Thinker · Aristotelians
Aristotle
384 – 322 BC · Aristotelians · The Greeks · 3 works
Plato's best student spent twenty years in the Academy and then turned the whole project around. Where his teacher said the really real lives in another realm and the tangible world is only a shadow of it, Aristotle pointed back down at the ground: the really real is *here*, in individual things, and the truth is found by observing and sorting the world, not by climbing out of it. Almost everything else (the four causes, the golden mean, the political animal, the science that ruled Europe for fifteen hundred years) grows out of that one turn of the hand from the heavens to the earth.
What changed
Before
The really real is in another world, and the tangible things around us are only its shadows
After
The really real is in this world, in individual things, reached by studying them
Inside the walk-through
The man who catalogued everything
How things work: the four causes
Form, matter, and the soul
The good life: virtue, habit, and the mean
Man is by nature a political animal
What it changed, and who answered
The works
