THE ANCIENT WORLD 63
There is nothing in
the mind except was
first in the senses.
John Lockeavailable until the 9th century CE,
when all of Aristotle’s works began
to be translated from Arabic into
Latin. It was also at this time that
his ideas were collected into the
the books we know today—such as
Physics, The Nicomachean Ethics,
The influence of Aristotle on the
history of thought can be seen in
the Great Chain of Being, a medieval
Christian depiction of life as a hierarchy
in which with God presides over all.
and the Organon. In the 13th
century, Thomas Aquinas braved
a ban on Aristotle’s work and
integrated it into Christian
philosophy, in the same way that
St. Augustine had adopted Plato,
and Plato and Aristotle came to
lock horns again.
Aristotle’s notes on logic (laid
out in the Organon) remained the
standard text on logic until the
emergence of mathematical logic
in the 19th century. Likewise,
his classification of living things
dominated Western thinking
throughout the Middle Ages,
becoming the Christian scala
naturae (the “ladder of nature”),
or the Great Chain of Being. This
depicted the whole of creation
dominated by man, who stood
second only to God. And during the
Renaissance, Aristotle’s empirical
method of enquiry held sway.
In the 17th century, the debate
between empiricists and rationalists
reached its zenith after René
Descartes published his Discourse
on the Method. Descartes, and
Leibniz and Kant after him, chose
the rationalist route; in response,
Locke, Berkeley, and Hume lined
up as the empiricist opposition.Aristotle Born in Stagira, Chalcidice, in
the northeast region of modern
Greece, Aristotle was the son of
a physician to the royal family
of Macedon, and was educated as
a member of the aristocracy. He
was sent to Plato’s Academy in
Athens at the age of 17, and spent
almost 20 years there both as a
student and a teacher. When
Plato died, Aristotle left Athens
for Ionia, and spent several years
studying the wildlife of the area.
He was then appointed tutor at
the Macedonian court, where he
taught the young Alexander the
Great and continued his studies.In 335 BCE he returned to Athens,
encouraged by Alexander, and
set up the Lyceum, a school to
rival Plato’s. It was here that
he did most of his writing, and
formalized his ideas. After
Alexander died in 323 BCE,
anti-Macedonian feeling flared
up in Athens, and Aristotle
fled to Chalcis, on the island
of Euboea, where he died
the following year.Key worksOrganon, Physics (as compiled in
book form in the 9th century).Again, the differences between the
philosophers were as much about
temperament as they were about
substance—the Continental versus
the English, the poetic versus the
academic, the Platonic versus the
Aristotelian. Although the debate
died down in the 19th century,
there has been a revival of interest
in Aristotle in recent times, and
a reappraisal of his significance.
His ethics in particular have
been of great appeal to modern
philosophers, who have seen in
his functional definition of “good”
a key to understanding the way
we use ethical language. ■