His immediate followers were known as the Peripatetics (meaning 'itinerant' or 'walking about', for their habit of walking the covered walkways of the Lyceum). In 335 B.C., Aristotle established his own school just outside the walls of Athens, known as the Lyceum, in competition with Plato's long-established Academy, and he conducted courses at the school for the next thirteen years. His wife Pythias died soon after, and Aristotle became involved with Herpyllis from his hometown of Stageira, and they had a son named after Aristotle's father, Nicomachus. After Hermias' death, Aristotle was invited by Philip of Macedon to tutor to the young Alexander the Great, which he did for several years before returning to Athens. While staying at the court of Hermias of Atarneus, an ex-student of Plato, he met and married Hermias' daughter, Pythias, and together they had a daughter also called Pythias. He traveled for some time in Asia Minor with Xenocrates (396 - 314 B.C.) and Theophrastus (371 - 287 B.C.). Plato's nephew Speusippus (407 - 339 B.C.) was chosen to succeed him as head of the Academy (partly because Aristotle's ideas had diverged too far from Plato's) and Aristotle left the Academy. At the age of 18, he moved to Athens to complete his education at Plato's famous Academy, where he remained for nearly twenty years (first as a star student and then as a teacher and a philosophical force to be reckoned with in his own right) until after Plato's death in 347 B.C. When he was just a boy of the age of 10, Aristotle's father died (which meant that Aristotle could not now follow in his father's profession of doctor) and his mother seems also to have died young, so he was taken under the care of a man named Proxenus. Aristotle's mother, Phaestis, came from Chalcis on the island of Euboea, and her family owned property there. His father, Nicomachus, was the personal physician to King Amyntas of Macedon, and Aristotle was trained and educated as a member of the aristocracy.

LifeĪristotle was born to an aristocratic family in Stageira on the Chalcidice Peninsula of Macedonia (a region of northern Greece) in 384 B.C. His own school of philosophy, known as Aristotelianism or the Peripatetic School, influenced almost all later philosophical thinking, particularly the Medieval movements such as Scholasticism, Averroism and Avicennism. He is one of the most important founding figures in Western Philosophy, and the first to create a comprehensive system of philosophy, encompassing Ethics, Aesthetics, Politics, Metaphysics, Logic and science. (Roman copy of a lost bronze sculpture by Lysippos, 1st or 2nd Century)Īristotle (384 - 322 B.C.) was an important Greek philosopher from the Socratic (or Classical) period, mainly based in Athens.

Politics and poetics aristotle