97 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.

Which sea creature chews with a mouthpart that biologists still call Aristotle's lantern?

Sea urchin: the name comes from a line in his History of Animals about a horn lantern with its panes left out. A 2008 study argues he was describing the animal's whole shape, not its jaws.

Aristotle wrongly asserted in History of Animals that women have fewer of which body part than men?

Teeth were his example: he said the same of sheep, goats and pigs, and one scholar suggests a poorer diet really did cost Greek women some.

Which fish did Aristotle believe sprang from mud and wet soil rather than from parents of their own?

Eels kept their breeding secret for two thousand more years, until a 1922 expedition netted the smallest larvae ever seen in the Sargasso Sea.

Which Dutch painter showed Aristotle in a gold chain, contemplating a bust of the poet Homer?

Rembrandt painted it in 1653 for a Sicilian nobleman who left the choice of subject to him, and New York's Met paid $2.3 million for the canvas in 1961.

Which Umberto Eco novel has monks dying over the lost second book of Aristotle's Poetics?

The Name of the Rose keeps the only manuscript in a monastery library, where a blind monk has laced its pages with poison to kill anyone who reads it.

What did Aristotle, who located thought elsewhere in the body, take the human brain to be?

A cooling mechanism was all Aristotle saw in the brain, until the Alexandrian doctor Herophilus corrected him and placed intelligence inside the skull.

Which birds did Aristotle suggest spend the winter hibernating rather than flying to warmer lands?

Swallows sleeping through the cold stayed a serious idea for two thousand years: as late as 1878 one ornithologist could list 182 papers on the subject.

Which American historian wrote the saying that excellence is a habit, often credited to Aristotle?

Will Durant wrote it in 1926 while summing up Aristotle's ideas in The Story of Philosophy, and readers took his summary for the philosopher's own words.

Which king destroyed Aristotle's home town, then rebuilt it in return for the tutoring of his son?

Philip II levelled the town in 348 BC, then hired Aristotle five years later to teach the teenage Alexander and resettled its scattered people as part of the bargain.

A Latin maxim credited to Aristotle calls Plato a friend, but names what as a greater friend?

Truth comes first, the maxim says; it paraphrases a passage in which Aristotle attacks a theory of Plato's while admitting the task goes against the grain.

Which charge did two Athenians reportedly bring against Aristotle, prompting him to flee the city?

Impiety was the charge, reportedly pressed by a priest named Eurymedon; Aristotle withdrew to his mother's family estate and died within the year.

In which city, the home of his mother's family, did Aristotle die soon after leaving Athens?

Chalcis, on the island of Euboea, is where Aristotle died of natural causes, leaving instructions that he be buried beside his wife.

To which city in Asia Minor did Aristotle move for a few years after leaving Plato's Academy?

Assos gave Aristotle a few productive years by the sea, and he began there the studies of plants and marine life that fed his later biology.

Which great-nephew of Aristotle served as historian on Alexander's campaign, then died under arrest?

Callisthenes objected when Alexander took up Persian court customs and was arrested over a plot against the king; ancient accounts differ on whether he was executed or died in prison.

Which ancient biographer reports that Aristotle spoke with a lisp and wore conspicuous rings?

Diogenes Laërtius, writing centuries later, also passes on Aristotle's slender calves, small eyes and a haircut as conspicuous as his rings.

Which Roman general carried off to Rome the Athenian library that held Aristotle's own manuscripts?

Sulla took the collection in 84 BC from the estate of Apellicon, a rich collector who had bought the manuscripts after they had long lain hidden.

Which Roman orator described Aristotle's writing style as a flowing river of gold?

Cicero must have been praising polished writings that are now lost, because the treatises that survive are famously terse and dry.

Which term covers the works Aristotle wrote for the public rather than for use inside his school?

Exoteric works were written for outsiders and the technical ones kept in the school were called esoteric, a distinction that goes back to Aristotle himself.

Whose 1890 papyrus purchase brought back Aristotle's lost Constitution of the Athenians?

The British Museum acquired the roll in the same year an American missionary bought it in Egypt, and the first printed edition followed in January 1891.

Which Athenian statesman, famed for his speeches, was born and died in the same years as Aristotle?

Demosthenes was born in 384 BC and died in 322 BC, the very years that bracket Aristotle's life; cornered in an island sanctuary, he took poison he had hidden in a reed.

Which of these would Aristotle's Categories call a primary substance rather than a secondary one?

One particular horse is primary because it is an individual; its species and genus are secondary substances, universals that can only be said of such individuals.

'Double', 'half' and 'larger' are examples of which of the ten kinds in Aristotle's Categories?

Relation, or 'the relative', covers whatever is what it is only towards something else: a half needs its whole, and nothing is larger all by itself.

Which philosopher's Isagoge introduced students to Aristotle's Categories for a thousand years?

Porphyry wrote it in Sicily around 270, and its branching scheme of genera and species, from substance down to individuals, is still called his Tree.

Which Greek word, often translated 'substance', names the first of Aristotle's ten categories?

Ousia was rendered in Latin both as essentia and as substantia, which is why English has two words, essence and substance, for one Greek term.

Before Aristotle borrowed it for logic, the Greek word 'kategoria' had which everyday meaning?

An accusation was the everyday sense, from a verb meaning to speak against someone; by Aristotle's day that verb had softened to 'assert' or 'name'.

Wearing shoes or armour is the example Aristotle's Categories gives for which of its ten kinds?

Having is the thinnest of the ten: Aristotle's only examples are being shod and being armed, a settled condition left by something done to you.

Which woman's name did medieval logic students give the first valid form of Aristotle's deductions?

Barbara has three As, the medieval code for three universal affirmatives: all men are mortal, all Greeks are men, so all Greeks are mortal.

Aristotle's puzzle about whether the future is already fixed turns on which event tomorrow?

A sea battle either happens tomorrow or it does not, and Aristotle asked whether that already seals the outcome; the puzzle later helped inspire logics with a third, undecided value.

Which German philosopher declared that logic had reached its completion with Aristotle?

Immanuel Kant made the claim in his Critique of Pure Reason in 1787, less than a century before a new symbolic logic overtook the old one.

Which principle does Aristotle call the most certain of all in Book IV of his Metaphysics?

The law of non-contradiction, Aristotle held, is too basic to be proved from anything deeper; he argued instead that anyone who denies it must rely on it just to say something meaningful.

Which sense does Aristotle's On the Soul treat as the one that every animal must possess?

Touch comes first for Aristotle because the other senses presuppose it, and with it comes the simplest perception of all, pleasure and pain.

Aristotle judged which planet to lie beyond the Moon after watching the Moon pass in front of it?

Mars disappeared behind the Moon in what astronomers call an occultation, and Aristotle drew the right conclusion: the hidden body must be the more distant one.

Which objects did Aristotle place below the Moon until Tycho Brahe's 1577 measurements moved them?

Comets must sit within the sphere of the Moon, Aristotle argued, clearly separated from the heavens; parallax measurements of the Great Comet of 1577 proved them far more distant.

Which atomist from Abdera did Aristotle treat as an important rival in natural philosophy?

Democritus left no book that survives: he is known only through second-hand references, and many of them come from Aristotle himself.

Which Latin name is given to Aristotle's ranking of living things from plants up to humans?

Scala naturae, also called the great chain of being, ran from minerals through plants and animals up to man, and Aristotle gave every species a fixed rung.

To what does Aristotle's On the Soul compare the mind before it has thought anything at all?

A blank tablet with nothing yet written on it was his image, the root of the Latin phrase tabula rasa that John Locke's empiricism made famous.

Which river fish did Aristotle report has males that guard the eggs after the female swims off?

Catfish fathers stand guard for forty or fifty days, he wrote, chasing off small fish and making a murmuring noise; the Greek species is now named Silurus aristotelis.

Aristotle tells how which early thinker got rich by booking the olive presses before a good harvest?

Thales foresaw a fine crop, reserved the presses of Miletus in winter and rented them out at harvest, a deal often called the first recorded option.

Which German logician's 1879 book launched the predicate logic that finally displaced Aristotle's?

Gottlob Frege's Begriffsschrift was little read before 1950, partly because of its eccentric notation, yet the logic it introduced ended two thousand years of Aristotelian dominance.

Which Greek city is home to the university founded in 1925 and later named after Aristotle?

Thessaloniki's university took Aristotle's name in 1954, and his birthplace lies only about 55 kilometres to the east.

Which novelist named the three parts of a 1957 bestseller after Aristotle's laws of logic?

Ayn Rand split Atlas Shrugged into three parts of ten chapters, each titled in honour of one of the laws, such as 'A Is A' for the law of identity.

Which actor played Aristotle, tutor to the young prince, in Oliver Stone's 2004 film Alexander?

Christopher Plummer took the tutor's role opposite Colin Farrell's Alexander, with Angelina Jolie and Val Kilmer as the conqueror's royal parents.

Which Córdoba-born philosopher's works on Aristotle earned him the Latin nickname 'The Commentator'?

Averroes wrote numerous commentaries on Aristotle among his hundred-odd books, and Latin Christian writers came to cite him by that title rather than by name.

Which Persian polymath said forty readings of Aristotle's Metaphysics left him none the wiser?

Avicenna had gone as far as memorising the text; only al-Farabi's short Purposes of the Metaphysics finally showed him what the book was for.

A church decree of 1210 forbade reading Aristotle's natural philosophy in which university city?

Paris was the target, on pain of excommunication; two decades later the new university at Toulouse advertised that the banned books could be heard there.

In which Spanish city did Gerard of Cremona put Aristotle's On the Heavens into Latin from Arabic?

Toledo's libraries were rich in Arabic books, and Gerard turned 87 of them into Latin there, among them Euclid's Elements and Archimedes on the circle.

In a medieval cautionary tale, which seductive woman rides on the back of a besotted Aristotle?

Phyllis, in the story, is the mistress Aristotle has warned Alexander against; Dürer and Cranach were among the artists drawn to the scene.

Aristotle's Masterpiece, a 1684 English bestseller he never wrote, was a manual on which subject?

Sex and midwifery filled its pages, under a famous name borrowed by an unknown author, and it stayed popular in England into the nineteenth century.

Caliph al-Ma'mun, said to have met Aristotle in a dream, backed the House of Wisdom in which city?

Baghdad's translators began their great project with Aristotle's Topics, and the caliph's love of learning was said to spring from that dream.

Which general, left in charge of Greece by Alexander, did Aristotle name as his chief executor?

Antipater was some fifteen years older than Aristotle, more a friend than a pupil, and the philosopher trusted him to carry out his last wishes.