LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Aristotle
built 657 days ago
Aristotle's really great contribution to natural science was in biology. Living creatures and their parts provide far richer evidence of form, and of "final cause" in the sense of design for a particular purpose, than do inanimate objects. He wrote in detail about five hundred different animals in his works, including a hundred and twenty kinds of fish and sixty kinds of insect. He was the first to use dissection extensively. In one famous example, he gave a precise description of a kind of dog-fish that was not seen again by scientists until the nineteenth century, and in fact his work on this point was disbelieved for centuries.
Aristotle is one of the "big three" in ancient Greek philosophy, along with Plato and Socrates. (Socrates taught Plato, who in turn instructed Aristotle.) Aristotle spent nearly 20 years at Plato's Academy, first as a student and then as a teacher. After Plato's death he travelled widely and educated a famous pupil, Alexander the Great, the Macedonian who nearly conquered the world. Later Aristotle began his own school in Athens, known as the Lyceum. Aristotle is known for his carefully detailed observations about nature and the physical world, which laid the groundwork for the modern study of biology. Among his works are the texts Physics, Metaphysics, Rhetoric and Ethics.
Source:
Aristotle had a lifelong interest in the study of nature. He investigated a variety of different topics, ranging from general issues like motion, causation, place and time, to systematic explorations and explanations of natural phenomena across different kinds of natural entities. These different inquiries are integrated into the framework of a single overarching enterprise describing the domain of natural entities. Aristotle provides the general theoretical framework for this enterpise in his Physics, a treatise which divides into two main parts, the first an inquiry into nature (books 1-4) and the second a treatment of motion (books 5-8).[1] In this work, Aristotle sets out the conceptual apparatus for his analysis, provides definitions of his fundamental concepts, and argues for specific theses about motion, causation, place and time, and establishes in bk. 8 the existence of the unmoved mover of the universe, a supra-physical entity, without which the physical domain could not remain in existence. He takes up problems of special interest to physics (such as the problem of generation and perishing) in a series of further physical treatises, some of which are devoted to particular physical domains: the De generatione et corruptione (On Generation and Perishing), the De caelo (On the Heavens),[2] and the Meteorology, which lead up to the treatises on biology and psychology.
Source:
For Aristotle, everything in nature has an end or purpose. Here Aristotelian science conflicts with mod.ern science, which has given up the question of "Why?" and asks "How?" There is a goal toward which everything is moving.eg: ., a kitten to become a cat, an acorn to become an oak. The final cause is the cause of causality in the other causes. As with human beings, nothing in nature is done without a purpose (although~ for most things this may be unconscious).
Source:
When Philip died and Alexander succeeded him, Aristotle returned to Athens. The Academy was flourishing under its new head, Xenocrates, and Aristotle founded his own school outside Athens, in a place called the Lyceum. He taught there for thirteen years, giving both public and private lectures. The Lyceum had a broader curriculum than the Academy, and a stronger emphasis on natural philosophy. With Alexander the Great's death in 323BCE came a change in the government of Athens, and a wave of anti-Macedonian feeling. Aristotle left Athens to live in a family house in Chalcis in Euboea; he died there the following year.
Source:
Upon the death of Aristotle's father, he became the ward of one Proxenus, the husband of his sister, Arimneste. It is possible that Proxenus was a friend of Plato; and it has ... been suggested that the fate of the young Aristotle was put to the oracle at Delphi. In any case, in 367, at the age of 17, Aristotle left Proxenus' protection to become a student of Plato at the renowned Academy at Athens. (A plausible alternative account has it that he spent his first three years in Athens, not at the Academy, but rather in a school of rhetoric run by Isocrates.) Plato, the founder of the Academy, was then 61. At the time, the members of this institution were much preoccupied with politics, law, mathematics, and astronomy, over and above their more general philosophical investigations. All of this interest in politics seems to have made a considerable impression upon Aristotle; certainly it was a central interest of his in later years.
Source:
MORE ABOUT
Aristotle