Aristotle's father was Nicomachus, a doctor who lived
near Macedon, in the north of Greece. So unlike Socrates and
Plato, Aristotle was not originally from Athens. He was not from
a rich family like Plato, though his father was not poor either.
When Aristotle was a young man, about 350 BC, he went to study
at Plato's Academy. Plato was already pretty old then. Aristotle
did very well at the Academy. But he never got to be among its
leaders, and when Plato died, the leaders chose someone else
instead of Aristotle to lead the Academy. Probably Aristotle was
pretty upset about this.
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Soon afterwards, Aristotle left Athens and went to Macedon to
be the tutor of the young prince Alexander, who grew up to be
Alexander the Great. As far as we can tell, Alexander was not
much interested in learning anything from Aristotle, but they
did become friends.
When Alexander grew up and became king, Aristotle went back to
Athens and opened his own school there, the Lyceum
(lie-SAY-um), in competition with Plato's Academy. Both
schools were successful for hundreds of years.
Aristotle was more interested in science than Socrates or
Plato, maybe because his father was a doctor. He wanted to use
Socrates' logical methods to figure out how the real world
worked; therefore Aristotle is really the father of today's
scientific method. Aristotle was especially interested in
biology, in classifying plants and animals in a way that would
make sense. This is part of the Greek impulse to make order
out of chaos: to take the chaotic natural world and impose a
man-made order on it.
When Alexander was traveling all over Western Asia, he had his
messengers bring strange plants back to Aristotle for his
studies. Aristotle also made efforts to create order in
peoples' governments. He created a classification system of
monarchies, oligarchies, tyrannies, democracies and republics
which we still use today.
When Alexander died in 323 BC, though, there were revolts
against Macedonian rule in Athens. People accused Aristotle of
being secretly on the side of the Macedonians (and maybe he
was; he was certainly, like Plato, no democrat). He left town
quickly, and spent the last years of his life back in the
north again where he had been born.
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