Knowra Aristotle Aristotle Aristotle (384–322 BCE) was an ancient Greek philosopher whose surviving works range from logic and natural science to ethics, politics, and poetry. His systematic approach shaped philosophical and scientific traditions for centuries.
Metaphysics : The philosophical study of being, reality, substance, and the principles underlying change. Aristotle’s work investigates substance, causes, potentiality, and actuality.
Four causes : Aristotle’s four explanatory answers: material, formal, efficient, and final cause. His framework asks what something is made of, what it is, what produces it, and what it is for.
Plato : An ancient Greek philosopher who founded the Academy and wrote influential philosophical dialogues. Aristotle studied with Plato, while later rejecting or revising several Platonic doctrines.
Theophrastus : A Greek philosopher and naturalist who succeeded Aristotle as head of the Lyceum. His leadership carried the Peripatetic school forward after Aristotle’s death.
Nicomachean Ethics : Aristotle’s treatise on virtue, character, practical judgment, and human flourishing. It develops his account of how people achieve a flourishing life.
Hylomorphism : The theory that physical substances consist of matter organized by form. It explains how a particular thing can be both material and intelligibly structured.
Academy : The philosophical school Plato founded in Athens in the fourth century BCE. Aristotle spent about two decades studying and teaching in Plato’s school.
Aristotelianism in the Islamic world : The interpretation and development of Aristotle’s philosophy by thinkers in Islamic societies. Translators and philosophers preserved, criticized, and transformed his works.
Politics : Aristotle’s treatise on constitutions, citizenship, and the purposes of political communities. It extends his ethical inquiry from individual flourishing to the polis.
Potentiality and actuality : Aristotle’s distinction between capacities for change and their realized states. It gives his account of change without treating change as creation from nothing.
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