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School · 384 BCE–200 BCE

Peripatetic school

Aristotle's Lyceum and its early successors pursued systematic inquiry across logic, natural science, ethics, politics, and literary criticism through argument tied to observation and collected research.

Shared questions

  • How can demonstrations from explanatory principles organize inquiry into living things, causes, ethics, and political communities?

Internal disagreements

  • How far formal demonstration, empirical collection, and inherited endoxa should each guide philosophical explanation.

Key texts

  • The Aristotelian corpus — What survives are lecture materials edited into treatises long after Aristotle, not works he published.
  • Characters — Theophrastus' sketches of moral types; most of his large output, including the history of physics, is lost.