On the Heavens

Aristotle, great Greek philosopher, researcher, reasoner, and writer, born at Stagirus in 384 BCE, was the son of Nicomachus, a physician, and Phaestis. He studied under Plato at Athens and taught there (367 47); subsequently he spent three years at the court of a former pupil, Hermeias, in Asia Minor and at this time married Pythias, one of Hermeias s relations. After some time at Mitylene, in 343 2 he was appointed by King Philip of Macedon to be tutor of his teen-aged son Alexander. After Philip s death in 336, Aristotle became head of his own school (of Peripatetics ), the Lyceum at Athens. Because of anti-Macedonian feeling there after Alexander s death in 323, he withdrew to Chalcis in Euboea, where he died in 322. Nearly all the works Aristotle prepared for publication are lost; the priceless ones extant are lecture-materials, notes, and memoranda (some are spurious). They can be categorized as follows: I. Practical: "Nicomachean Ethics"; "Great Ethics" ("Magna Moralia"); "Eudemian Ethics"; "Politics"; "Oeconomica" (on the good of the family); "Virtues and Vices." II. Logical: "Categories"; "On Interpretation"; "Analytics" ("Prior" and "Posterior"); "On Sophistical Refutations"; "Topica." III. Physical: Twenty-six works (some suspect) including astronomy, generation and destruction, the senses, memory, sleep, dreams, life, facts about animals, etc. IV. "Metaphysics" on being as being. V. On Art: "Art of Rhetoric" and "Poetics." VI. Other works including the "Athenian Constitution"; more works also of doubtful authorship. VII. Fragments of various works such as dialogues on philosophy and literature; and of treatises on rhetoric, politics and metaphysics. The Loeb Classical Library(r) edition of Aristotle is in twenty-three volumes.