Abstract

Despite a paucity of contemporary information about Aristotle's life and affairs, our ancient sources are only too happy to supply missing details and additional colour, much of it centred on his relationship with his teacher, Plato. Aristotle left Athens at around the time of Plato's death, for Assos, on the northwest coast of present-day Turkey, where he carried on his philosophical activity, augmented by intensive marine biological research. He returned to Athens for his second and final stay in 335. Once there, Aristotle established his own school in the Lyceum. This second period of residency in Athens was an astonishingly productive one for Aristotle. His works range widely across an astonishing number of fields, from aesthetic theory and argumentation theory to epistemology, ethics, logic, metaphysics, music, medicine, meteorology, pedagogy, philosophy of science, theology, and zoology. All these areas Aristotle pursued with genuine, unselfconscious zeal, under a general rubric of his own invention.