Great polymaths: Aristotle (part 1)
About the great polymaths in history who inspired me to carry out this project: Leonardo da Vinci, Aristotle, Charlie Munger, Isaac Newton, Benjamin Franklin, etc..
There are multiple biographies of all of them and my intention is not to repeat what has already been written. The vision of this series is a little different, I will talk about the characters, of course, but focusing mainly on their insatiable interest in multiple fields and their ability to connect what seems far from each other. Finally, I will talk about the principles, ideas and mental frameworks that have been bequeathed to us and that are still important and current.
I have decided to dedicate the first article of the series to what has probably been the greatest polymath in history, the father of reason: Aristotle also called “The Stagirite”, “The Reader” and “The First Teacher”.
Let us begin!
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The life of Aristotle
Perhaps due to the immense legacy that Aristotle left us and his great influence in the world today, we sometimes forget that he lived more than 2,400 years ago. And it is that the passage of the centuries has not made his ideas about logic, ethics, politics or rhetoric go out of style.
Aristotle was born in 384 BC in Estagira. Like most of the philosophers of that time, he was a philosopher because he could afford it. He came from a family of important Macedonian physicians who were able to afford him the best of the schools of antiquity — the Academy of Athens. For us to understand each other, studying at the Academy of Athens would be the equivalent of doing it today at Harvard, well, actually somewhat more elitist, since at that time there were not as many options as there are now.
Section of “The School of Athens”, by Rafael. Plato and Aristotle in the middle
The director of the Academy was the great philosopher Plato, a disciple of Socrates. Since his arrival in Athens at the age of 17, Aristotle stood out and became one of Plato’s favorite disciples. Plato called Aristotle “The Reader” because of his great eagerness to read at a time when learning was mainly carried out orally.
For the next 20 years Aristotle remained at the Academy, first as a student and then as a teacher. During this time it is known that he wrote some dialogues, in the style of Plato, and perhaps some popular writings, but unfortunately none of them are preserved. Current philosophy students are afraid to study Aristotle’s texts because what has come down to us until today are loose fragments and notes from his school, so they are not oriented to the general public, as Plato’s Republic was. However, Cicero said that Aristotle surpassed his teacher in the quality of his prose. It is a pity that the disclosure texts of him have been lost because they would surely delight everyone.
During his time at the Academy it is believed that Aristotle wrote part of the Rhetoric, writings that taught how to persuade people. Today these writings can be bought edited in a book that is as current as then.
At the age of 81, his teacher died and Aristotle accepted the invitation of Hermias, an old friend who at that time ruled the city of Atarneo, in Asia Minor (now Turkey). During his stay there, Aristotle created an academy in the style of the one in Athens. Unfortunately for Aristotle, three years after his arrival, Hermias was taken prisoner by the Persians and was tortured to reveal the secrets of Philip II, king of Macedonia. Apparently Hermias kept silence so he ended up being crucified. Aristotle, upset by the violent death of his friend, went to the island of Lesbos (held by the Macedonians) where he spent two years studying zoology and marine biology, one of the fields in which he was most interested. According to Armand Marie Legoi, author of The Lagoon: How Aristle invented science, Aristotle was the first biologist and one of the greatest ever.
In his biology writings The Philosopher described more than 500 species. He was systematic in his observations and made discoveries of great relevance to this day.
1597 map of Lesbos by Giacomo Franco. (Flickr / Creative Commons)
This is one of the first moments in which Aristotle can be seen to deviate from Platonic philosophy, focused mainly on “the world of ideas”, to explore the natural world. It is believed that belonging to a line of doctors awakened in him, from a young age, an interest in the human body and biology, which influenced the studies that he would develop during his life.
Aristotle, the first marine biologist | EMBRC
Aristotle’s History of Animals
In 343 BC, a mature 41-year-old Aristotlereceives the call Philip II, king of Macedonia, to be the tutor of his son Alexander in the city of Pella, capital of the Macedonian kingdom. Alejandro at that time was a 13-year-old boy who would end up changing the course of history a few years later. To understand why Philip II entrusted Aristotle with such an important mission, one must know that Nicomachus, Aristotle’s father, had been his doctor and also that at that time the philosopher was already known as one of the great teachers of the time.
Aristotle teaching Alexander (engraving by Charles Laplante)
For three years Aristotle teaches Alexander until he begins to receive military training from him. There are many debates about how deeply the teachings of the Stagirite penetrated Alexander. Some say that the ethics of virtue made a dent in the young Alexander while others think that he should not have learned much from his teacher because he lacked prudence in his conquest of the East, one of the virtues most praised by Aristotle.
A few years later an already famous Aristotle returns to Athens to found his school at the Lyceum, a place that was used as a gymnasium. Unlike the Academy, the Lyceum was public and its classes were free. As a curiosity, the Lyceum was rented, since Aristotle was a foreigner in Athens and foreigners could not own property. In addition to being a place of teaching, the Lyceum was a natural science research center and had a large library. However Aristotle is considered one of the first collectors of books in history and his library as the first great library.
Reconstruction of the Lyceum arena (by Dimitris Koukoulas)
The writings that have come down to us from Aristotle are not books that he wrote. Most of them are compilations of writings and notes from his disciples at the Lyceum. Unfortunately most of his writings were lost. Andrónico de Rodas, director of the Lyceum in the 1st century BC, collected and organized the remaining texts in what is usually called the Aristotelian corpus. It is believed that only a third of the Master’s writings are preserved. When I think about how immense the Aristotelian corpus is and realize that most of what he wrote we lost, I cannot help but marvel at the immense knowledge of him.
Some volumes of the edition of the Greek Commentaries on the work of Aristotle (Berlin, 1882–1909)
(From Codex — Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=38634497)
At the death of Alexander the Great, in 323 BC, it is believed that Athens could have become a dangerous place for the Macedonians since Athens had until then been a Macedonian colony. Before facing the same fate as Socrates, Aristotle decided to go into exile to Chalcis where he died shortly after from a digestive system disease at the age of 61.
Aristotle’s Self-Exile
Aristotle leaves Athens (by SHEILA TERRY / SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY)
His influence in the West
After his death, Aristotle became a great source of wisdom, such an influence that his ideas became dogma in the late Middle Ages. During the time of Roman rule the Stoic and Epicurean schools have more weight, although there were also Roman Aristotelian followers. During much of the High Middle Ages, most of Aristotle’s philosophy was buried. The first to recover it are the Arab philosophers Al-farabi, Avicenna and Averroes who called Aristotle the “First Teacher”. These great polymaths dedicated a good part of their lives between the 10th and 12th centuries to study the writings of the Stagirite.
Averroes (The Bridgeman Art Library International)
In the thirteenth century, Thomas Aquinas, influenced by Averroes, recovered the Aristotelian philosophy for the Western Christian world. Thomas Aquinas revises Aristotle’s philosophy and makes it the official doctrine of the Latin Church. It also becomes the philosophical and scientific reference for all serious reflection. Some medieval scientific discoveries were held back by not being found in Aristotle’s ideas. But little by little, things are changing. On the one hand Luther and his reform charge against the ideas of Aristotle and on the other, the scientific revolution of the Renaissance is making a dent in the ideas of natural philosophy that the teacher had on astronomy, physics, biology and other sciences. Little by little they were being replaced by other more rigorous ideas of scientists with a new way of doing science such as Galileo Galilei or William Harvey.
“Aristotle was a great man, because he established the rules of tragedy after having established those of dialectics, morals and politics, uncovering as much as he could the great veil that covered Nature.”
- Voltaire
Even so, in the contemporary world his metaphysics and his ideas about ethics, politics, rhetoric and poetics remain influential and important.some fully valid cases. Only his natural philosophy has been fully surpassed by contemporary science.
Aristotle, the polymath
No one ever tried to cover as many fields of knowledge as Aristotle. The Stagirite starts from the most abstract: Metaphysics, where he defined the first principles of philosophy, those that cannot be demonstrated and that start from intuition. These first principles were essential as a basis for the rest of the disciplines in which he worked. He also created logic, a fundamental tool for reasoning and thinking scientifically.
Aristotle was very interested in the world of biology and zoology, he created a classification of animals that remained in force until the nineteenth century. His way of working was to collect specimens and describe them in detail. He also investigated the inert world. He studied astronomy, physics, and geology. And of course, he also devoted much of his efforts to the social sciences writing treatises on ethics and politics. He considered politics as the highest practical science, this led him to make a titanic effort collecting in his library more than 150 constitutions of different polis.
He was fond of poetry and he was also one of the first literary critics to study the structure of tragedies, epics, and comedies. These texts were compiled in La Poética, although his studies on comedy were never found.
Since he was at the Academy, El Maestro was interested in rhetoric, the art of influencing and convincing. An art that Socrates and Plato viewed with disdain since it was used by sophists who did not seek the truth but rather to convince or persuade at any cost. Aristotle, on the other hand, saw in rhetoric an effective way of bringing philosophy to the people, and wrote a treatise on the subject that is still completely current.
Coming soon
In this article I have talked about the character and his influence in the West, I have also gone over his ideas and his main writings. In the second part I will delve into some of his most important ideas, specifically I will focus on those that are still current and influential and from which we can all learn to be a little wiser.
