Introducing the Ancient Greeks: From Bronze Age Seafarers to Navigators of the Western Mind

by Edith Hall

As a youth Aristotle traveled to Athens to study with Plato at the Academy. He stayed for twenty years. Much of his work can be read as a response to Plato’s ideas, although the differences are significant. Aristotle left Athens in about 348, at the same time Philip destroyed Stagira. He traveled in Lesbos and Asia Minor but in 343 took up the appointment of tutor to the young Alexander. It was not until eight years later, in 335, when Alexander had succeeded Philip and already taken control of Athens, that Aristotle returned there to found his Lyceum and, it is thought, write most of his numerous treatises. For eight of Alexander’s most important years, therefore, he was in constant and intimate dialogue with the famous thinker. Aristotle’s contribution to intellectual history, not only to Western philosophy, is incalculable. His Metaphysics, in particular, was instrumental in founding Arabic philosophy (falsafa) in the ninth century AD. It elicited a massive commentary by the Spanish Arab philosopher Ibn Rushd (Averroes), himself studied keenly in the West. There was no constituent of the universe in which Aristotle was not interested, whether it was empirically discernible to the senses or beyond the perceptible surface of things. All Aristotle’s writings are unified by the methods of reasoning he developed, expressed in a group of works on logic that later ancient philosophers assembled and named his Organon (Instrument). The contents of these works monopolized the ent...