Rhetoric

Aristotle, great Greek philosopher, researcher, reasoner, and writer, born at Stagirus in 384 BCE, was the son of Nicomachus, a physician, and Phaestis. He studied under Plato at Athens and taught there (367 47); subsequently he spent three years at the court of a former pupil, Hermeias, in Asia Minor and at this time married Pythias, one of Hermeias s relations. After some time at Mitylene, in 343 2 he was appointed by King Philip of Macedon to be tutor of his teen-aged son Alexander. After Philip s death in 336, Aristotle became head of his own school (of Peripatetics ), the Lyceum at Athens. Because of anti-Macedonian feeling there after Alexander s death in 323, he withdrew to Chalcis in Euboea, where he died in 322. Nearly all the works Aristotle prepared for publication are lost; the priceless ones extant are lecture-materials, notes, and memoranda (some are spurious). They can be categorized as follows: I. Practical: Nicomachean Ethics ; Great Ethics ( Magna Moralia ); Eudemian Ethics ; Politics ; Oeconomica (on the good of the family); Virtues and Vices. II. Logical: Categories ; On Interpretation ; Analytics ( Prior and Posterior ); On Sophistical Refutations ; Topica. III. Physical: Twenty-six works (some suspect) including astronomy, generation and destruction, the senses, memory, sleep, dreams, life, facts about animals, etc. IV. Metaphysics on being as being. V. On Art: Art of Rhetoric and Poetics. VI. Other works including the Athenian Constitution ; more works also of doubtful authorship. VII. Fragments of various works such as dialogues on philosophy and literature; and of treatises on rhetoric, politics and metaphysics. The Loeb Classical Library(r) edition of Aristotle is in twenty-three volumes.