Aristotle: Metaphysics

Abstract

By Dante called ‘the master of them that know’, Aristotle by common consent bestrides the ancient and late mediaeval worlds (1). Born at Stagira in Thrace of a medical family, he entered the Platonic Academy in 367 BC when seventeen years of age. For twenty years he worked in close contact with the elder philosopher by whom he is reputed to have been called ‘the intellect of the school’. On Plato’s death in 347 BC he composed a eulogy in which he commended the philosopher as ‘the man whom it is not lawful for bad men even to praise, who alone, or first of mortals, clearly revealed by his own life and by the methods of his words, how to be happy is to be good’ (2).