Aristotle
Aristotle (Ancient Greek: Ἀριστοτέλης, Aristotélēs) (384 BC – 322 BC)[1] was a Greekphilosopher and polymath, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great.
His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric,linguistics, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology. Together with Plato and Socrates(Plato's teacher), Aristotle is one of the most important founding figures in Western philosophy.
Aristotle's writings were the first to create a comprehensive system of Western philosophy, encompassing morality, aesthetics, logic, science, politics, and metaphysics.
Aristotle's views on the physical sciences profoundly shaped medieval scholarship, and their influence extended well into the Renaissance, although they were ultimately replaced by Newtonian physics.
In the zoological sciences, some of his observations were confirmed to be accurate only in the 19th century. His works contain the earliest known formal study of logic, which was incorporated in the late 19th century into modern formal logic.
In metaphysics,Aristotelianism had a profound influence on philosophical and theological thinking in the Islamic and Jewish traditions in the Middle Ages, and it continues to influence Christian theology, especially the scholastic tradition of the Catholic Church.
His ethics, though always influential, gained renewed interest with the modern advent of virtue ethics. All aspects of Aristotle's philosophy continue to be the object of active academic study today. Though Aristotle wrote many elegant treatises and dialogues (Cicero described his literary style as "a river of gold"),[2]it is thought that the majority of his writings are now lost and only about one-third of the original works have survived.[3]
Aristotle defined the soul or psyche (ψυχή) as the first actuality of a naturally organized body,[11] but argued against its
having a separate existence from the physical body.
In Aristotle's view, the primary activity of a living thing constitutes its soul; for example, the soul of an eye, if it were an independent organism, would be seeing (its purpose or final cause).
The various faculties of the soul or psyche, such as nutrition, sensation, movement, and so forth, when exercised, constitute
the "second" actuality, or fulfillment, of the capacity to be alive. A good example is someone who falls asleep, as opposed to someone who falls dead; the former actuality can wake up and go about their life, while the second actuality can no longer do so.
Aristotle identified three hierarchical levels of living things: plants, animals, and people, for which groups he identified three corresponding levels of soul, or biological activity: the nutritive activity of growth, sustenance and reproduction which all life shares; the self-willed motive activity and sensory faculties, which only animals and people have in common; and finally reason, of which people alone are capable.
Aristotle treats of the soul in his work, De Anima (On the Soul). Aristotle concludes, in the fifth chapter of the third book of this work, that the human active intellect is immortal.[12]