Top 13 Books About Aristotle Updated 04 /2024

Aristotle was born around 384 BC in Stagira, a small town on the northern coast of Greece that was a sea port. He was born in a place called Stagira.

When Aristotle was a child, his father, Nicomachus, was the doctor for the Macedonian King, Amyntas II. Even though Nicomachus died when Aristotle was a child, Aristotle stayed close to and was influenced by the Macedonian court for the rest of his life. He didn't know much about his mother, Phaestis. It's thought that she died when Aristotle was a little boy.

It was after the death of Aristotle's father that the man who was married to Aristotle's older sister, Arimneste, took care of him until he was old enough. When Aristotle was 17, Proxenus sent him to Athens to go to school there.

Aristotle went to Plato's Academy, the best place to learn in Greece. He was an excellent student. He kept in touch with the Greek philosopher Plato, who was a student of Socrates, and his school for two decades.

During the time after Plato died, Aristotle was invited to court by his friend, the king of the cities of Atarneus and Athos in Mysia. He met and married Pythias, the niece of King Hermias, while he was in Mysia for three years. People named their daughter Pythias after her mother.

Pythias died in 335 BC. Shortly after, Aristotle started a relationship with a woman named Herpyllis, who was from his hometown of Stagira and lived there at the time. If Herpyllis had children with Aristotle, one of them was named Nicomachus, after Aristotle's father.

It was 338 BC, and Aristotle came back to Macedonia to start teaching King Philip II's son, Alexander the Great, who was 13 years old at the time. It was a big deal to Philip and Alexander that the Macedonian court paid Aristotle well for his work.

In 335 BC, after Alexander became king and took over Athens, Aristotle came back to the city. Alexander let him start his own school in Athens, called the Lyceum. As a teacher, he worked there for most of the rest of his life. He did this until Alexander the Great died.

The members of the Lyceum did research on almost every subject they could think of. They wrote down their findings in manuscripts, which helped build up the school's huge collection of written materials, which in ancient times was thought to be one of the first great libraries.

The pro-Macedonian government was overthrown when Alexander the Great died in 323 BC. In the face of anti-Macedonian sentiment, Aristotle was accused of impiety because he had a friendship with his former pupil and the Macedonian court. A year before he died, he left Athens and fled to Chalcis, on the island of Euboea. He lived there for the rest of his life and was never prosecuted or put to death.

He died in 322 BC because of a disease of the digestive system.

Rhetoric

Aristotle's Rhetoric is an ancient Greek book about how to get people to do what you want. It was written in the 4th century BC. There are many different names for it in English. It can be called "Rhetoric," "The Art of Rhetoric," "On Rhetoric," or "A Treatise on Rhetoric."

Aristotle is usually said to have laid the groundwork for the system of rhetoric that "afterward served as a touchstone," which led to the development of rhetorical theory from antiquity to modern times. A lot of people who study rhetoric think the Rhetoric is "the most important work on persuasion that has ever been written."

The Categories

The Categories is a text from Aristotle's Organon that lists all the things that can be the subject or predicate of a statement, or the thing that makes a statement true or false. They are "perhaps the single most talked about of all Aristotelian ideas."

As in Aristotle's works, the work is short enough to be broken up into fifteen chapters, not into books, as is the case with most of them.

Each thing that a person can see or hear is put into one of the ten categories in the Categories (known to medieval writers by the Latin term praedicamenta). To do this, Aristotle told them to write down everything that can be said without a lot of structure or composition, which is everything that can be the subject or predicate of a proposition.

The Poetics

Works of dramatic theory are also found in this book. It's also the first philosophical treatise on literary theory that is still in existence today. During the Middle Ages and early Renaissance, a Latin translation of an Arabic text was used to bring the text back to the Western world.

When Aristotle talks about poetry, he breaks it into verse drama, lyric poetry, and epic. The Poetics talks about the art of poetry. A lot of the discussion is about drama, and tragedy is the main point.

Aristotle also makes a difference between poetry that is sad and history that is sad. When he talks about history, he talks about things that happened in the past. When he talks about tragedy, he talks about things that could happen, or things that could be imagined to happen. Thus, he says that poetry is more philosophical than history because it tries to learn about universals.

On Interpretation Aristotle

This is the second text in Aristotle's Organon. Language and logic are both important parts of this book. It talks about how they work together in a clear, formal way. It has 14 chapters in which it talks about the following:

As part of this, he studies simple categorical propositions and draws a series of basic conclusions about the definition and classification of things like noun and verbs as well as negation.

Some of the things it talks about are the mental experiences that people have when they speak or write words, the differences between verbs and their tenses, and the universality or uniqueness of certain terms, among other things.

Nicomachean Ethics

When people talk about Aristotle's best-known work on "Ethics," they call it the Nicomachean Ethics. The work, which is important in defining Aristotelian ethics, is made up of ten books that were originally separate scrolls. It is thought to be based on the notes he took during his lectures at the Lyceum.

As a general rule, people think that the title refers to his son Nicomachus, whom he may have been giving the work to or editing it (although his young age makes this less likely). It's also possible that the work was written in honor of his father, who was also called Nicomachus.

History of Animals

This book, which was written in the fourth century B.C., is one of the main texts on biology. It was the first work of zoology. Also, for about two thousand years until the 16th century, this science had a big impact on people who studied it. This is because detailed works on zoology began to be written in this time.

History of Animals has a lot of eye-witness accounts of marine biology around the island of Lesbos, which is where the book is set. When Aristotle talks about the natural world in this way, he wants to talk about the what (the things that already happen to animals) before figuring out why (the causes of these characteristics).

Throughout the text, Aristotle tries to figure out what makes people different from each other and what makes groups different from each other. He thinks of a group as one in which all members are seen to have the same set of unique features.

Metaphysics

It is one of Aristotle's best works and the first important work in that branch of philosophy. The main idea is "being as being."

It looks at what can be said about any living thing because it is what it is, not because of any special qualities it has. Some other things talked about are how things form and how things are made. There are also different types of causality, the existence of mathematical objects, and a God who moves things.

On Generation and Corruptio

This is a treatise by Aristotle called "On Generation and Corruption." It's also called "On Coming to Be and Going Away." Like many of Aristotle's other texts, this one is scientific, it is part of his biology, and it is philosophical, just like many of his other texts. As in all of Aristotle's works, the conclusions about things that can't be seen or experienced are based on real observations and experiences.

At the start of the text, a question is asked. It is based on an idea from Aristotle's work, "The Physics." That is, whether things are caused by something else, or if everything is just changed.

On Sophistical Refutations

On Sophistical Refutations is a text from Aristotle's Organon in which he points out thirteen fallacies that people make. Because of this, according to Aristotle, it is the first book to talk about deductive reasoning. The fallacies that Aristotle points out are:

Faults in the way people speak (in dictione).

Equivocation Amphibology Composition Division Accent Figure of speech or way of saying something.

People who say that fallacies aren't in the language (extra dictionem)

It was an accident, and Secundum quid is the second thing. Begging the question, false cause, false cause, affirming the consequent, and many other questions are all examples of this.

Posterior Analytics

It is from Aristotle's Organon and talks about how to show, define, and know about science. The following are some of the main things it talks about:

That's what this text says. It says all demonstrations must be built on already known principles that can be proven on their own or are part of the so-called "first principles" (which cannot and need not be demonstrated). In addition, he points out that conclusions and premises can't support each other. He also talks about how a syllogism should look, and how it should be set up.

We also talked about Analytics in the past. Finally, we talked about Analytics in the past.

Aristotle talks about how the mind learns about first principles, which aren't innate, so people can choose not to pay attention to them because they aren't there. As well, these can't be based on any previous knowledge. They come from sense-perception, which puts true universals in the mind.

On the heavens

On the heavens is Aristotle's main cosmological treatise. It was written in 350 BC, and it includes his astronomical theory and his ideas about how the Earth works. In this case, it should not be confused with On the Universe, which is a fake book (De mundo, also known as On the Cosmos).

He says that the heavenly bodies are the most perfect things (or "substances"), and that their motions are governed by different rules than those of the bodies in the sublunary sphere. The latter are made up of one or more of the four classical elements (earth, water, air, fire) and can be destroyed. The matter that makes up the heavens, on the other hand, is impenetrable, so they can't be made or destroyed.

On the Soul

It was written in 350 BC. Although its subject is the soul, this book is not about spirituality. It is a work of what might be called biopsychology, which is a study of psychology in a biological context.

It talks about the different types of souls that different kinds of living things have, and how they work. Plants, on the other hand, are able to get food and reproduce, which is the minimum that any living thing must be able to do. Lower animals also have the ability to sense and move on their own (action). Humans have all of this, as well as the ability to think.

Politics

Politics is a work of political thought.

At the end of the Nicomachean Ethics, it is said that the study of ethics must follow the study of politics, and the two works are often thought of as part of a larger treatise or series of lectures called the "philosophy of human affairs." The name of the book, Politics, means "things about the polis."

Aristotle's Politics is broken up into eight books, each of which has a number of chapters in it. In this work, like in the rest of Aristotle's works, citations are usually based on the Bekker section number. Bekker's politics section goes from 1252a to 1342b.

On Youth and Old Age, on Life and Death, on Breathing

You can find it in Aristotle's Parva Naturalia. It is one of the short treatises that make up the whole thing. We must now talk about youth and old age and life and death. When we talk about respiration, we should probably also talk about what causes it, because sometimes living and the other way around are linked to this.

There are natural things that happen to the body and soul, like how old you get and how long you live. 27 chapters are used in modern editions to break it up.

At the start, Aristotle talks about where the body's life comes from. It's clear to him that the soul must be in some part of the body, and that it must surely be one of the parts that can control the body's parts. In the end, the heart is thought to be the most important part of the soul.

Topics

The Organon is a group of six works by Aristotle on logic. This one is one of them. Eventually, there are 9 books in all.

The treatise talks about the art of dialectic, which is making and finding arguments that people agree with. Aristotle doesn't say what the subject is, but he thinks it could be used to make dialectical arguments.

It talks about things like how a definition is described and how many ways there are to both attack and defend a definition. It also talks about how difficult it can be to come up with an argument and gives tips, tricks, and suggestions for organizing and exposing one or the other side.

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