Aristotle Biography

Aristotle, one of Plato's greatest students, was born in 384 BC. Aristotle's father was a physician to the king of Mecadonia, and when Aristotle was seven years old, his father sent him to study at the Academy. He was there at the beginning as a student, then became a researcher and finally a teacher. He seemed to adopted and developed Platonic ideas while there and to have expressed them in dialogue form. When Plato died, Plato willed the Academy not to Aristotle, but to his nephew Speusippus. Aristotle then left Athens with Xenocrates to go to Assos, in Asia Minor, where he opened a branch of the Academy. This Academy focused more on biology than its predecessor that relied on mathematics.

There he met Hermias, another former student of Plato, who had become king of Assos. Aristotle married Hermias niece, Pythias, who died ten years later. During these years in Assos, Aristotle started to break away from Platonism and developed his own ideas.

King Philip of Macedonia invited Aristotle to the capitol around 343 BC to tutor his thirteen-ear-old don, Alexander. Tutoring Alexander in the Academy in Assos, Aristotle still remained the president of the Academy. In 359 BC, Alexander's father, King Philip decided to set off to subdue the Greek city-states, and left Alexander in charge, thus stopping Aristotle's tutoring of Alexander.

King Philip was then murdered, in 336 BC, and Alexander then became king. He mobilized his father's great army and subdued some city-states, thus becoming "Alexander The Great".

In 335 BC, Aristotle returned to Athens. Speusippus had died, but Aristotle was again not given the presidency of the Academy in Athens, instead, it was given to one of his colleagues Xenocrates. So, Aristotle founded his own school this time, it was named the Lyceum, named after Apollo Lyceus. In 323 BC, twelve years after founding the Lyceum, Alexander the Great died. In Greece resentment against the Macedonia hegemony seethed and riots broke out. Aristotle was accused of impiety, and his life become in serious jeopardy. So he left Athens, and went to his late mother's estate at Chalcis on the island of Euboea. He died there in the next year, 322 BC.