Aristotle

384 BCE – 322 BCE(lived 62 years)

Aristotle (384–322 BCE), born in Stagira to a Macedonian court physician, studied at Plato’s Academy for two decades before founding the Lyceum in 335 BCE. He turned philosophy into a walking research program—collecting 158 constitutions, dissecting animals, codifying logic, and composing the Nicomachean Ethics and Politics. Tutor to Alexander the Great, he tested ideas against evidence, arguing that virtue is built by habituation and that humans are political animals. In this timeline he recasts Socratic inquiry as organized science: methodical, collaborative, and civic—another architecture strong enough to protect reasoning in a turbulent city.

Biography

Aristotle was born in 384 BCE in Stagira, a small city on the Chalcidice peninsula. His father, Nicomachus, served as physician to King Amyntas III of Macedon, giving the boy early exposure to biological observation and court life. At seventeen Aristotle traveled to Athens and entered Plato’s Academy, where he spent roughly twenty years absorbing and disputing Platonism. After Plato’s death in 347 BCE, he left Athens for Assos and Lesbos, conducting marine and biological studies with Theophrastus. In 343 BCE Philip II summoned him to tutor the young Alexander. By 335 BCE, with Macedon ascendant, Aristotle returned to Athens and established his own school at the gymnasium of the Lyceum.

Aristotle died in 322 BCE after building the Lyceum into a research school. The peripatos went quiet for a moment, then kept circling—the proof that systems and students could sustain philosophy without the master [18].

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