive let him reflect that aristotle's is almost the most abstract and obscure of all the great philosophies and that only the exigencies of logical and chronological sequence have led us to study him before mastering simpler systems aristotle is hard to grasp because his work is so varied and manifold that no centralising unity can be found to co-ordinate it for easier comprehension nor is there in his work any enthralling drama of passionate reform he is a man of the world who has become almost reconciled to the eternity of human imperfections the author has spared neither time nor labour to make out under the mummy-like mass of lecture notes in which Aristotle has come down to us the features of the living man, but he is very much afraid that he has failed.

W.D. End of A Word to the Reader The Historical Background Aristotle was born at Stagyra, a Macedonian city some two hundred miles to the north of Athens, in the year 384 B.C. his father was friend and physician to amyntas king of macedon and grandfather of alexander aristotle himself seems to have become a member of the great medical fraternity of he was brought up in the odour of medicine as many later philosophers were brought up in the odour of sanctity he had every opportunity and encouragement to develop a scientific bent of mind he was prepared from the beginning to become the founder of science we have a choice of stories for his youth One narrative represents him as squandering his patrimony in riotous living, joining the army to avoid starvation, returning to Stagira to practice medicine, and going to Athens at the age of thirty to study philosophy under Plato.

A more dignified story takes him to Athens at the age of eighteen and puts him at once under the tutelage of the great master.

but even in this likelier account there is sufficient echo of a reckless and irregular youth living rapidly the horrified reader may console himself by observing that in either story our philosopher anchors at last in the quiet groves of the academy under plato he studied eight or twenty years and indeed the pervasive platonism of aristotle's speculations even of those most anti-platonic suggests the longer period one would like to imagine these as very happy years a brilliant pupil guided by an incomparable teacher walking like greek lovers in the gardens of philosophy but they were both geniuses and it is notorious that geniuses accord with one another as harmoniously as dynamite with fire almost half a century separated them it was difficult for understanding to bridge this gap of years and cancel the incompatibility of souls plato recognised the greatness of this strange new pupil from the supposedly barbarian north and spoke of him once as the nous of the academy as if to say intelligence personified Aristotle had spent money lavishly on the collection of books, that is, in those printless days manuscripts.

A WORD TO THE READER the student who has come to philosophy under the spur of plato's eloquence will need some encouragement to face the more practical and prosaic work of aristotle if he finds the following essay difficult and unattractive let him reflect that aristotle's is almost the most abstract and obscure of all the great philosophies and that only the exigencies of logical and chronological sequence have led us to study him before mastering simpler systems aristotle is hard to grasp because his work is so varied and manifold that no centralising unity can be found to co-ordinate it for easier comprehension nor is there in his work any enthralling drama of passionate reform he is a man of the world who has become almost reconciled to the eternity of human imperfections the author has spared neither time nor labour to make out under the mummy-like mass of lecture notes in which Aristotle has come down to us the features of the living man, but he is very much afraid that he has failed.

W.D. End of A Word to the Reader The Historical Background Aristotle was born at Stagira, a Macedonian city some two hundred miles to the north of Athens, in the year 384 B.C. his father was friend and physician to amyntas king of macedon and grandfather of alexander aristotle himself seems to have become a member of the great medical fraternity of he was brought up in the odour of medicine as many later philosophers were brought up in the odour of sanctity he had every opportunity and encouragement to develop a scientific bent of mind he was prepared from the beginning to become the founder of science we have a choice of stories for his youth one narrative represents him as squandering his patrimony in riotous living joining the army to avoid starvation returning to stagyra to practise medicine and going to athens at the age of thirty to study philosophy under plato a more dignified story takes him to athens at the age of eighteen and puts him at once under the tutelage of the great master but even in this likelier account there is sufficient echo of a reckless and irregular youth living rapidly the horrified reader may console himself by observing that in either story our philosopher anchors at last in the quiet groves of the academy Under Plato he studied eight, or twenty, years, and indeed the pervasive Platonism of Aristotle's speculations, even of those most anti-Platonic, suggests the longer period.

One would like to imagine these as very happy years, a brilliant pupil guided by an incomparable teacher, walking like Greek lovers in the gardens of philosophy.

but they were both geniuses and it is notorious that geniuses accord with one another as harmoniously as dynamite with fire almost half a century separated them it was difficult for understanding to bridge this gap of years and cancel the incompatibility of souls Plato recognized the greatness of this strange new pupil from the supposedly barbarian north and spoke of him once as the noose of the academy, as if to say intelligence personified.

As the 20th century philosopher Alfred North Whitehead famously put it, the safest way to describe the entire European philosophical tradition is that it consists simply of a series of footnotes to Plato.

Aristotle from Stagira to Alexander's Shadow Getting to the museum had been its own grinding campaign, sweltering concrete, unpredictable pedestrian traffic, hostile urban geometry, a Mediterranean afternoon's solar radiation absorbed at close range.

It was an exercise in separating the optimal, theoretical form of a vacation from the observable, wet decay of domestic life.

Aristotle, the great organizer of practical reality, would have respected the effort and approved even more of where it had deposited me, deeper into a building I had already entered, moving now through rooms built entirely around the proposition that the ancient world ran on machines, not just myths.

He understood that collision of high concept and physical fact better than most.

Born in 384 BCE in the rugged hills of Stagira, he grew up at the intersection of natural science and Macedonian power.

His father, Nicomachus, served as physician to the royal court, an early exposure to medicine and administration that shaped his entire trajectory, and explains the later break with his master.

Where Plato sent his students upward toward an abstract realm of perfect ideals, Aristotle effectively filed a motion to dissolve the partnership and turned his attention to literal dirt, treating the study of living things as a serious empirical discipline in its own right.