A student of Plato for twenty years and later the tutor of Alexander the Great, Aristotle founded his own school, the Lyceum. He wrote on logic, biology, physics, ethics, politics and poetry, organizing nearly all the knowledge of his time. His work dominated Western and Islamic science and philosophy until the early modern era.
Core ideas
Happiness is the end of human life and is reached by practicing the virtues
Virtue is the mean between extremes, like courage between fear and recklessness
Human beings are political animals, who only flourish living in community
The tradition: Aristotelian
An Aristotelian follows Aristotle, valuing observation of the world, logic and the ethics of virtue. He is the founder of this tradition, later taken up by Arab thinkers and the Scholastics.
