Aristotle

Plato’s most brilliant student and perhaps the most significant intellectual in world history, Aristotle of Stageira built on the doctrines he had studied at the Academy but also radically disagreed with them. The founder of Athens’ second great university, the Lyceum, did not believe there was any perfect, ideal world that transcended human ability to see, touch, smell and hear it, and proposed that all philosophy begin from with material reality of being a human animal in a complex natural world. Aristotle contributed to many disciplines—scientific subjects as well as ‘Humanities’, but his core philosophical beliefs are laid down in his Nicomachean Ethics, Politics and Rhetoric, which are analysed in this lecture, as well as the major works of the next generation of practitioners of what became known as ’Peripatetic’ philosophy.