..
I was born Aristotle Ochoa at Stagira, a colony of Andros on the Macedonain peninsula of Chalcidice in 384 BCE. My father's name was Nicomachus and my mother's name was Phaestis. My father was a court physician to King Amyntas III of Macedon. My mother passed away early in my life, and when I was ten years old, my father passed away. I was left an orphan and placed under the guardianship of my uncle, Proxenus of Atarneus. I was influenced by my father's medical knowledge, and my uncle taught me rhetoric and poetry.At the age of seventeen, I moved to Athens so I could study at Plato's Academy. While Plato believed in idealistic principles, I preferred investigation of the facts and laws of the physical world. Even though there is much speculation about our relationship being strained due to a difference of opinion, I want to say that I hold Plato in the highest regard and esteem. His work had a tremendous influence on me and my life. After Plato's death in 347 BCE, I was temporarily considered as the next head of the Academy, but the permanent position was given to Plato's nephew. I then moved to the court of Hermias, ruler of Atarneus in Asia Minor, with one of my fellow Platonists, Xenocrates. While I was there, I married Hermias'niece, Pythias, and we had a daughter who we named Pythias after her mother. A couple of years later, I was then asked to go to the Macedonian capital by King Philip II to tutor his son, Alexander the Great, who was then thirteen years old. I not only taught Alexander ethics and politics, I taught him the most "profound secrets of philosophy." I have been credited as being a tremendous influence on Alexander, so much so, that some have claimed that I alone was the sole reason for his overwhelming success. Most say [that] "Alexander greatly profited from the contact he had with his philosopher (3)." In 335 BCE, I returned to Athens and opened The Lyceum, my own school of philosophy. I taught there for the next thirteen years. I discussed many things but my focus was on rhetoric and the dialectic both in the mornings (to advanced students)and in the evenings(to general lovers of knowlege). I loved to walk around while I talked, and I became known in later years as the peripatetics, meaning "to walk about." It was during this time that I wrote most of my treatises. My first wife passed away when I was thirty-seven, so in later life I remarried for a second time to a woman named Herpyllis, and we had a son, Nichomachus. Due to civil unrest between the city states, some of the Athenians questioned my allegiance to Athens because of my previous relationship with Alexander, so I decided to move to Euboea. I died there the following year, on March 7, 322 BCE from a disease of my stomach from which I had long suffered. The legends of my being "poisoned" or "throwing myself into the ocean because I could not explain the tides" are just that--legends. As I stated, my death was the result of a long illness(Wikipedia 1-15). The cause of the city state unrest lies in the fact that Athens dominated the Greek city-states, leading the Delian League and counting other city-states as allies. Rival Sparta led the smaller Spartan Confederacy. The two sides fought in the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BC), and Athens lost and was left weakened. The rivalry among the city states continued on into my lifetime and beyond (MSN Encarta Online)Both my writings and my teachings were based " . . . more on observation than speculation and more on research than intuition." The work in my treatieses became known as Scholasticism, or Christian doctrine in a philosophical system, and was adapted as the official dogma by the Roman Catholic Church throughout the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance. My combined works practically constitute an encyclopedia of Greek knowledge. Furthermore, my writings, as well as Plato's, established two of the most important schools of Ancient philosophy (Wikipedia 1-15).
