Aristotle

The world of philosophy has been characterized by many scholars. One of these important people who defined philosophy especially in the ancient Greek was Aristotle. He made a lot of contribution to issues of metaphysics, logic, botany, physics, medicine, mathematics, theatre, politics, dance ethics and agriculture. Aristotle learnt the world of philosophy from Plato, a philosopher who studied under the renowned Greek philosopher Socrates. Aristotle was somewhat independent and empirically-minded when compared to Socrates or Plato. His fame is highly attributed to the instance he rejected the theory of forms as put forward by Plato.

Aristotle’s work of philosophy

Aristotle was a prolific writer and at the same time, a polymath who radically brought a big transformation of quite a number of knowledge fields if not all of them. Due to his prowess, some people like Aquinas have only referred to him as “the philosopher”. He wrote about two hundred treatises but about thirty of them have been able to survive. Most of his works are in lecture notes forms and draft manuscripts and were not meant for general readership. Therefore they do not show his reputed and highly polished prose style that was attracted through many outspoken followers such as the Roman Cicero.

This famous Greek Philosopher was the first to give a classification of human knowledge into certain disciplines like biology, mathematics and ethics. A number of these classifications are still in use to this day. Commonly known as the father of logic, Aristotle was the first person to establish a formalized structure for reasoning. He observed that the credibility of an argument could be determined through its system rather than the content in it. A good example is the syllogism he talked about all men being mortal and for the fact that Socrates was a man he too was mortal. Looking at this system in the argument given that the premises are correct then the conclusion can be guaranteed to contain such validity.

Logic and reasoning

This formed a very important and the most defining elements of Aristotle’s philosophy. It dominated the area of thought all the way to the start of the contemporary propositional logic as well as the predicate logic more than two thousand years later on. He emphasized a lot on the subject of having good reasoning coupled together with his highly treasured aspect of believing in scientific method. These are the main elements that defined the work that he did.