Aristotle

Aristotle (384–322 BCE) was one of the most influential philosophers of antiquity and of Western intellectual history as a whole. A student of Plato and the founder of the Lyceum in Athens, he produced a body of work of extraordinary breadth, spanning logic, metaphysics, ethics, politics, biology, and rhetoric. In contrast to Plato, Aristotle grounded philosophy in empirical observation and causal analysis. In the Nicomachean Ethics, he presents moral philosophy as a practical inquiry oriented toward action, centered on the pursuit of eudaimonia—a fully flourishing life—achieved through the cultivation of virtue and the doctrine of the mean. His thought is marked by rigorous attention to the structures of human reason and by the conviction that philosophy should illuminate how we live, judge, and act in the world.