Thinker Profile: Aristotle

Aristotle (384-322 B.C.): One of the most famous philosophers of ancient Greece. Although Aristotle had been a student of Plato, he rejected Plato's doctrine of transcendent Forms in favor of the claim that universal properties exist immanently in particulars, which he saw as a synthesis of form and matter. Aristotle invented logic as a formal discipline and wrote on a wide range of topics, including metaphysics, ethics, and much that would today be classified as natural science, including biology and physics. Aristotle's followers are sometimes called Peripatetics because of his habit of lecturing as he walked on the grounds of the Lyceum, his philosophical school in Athens.1

1. C.Stephen Evans, Pocket Dictionary of Apologetics & Philosophy of Religion (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2002), p. 13.