Aristotle · Philosophy Atlas

Intellectual setting

Aristotle spent about two decades in Plato's Academy before pursuing wide empirical and systematic inquiries and founding the Lyceum in Athens.

Key ideas

Four causes

Adequate explanation may ask what something is made from, its form, its source of change, and its end.

Practical wisdom

Ethical judgment is a cultivated ability to deliberate well about action in circumstances that resist mechanical rules.

Legacy

His works became organizing authorities for philosophy and science in Greek, Arabic, Latin, and other learned traditions, while also provoking repeated critique.

Connections

Influenced al-Fārābī (documented influence): Al-Fārābī wrote extensively on Aristotelian logic and philosophy, interpreting Aristotle as a central source while adapting that inheritance to his own system.

Influenced Al-Kindī (documented influence): Al-Kindī organised the translation circle that put Aristotle into Arabic and treats him as the main authority in philosophy, arguing from the Categories that the soul is immaterial and from the theory of imagination for prophetic dreams.

Influenced Boethius (documented influence): Boethius translated Aristotle's logical works into Latin and wrote commentaries on the Categories and two each on On Interpretation, planning to render all of Plato and Aristotle; the plan was cut short by his execution, and the logic is what reached the Latin Middle Ages.

Influenced Francis Bacon (documented influence): Bacon titled the Novum Organum after Aristotle's Organon in order to replace it, and set his method against what he judged the damage the Aristotelians had done to the sciences; the debt is to a body of logic he engaged in detail and rejected.

Influenced George Pachymeres (documented influence): Pachymeres produced Aristotelian commentaries and a Quadrivium that served the educational sector of Palaiologan Constantinople, and recent research assigns him a commentary previously attributed elsewhere; the entry deliberately does not place heavy demands on the originality of such works.

Influenced Ibn Sina (documented influence): Ibn Sina worked through the Arabic Aristotelian tradition while revising its logic, psychology, natural philosophy, and metaphysics into a distinctive system.

Influenced Maimonides (documented influence): The Guide sets out four accounts of creation and weighs the Aristotelian eternal world against the account it takes from Moses, and its theory of prophecy is a reconstruction owing much to Aristotle; whether that makes it a philosophically sanitised religion is the standing question about the book.

Influenced Martha Nussbaum (probable influence): Nussbaum traces aspects of the capability approach back to Aristotle, and her list of central capabilities is built on an account of human functioning in that idiom; the entry records the lineage as her own claim about her sources rather than as an established reading.

Influenced Roger Bacon (documented influence): Bacon was among the early Paris masters who lectured on Aristotle's natural philosophy and metaphysics in the 1240s, and his surviving questions on the Physics and the Metaphysics come from that teaching; he also worked from texts wrongly attributed to Aristotle, such as the Secret of Secrets.

Influenced Theophrastus (documented influence): Theophrastus studied with Aristotle and succeeded him as head of the Lyceum, continuing and extending its research program.

Influenced by Plato (documented influence): Aristotle studied in Plato's Academy and developed many of his own positions through sustained criticism of Platonic arguments.