Plato's main ideas were that knowledge from the senses was always confused and not pure. These three thinkers turned early Greek philosophy into the beginnings of Western philosophy as it is today. Socrates taught Plato, then Plato taught Aristotle. The three greatest ancient Greek philosophers were Aristotle, Plato, and Socrates. He died in Euboea of natural causes that same year, 322 BC. When Alexander died, Athenians started to dislike Macedonians again and Aristotle left the city.

The king executed Aristotle's grandnephew Callisthenes as a traitor. Aristotle often said that he disliked Alexander calling himself a god. He threatened Aristotle in letters he wrote to him. Near the end of Alexander's life, he began to think people might be trying to kill him. Some people think Aristotle was probably the last person to know everything there was to know about in his own time. All of Aristotle's works are like an encyclopedia of everything the Greeks knew. The works that have survived are probably lecture notes for his students. It was probably then (335 to 323 B.C.) that Aristotle wrote most of his works. Aristotle taught courses at the school for twelve years. p58īy 335 BC Aristotle returned to Athens. One time, he advised Alexander to be 'a leader to the Greeks and a despot to the barbarians, to look after the former as after friends and relatives, and to deal with the latter as with beasts or plants'. He encouraged Alexander to conquer Persia, which was an empire to the east. During that time, he not only taught Alexander he also taught two other future kings: Ptolemy and Cassander.Īristotle believed Greek culture was better than all of the other cultures. Aristotle was put in charge of the royal academy of Macedon. Philip II of Macedon invited Aristotle to tutor his son Alexander the Great. They looked at the botany and zoology of the island. While in Asia, Aristotle traveled with Theophrastus to the island of Lesbos. He then traveled with Xenocrates to Asia Minor. Aristotle stayed at the academy until he was 27. He was a soldier for King Amyntas of Macedonia.Īt about the age of eighteen, Aristotle went to Athens to become a student of Plato at Plato's Academy.

Aristotle tutored Alexander the Great when Alexander was a child.Īristotle's father was named Nicomachus. Aristotle wrote many books, and some of those books survive. He was one of the most important philosophers in the history of Western civilization. It wasn’t until 1905 that Albert Einstein published a paper that actually proved the atomic theory, and ever since then, the model of the atom has been corrected and improved many times.Aristotle: marble copy of bronze bust by Lysippus, Louvre Museum.Īristotle (Stagira, Macedonia, 384 BC – Chalicis, Euboea, Greece, 7 March 322 BC) was a Greek philosopher. Still, there was no direct evidence to prove the existence of atoms, and Dalton’s atomic model was primitive by modern standards. John Dalton, in the early 1800s, more than 2,000 years after Aristotle, formulated the first modern version of atomic theory, and by then he had enough scientific data to actually do a pretty good job of describing an atom, as we now understand it. I would argue they really had no idea what atoms really are.

The word “atom” means indivisible, and in that sense, the Greeks were sort of correct. Many Greeks of the time thought that the highest form of research was thinking about things, because the mind and ideas are superior to the world and the senses, or something like that. We know now that the atoms, for example in ice, water, and steam are all made of the same kinds of atoms. He was a philosopher, and his idea was to try to explain why different materials had different properties, such as why are liquids flexible and solids less flexible. Democritus (see images above) lived about two hundred years before Aristotle and Plato, and is often credited with originating the concepts of the atom.

Aristotle atomic theory