Aristotle was born in 384 BCE at Stagira in the north, the son of the Macedonian king’s physician. At seventeen he arrived at Plato’s Academy and stayed twenty years. When Plato died in 347 BCE the school passed to Plato’s nephew, and Aristotle left: first to Assos, then to Lesbos, where he spent two years describing the sea life in the lagoon, then to Macedon to tutor the thirteen-year-old Alexander.
In 335 BCE he returned to Athens and opened a school at the Lyceum, a public gymnasium with a covered walk, the peripatos. His followers were the Peripatetics, the walkers. When Alexander died in 323 BCE, Athens turned on anything Macedonian; Aristotle left for Chalcis, saying he would not let the city sin twice against philosophy, and died there the next year. What we have of him is lecture notes, edited three centuries later.
Flourishing, not pleasure. The good life is eudaimonia: activity of the soul in accordance with virtue, over a whole life. One swallow does not make a summer.
Virtue is a habit. We become brave by doing brave things. Each virtue sits at a mean between two vices: courage between cowardice and rashness, generosity between meanness and waste.
Practical wisdom. Phronesis is knowing what this situation, with these people, at this moment, calls for. No rulebook supplies it.
Four causes. To understand a thing, know what it is made of, what shape it takes, what brought it about, and what it is for.
The political animal. Humans are made for the city. A person who needs no city is either a beast or a god.
Three kinds of friendship. For use, for pleasure, and for the friend’s own sake. Only the third lasts, and it is rare.
For most of a thousand years the Aristotelian tradition was not European at all. Al-Farabi in Baghdad was called the Second Teacher, after Aristotle. Avicenna in Persia rebuilt the metaphysics; Averroes in Cordoba wrote the commentaries Latin Europe learned from and called him, simply, the Commentator. Maimonides, the Jewish philosopher of Cordoba and Cairo, fused Aristotle with the Torah in the Guide for the Perplexed, and Aquinas read him closely.
The record on women is thin, and we would rather say so than pad it. The Byzantine princess Anna Komnene commissioned the first commentaries on the Nicomachean Ethics in centuries, and Elizabeth Anscombe restarted the whole ethical tradition with one essay in 1958.
Platonism is the parent and the lifelong argument: Plato looked past the world to the Forms; Aristotle looked at the world and took notes. The Stoics quarried his ethics of virtue. The Rationalist century made his physics its chief target and his logic its chief tool.
The word “metaphysics” is one of his book titles. Biology’s habit of sorting living things into kinds begins on Lesbos. Virtue ethics is taught in every philosophy department, and every piece of advice that says “not too much, not too little” is the golden mean with the label off.