Aristotle and the Lyceum

When Plato died in 347 BC, leadership of the Academy passed to his nephew Speusippus. Aristotle, who had studied under Plato for twenty years and was by then his most formidable student, was passed over.

He left Athens shortly afterward, and did not return for more than a decade.

Aristotle’s Odyssey

He traveled first to Assos, on the coast of Asia Minor, where the local ruler Hermias had gathered a small circle of Platonists and welcomed Aristotle as a peer rather than a former student.

Aristotle married Hermias’s niece and adopted daughter, Pythias, and spent several years there and on the nearby island of Lesbos, where he undertook the detailed biological and zoological observation that would later fill his natural-history writings — dissecting marine animals, cataloguing species, working from direct observation in a way nothing in Plato’s own output resembles.

In 343 BC, Philip II of Macedon summoned him to the court school at Mieza to tutor his thirteen-year-old son. Aristotle would spend several years as the tutor of the boy who became known as Alexander the Great.

The strife in the Academy

The philosophical disagreement that separated Aristotle from his master concerned the Forms themselves: the claim, central to everything the Academy taught, that the properties by which we recognize things (Beauty, Justice, Good) exist as perfect, unchanging realities separate from the physical objects that merely participate in them.

Aristotle rejected the separation. For him, form is real, but it exists in the particular thing itself — the shape of this statue, the humanity of this man — not in some further realm the thing merely resembles.

The sentiment later crystallized into the Latin motto:

Amicus Plato, sed magis amica veritas — “Plato is my friend, but truth is a greater friend.”

Though this line, as usually quoted, is a later paraphrase, not Aristotle’s own words.

What he actually writes, in the Nicomachean Ethics, is that examining this question is unwelcome given his closeness to the men who introduced the theory, but that where truth and one’s own people are both dear to us, piety requires giving truth the priority.

The Lyceum

Aristotle did not return to Athens until 335 BC, once Alexander had secured the throne after Philip’s assassination.

He founded his own school at a public gymnasium sacred to Apollo Lyceios, on the opposite side of the city from Plato’s Academy.

Tradition holds that he taught while walking the school’s covered colonnade, the peripatos — the origin of “Peripatetic,” the name later given to his followers.

The Lyceum’s character differed from the Academy’s from the start: less concerned with dialectic and the vision of a single unifying Form of the Good, more oriented toward the systematic collection and classification of particulars.

The result: Aristotle’s students compiled descriptions of 158 different Greek city constitutions to understand politics; and he catalogued more than five hundred species to understand biology.

Reading Aristotle

Unfortunately, almost nothing Aristotle wrote for a general audience survived.

What we have instead are lecture notes — dense, compressed, frequently missing the connective tissue a finished text would supply, never intended for anyone outside the school to read.

Jonathan Barnes, who edited the standard modern Complete Works of Aristotle, has written candidly about how much of ordinary translation work here is really reconstruction: deciding where an argument’s missing steps must have run, given what survives on either side of the gap.

W. D. Ross’s earlier edition of the Greek text, and his 1923 study simply titled Aristotle, remain the point every later English-language account of him has had to work either with or against.

One system, or several?

Aristotle wrote on logic, physics, biology, metaphysics, ethics, politics, rhetoric, and poetics, and the question of whether these amount to one coherent philosophy or a set of loosely related inquiries has never been fully settled.

Enrico Berti, a famous Italian expert on Aristotle, has argued at length for the underlying unity of what Aristotle calls “first philosophy” — the equivalent of what we would call today metaphysics: the inquiry into being as such, running beneath the more specific sciences and giving them their common foundation, even where the surviving texts present it in fragments composed at different points in his life.

After Athens

Alexander died in 323 BC, and Athens turned quickly against everything associated with Macedonian rule. Aristotle, tied to the court that had tutored him, was charged with impiety — the same accusation that had killed Socrates seventy-six years earlier.

Aristotle left the city rather than stand trial: claiming he would not let Athens sin twice against philosophy. He died the following year at Chalcis.

Centuries later, Alexander of Aphrodisias would become known simply as “the Commentator” for his authoritative readings of Aristotle’s logical and metaphysical works, and Thomas Aquinas would refer to Aristotle in his own writings not by name at all, but as Philosophus — the Philosopher, as if no other candidate for the title needed naming.

Next newsletter

Not every school that followed sought Aristotle’s precision or Plato’s transcendence. Next week: Zeno of Citium, and the porch in the Athenian marketplace where a shipwrecked merchant built a philosophy meant to be lived, not just taught.