ARISTOTLE

, a Grecian philosopher, the son of Nicomachus, physician to Amyntas king of Macedonia, was born 384 years before Christ, at Stagira, a town of Macedonia, or, as others say, of Thrace; from which he is also called the Stagirite. Not succeeding in the profession of arms, to which it seems he first applied himself, he turned his views to philosophy, and at 17 years of age entered himself a disciple of Plato, and attended in the academy till the death of that philosopher. Aristotle then retired to Atarna, where the prince Hermias gave him his daughter to wife. Repairing afterwards to the court of king Philip, he became preceptor to his son, Alexander the Great, whose education he attended for the space of 8 years; and by the magnificent encouragement of this prince he was afterwards enabled to procure all sorts of animals, from the inspection of which to write the history of them. On his quitting Macedon, he settled at Athens, where he established his school, having the Lyceum assigned him, by the magistrates, for the place of his instruction or disputation; where he became the head and founder of the sect called after his name, as also Peripatetics, from the circumstance of his giving instructions while walking. But being here accused of impiety by Eurymedon, priest of Ceres, and fearing the fate of Socrates, he retired to Chalcis, where he died at 63 years of age, and 322 years before Christ. Some say that he poisoned himself, others that he died of a cholic, and others again pretend that he threw himself into the sea for grief that he could not discover the cause of the flux and reflux of the waters. Laertius, in his life of Aristotle, estimates his books at the number of 4000; of which however scarce 20 have come down to us: these may be comprised under five heads; the first, relating to poetry and rhetoric; the second, to logics; the third, to ethics and politics; the fourth, to physics; and the fifth, to metaphysics. In the schools, Aristotle has been called the philosopher, and the prince of philosophers. And such was the veneration paid to him, that his opinion was allowed to stand on a level with reason itself: nor was any appeal from it admitted, the parties, in every dispute, being obliged to shew, that their conclusions were no less conformable to the doctrine of Aristotle than to truth.

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Entry taken from A Mathematical and Philosophical Dictionary, by Charles Hutton, 1796.

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ARGUMENT
ARIES
ARISTARCHUS
ARISTOTELIAN
ARISTOTELIANS
* ARISTOTLE
ARITHMETIC
ARITHMETICAL
ARTILLERY
ASCENDANT
ASCENDING