Aristotle is the most influential person in philosophy.

Aristotle is the most influential person in Philosophy.

- What is the meaning of Aristotle's philosophy?

- What contribution did he make to the development of philosophical thought?

- Why is he the most influential person in the history of the development of philosophy?

I will answer all these questions in my article.

Let's start with the basics:Biography of Aristotle

Aristotle was born in 384 BC in the city of Stagira - this is the territory of the north of modern Greece. That is why in history Aristotle is often found under the name of Stagirit - after the city of birth. In such a picturesque place today there is a monument to the great philosopher: Aristotle's father was called Nicomachus, so the title of the treatise "Nicomachean Ethics" is not at all accidental.

At the age of 17, Aristotle moved to Athens, where he became a student of the famous Platonic Academy. Subsequently, he became close to Plato and became a teacher, wrote numerous works, many of which have come down to us.

After the death of his teacher (347 BC), Aristotle embarked on a free voyage. First, he returned to Macedonia, where he became the teacher of the most famous man of that era - Alexander the Great!

Returning to Athens, he founded the Lyceum, his school of philosophy. His followers would also be called Peripatetics, since they had inherited from their teacher the habit of taking a walk during lectures and discourses.

In 323 BC, he was forced to leave Athens. There is a possibility that if he had stayed there, he would have shared the sad fate of Socrates. He settled in the city of Chalcis and died of stomach disease a year later.

Now let's talk about what contribution Aristotle made to philosophy.

- He worked out the foundations of deductive logic, which determined the development of logic for more than 2,000 years!

- Influenced rational approaches to understanding reality. Thus, the most famous Catholic philosopher Thomas Aquinas is a direct heir of Aristotle. From him he also got ideas for his "proofs of the existence of God". True, Thomas knew Aristotle in the paraphrases of Eastern thinkers such as Averroes.

- He created an integral and consistent philosophical system, which is still relevant.

- Laid the foundations of social sciences: sociology, economics, political science.

But Aristotle's most significant contribution to philosophy is that he created the style of thinking and presentation that we know today as scientific!

Aristotle created a conceptual apparatus that still permeates the philosophical lexicon and the very style of scientific thinking. Aristotle is also the founder of logic. Aristotle saw the goal of science in the complete definition of the object, achieved only by combining deduction and induction:

1) knowledge of each individual property must be acquired from experience;

(2) The conviction that this property is essential must be proved by an inference of a special logical form, the categorical syllogism. The study of the categorical syllogism, carried out by Aristotle in the Analytics, became, along with the doctrine of proof, a central part of his logical doctrine. These three terms were understood by Aristotle as a reflection of the connection between the effect, the cause and the carrier of the cause. The system of scientific knowledge cannot be reduced to a single system of concepts, because there is no concept that could be the predicate of all other concepts: therefore, it turned out to be necessary for Aristotle to indicate all the higher genera, namely, the categories to which the other genera of existence are reduced.