Aristotle was born at Stagira, in the east part of Chalcidice, in 384 B.C. His father, Nicomachus, was personal physician to Amyntas II, king of Macedon. The young Aristotle emigrated to Athens in 368/7, gaining a place at Plato's Academy. He was a student there for twenty years, until the Master died, in 348/7.

Aristotle then went to Assos (Mysia) - then enjoying a great intellectual flowering - and afterwards to Mytilene, where he stayed for two years. In 343/2 he was invited to the court of Philip of Macedon, to take on the education of Alexander.

Aristotle returned to Athens in 335/4 B.C. There he founded a school of his own: the Lyceum (or Peripatos), as it was later to be nicknamed. This school was in the east end of town, not far from the shrine of Apollo Lycius that gave it its nickname. To begin with it was housed on a wrestling-ground; but later on Theophrastus, Aristotle's successor, placed at the Lyceum's disposal a plot he had inherited near the school.

Aristotle taught at the school for thirteen years. The philosopher's stay in Athens came to an inglorious end when he was accused of impiety, as anti-Macedonian feeling in the city mounted after Alexander the Great's death. To avoid trial Aristotle had to take refuge in Chalcis, where he died only a year later, in 322.

Aristotelian philosophy was as influential in his lifetime as it has been in more recent times. Aristotle himself was 'universal man' - he handled any and every philosophical subject, marrying philosophical theorizing with empirical observation. The Middle Ages bore the decisive imprint of his thought.

His works were addressed to a public with sufficient general education. He himself made a distinction between external accounts (works aimed at a readership outside the school: only fragments of these survive) and accounts in a philosophical style (works written in dialogue form or for reading by an inner circle). It is the second group that comprise the surviving Aristotelian oeuvre. The texts as we have them probably go back to an edition by Andronicus of Rhodes, at some time before the mid-1st century B.C. To Andronicus, too, are ascribed the classification of the philosopher's works, their division into books, and also some of their titles.

Aristotle himself recognized the specific classification of knowledge or sciences upon which classification of his works is based, into theoretical, practical, and productive (see Metaphysics Ε 1025b25). We should also mention treatises on logic, which Aristotle regarded as a methodological approach applicable in any science.

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