47 Fun Facts About Aristotle

In Aristotle's account of virtue, courage is the mean between cowardice and which vice?

Rashness: he taught that such virtues grow from habit, as people repeat brave acts until bravery becomes their settled character.

Which scientist is famously said to have dropped weights from the Leaning Tower of Pisa to disprove Aristotle on falling bodies?

Galileo Galilei's first biographer, Vincenzo Viviani, told the story, but many historians think the drop was only a thought experiment.

What was the name of the school Aristotle founded in Athens?

The Lyceum, named for an exercise ground dedicated to Apollo Lykeios, later gave French its word lycée for a state secondary school.

Aristotle's followers were called Peripatetics, from a Greek word linked to which activity?

Walking: the name may come from the school's covered walkway, or from Aristotle's reported habit of teaching while strolling.

In which city in Chalkidiki, northern Greece, was Aristotle born in 384 BC?

Stagira was razed by Philip II, who reportedly rebuilt it as payment for Aristotle's teaching of his son.

What was the profession of Aristotle's father?

Physician to the king of Macedon: the family was said to belong to the Asclepiads, a medical guild, which likely sparked Aristotle's interest in biology.

What name did Aristotle give to the eternal divine cause that keeps the cosmos turning?

The unmoved mover: he reasoned that the chain of motion must start with something that moves all else but is itself unmoved.

Which nephew of Plato took over the Academy after Plato's death, reportedly disappointing Aristotle?

Speusippus got the post, and Aristotle soon left Athens for Assos, perhaps also pushed by anti-Macedonian feeling.

On which island did Aristotle and a colleague carry out extensive research in botany and marine biology?

He spent two years describing the zoology of its Pyrrha lagoon and the surrounding seas.

Aristotle married Pythias, a niece or ward of which ruler who had studied at Plato's Academy?

Hermias of Atarneus was later seized by the Persians and executed, and Aristotle honoured him in a hymn to virtue.

What annotated gift did Aristotle give Alexander that reportedly became one of his most prized possessions?

A copy of the Iliad: Alexander reportedly took Homer on campaign and, in one ancient account, slept with it under his pillow beside a dagger.

Aristotle reportedly advised Alexander to be a leader to the Greeks and what to the barbarians?

A despot: yet Alexander later adopted Persian dress and court customs to win over Persian nobles, dismaying many Macedonians.

Which two future rulers may have studied under Aristotle alongside Alexander?

Ptolemy and Cassander both became kings, and one later rumour even accused Aristotle of helping Cassander's family poison Alexander.

Most of Aristotle's surviving works are thought to be what kind of writing?

Lecture notes: the polished dialogues he wrote for the public survive only in fragments.

When Aristotle fled Athens, he reportedly refused to let it 'sin twice against philosophy', recalling whose execution?

Socrates: rather than face trial, Aristotle withdrew to his mother's family estate at Chalcis, where he died of natural causes.

Who succeeded Aristotle as head of his school and inherited his works?

Theophrastus was later prosecuted for impiety too, but the case failed so badly that his accuser nearly faced punishment.

What name was later given to the collection of Aristotle's six works on logic?

The Organon, Greek for 'tool': ancient commentators grouped the books under that name because they saw logic as an instrument for careful thinking.

Which kind of argument did Aristotle analyse, in which a conclusion follows necessarily from two premises?

The syllogism: Kant held that nothing significant had been added to his logic, until 19th-century logicians such as Frege moved beyond it.

What did Aristotle himself call the discipline a later compiler labelled metaphysics?

First philosophy or theology: the later title Metaphysics most likely just meant the books placed after his Physics.

What name is given to Aristotle's view that every physical object combines what it is made of with its structure?

Hylomorphism: applying it to living things, he said asking whether soul and body are one is as needless as asking whether wax and its shape are one.

Which four "causes" did Aristotle distinguish to explain why something exists or changes?

Material, formal, efficient and final: Francis Bacon later split them, leaving only material and efficient causes to physics and formal and final ones to metaphysics.

What fifth element did Aristotle add to Empedocles' earth, water, air and fire?

The heavenly aether: medieval Latin called it the 'fifth essence', which gave English the word quintessence.

What did Aristotle conclude from his claim that a body would fall infinitely fast in empty space?

That a vacuum is impossible: he also saw that in a void a moving body would never stop, and counted that as absurd too.

What did Aristotle believe caused earthquakes?

Wind trapped underground: the theory led to the lasting folk belief that hot, calm 'earthquake weather' warns of a quake.

How did Aristotle split animals into two groups, roughly matching vertebrates and invertebrates?

With and without blood: his 'bloodless' insects, crustaceans and molluscs simply lacked red blood.

Which three kinds of soul does Aristotle posit in On the Soul, all of which humans possess?

Vegetative, sensitive and rational: Descartes later explained the first two by mechanism alone, reserving the soul for rational thought.

Where did Aristotle place the body's control centre?

In the heart: soon after, the Alexandrian anatomist Herophilus instead regarded the brain as the centre of the nervous system.

What Greek word, usually translated "happiness", did Aristotle name as the aim of all human action?

Eudaimonia: he held it takes a complete life, since one swallow does not make a summer, nor one day a happy person.

What is the title of Aristotle's most notable treatise on how to live well?

Nicomachean Ethics: in the Inferno, Dante's Virgil cites it to explain how the sins punished in Hell are ranked.

Which famous description of humans comes from Aristotle?

"By nature a political animal": anyone who can live without a city, he added, must be either a beast or a god.

What are the three kinds of appeal a speaker can use, according to Aristotle's Rhetoric?

Ethos, pathos and logos: he insisted a speaker's credibility must come from the speech itself, not from his reputation beforehand.

Which half of Aristotle's Poetics is lost?

The book on comedy: the surviving text promises to speak of comedy 'hereafter', but that second book never reached us.

Which of the six elements of tragedy did Aristotle consider the most important?

Plot: he argued a tragedy could exist without developed characters, but never without action.

Which term does Aristotle's Poetics use for the representation that all poetic genres share?

Mimesis: he held that humans are the most imitative creatures and learn their earliest lessons through imitation.

What title did medieval Muslim scholars give Aristotle?

The First Teacher: later, Averroes's commentaries on his works spread through medieval Europe in Latin, and scholars there knew Averroes as the Commentator.

Which Jewish philosopher built his Guide for the Perplexed on Aristotelianism?

He adopted Aristotle from the Islamic scholars, and his work became the basis of Jewish scholastic philosophy.

How does Dante refer to Aristotle in the Divine Comedy?

Master of those who know: though unbaptised, he sits in Limbo, where the philosophers all gaze on him and do him honour.

Which two naturalists, Darwin wrote in 1882, had been his 'gods' yet were 'mere schoolboys' beside Aristotle?

Linnaeus and Cuvier: Darwin wrote this thanking William Ogle for a translation of Aristotle, eight weeks before Darwin died.

Which philosopher claimed almost every intellectual advance began 'with an attack on some Aristotelian doctrine'?

He also called Aristotle's ethics "repulsive" and his logic as antiquated as Ptolemaic astronomy.

In which Vatican fresco do Plato and Aristotle stand at the architectural vanishing point?

Raphael's The School of Athens: Plato points upward while Aristotle holds his palm down, a contrast usually read as ideals versus the observable world.

Who is credited with compiling Aristotle's surviving treatises into their present form in the 1st century BC?

Andronicus of Rhodes: Plutarch reports that texts from Apellicon's library, seized by Sulla, reached him in Rome.

Which sight in the sky did Aristotle cite as evidence that the Earth is a sphere?

Lunar eclipses: Earth's shadow on the Moon always has a curved edge, and he added that travellers in Egypt see stars never visible farther north.

Which pupil of Albertus Magnus simply called Aristotle 'The Philosopher'?

Thomas Aquinas: fellow students thought him slow and called him the dumb ox, but Albertus predicted his bellowing would be heard throughout the world.

Which emperor's order closed the pagan schools in 529, reshaping how Byzantines studied Aristotle?

After that, Philoponus and other Christian commentators approached Aristotle from a Christian perspective.

At which private school, set in the gardens of the Nymphs, did Aristotle teach the young Alexander?

Philip II invited him in 343/42 BC to tutor his thirteen-year-old son, a choice helped by family ties to the Macedonian court.

What was Aristotle's legal status in Athens, which barred him from buying the building for his school?

Resident foreigner: only after Aristotle's death did his successor reportedly gain a garden of his own, through the help of Demetrius of Phalerum.

Whose Latin translations of Aristotle's logic kept the philosopher known in the West from about AD 600 to 1100?

Boethius: he set out to translate all of Plato and Aristotle, but was executed for treason with the project far from finished.