As philosophers come, few have such an outstanding pedigree as Aristotle. He was a student of Plato and a teacher of Alexander the Great. He is the father of logic and of metaphysics. Medieval scholars saw no need to name him, and frequently called him simply The Philosopher.

Aristotle was born in 384 BCE near modern Thessaloniki and raised at the Macedonian court where his father worked. As a young man he travelled to Athens to study at Plato’s academy and ended up staying there for nearly twenty years. He then returned to Macedon to teach the young Alexander, with whom he stayed in correspondence with throughout the young man’s short life. Once his duties as teacher were taken care of, he returned to Athens where he started his own school and penned his famous works.

The idea that Aristotle created logic is one that many instinctively feel resistant towards. We take logical discourse for granted as a human trait and natural law, but prior to Aristotle the western world did not engage in the study of formal logic.

Except for his immensely popular works on logic, much of Aristotle’s writings were for a long time lost to Europeans in the sands of time and known only through paraphrasing and quotation in other writings. It was to a great extent through contacts with the Arab world that Aristotle returned to us in the late 12th and 13th century. The Greek texts had remained in the eastern Greek world, which became then the Arab world, and the Arabs, hungry scientists as they were, translated Aristotle to their language. While we forgot much about him, they kept him alive.

Want to read more about Aristotle? Start with his Wikipedia page. Would you rather read some Aristotle? The Internet Classics Archive has collected the works of Aristotle for free online reading.

That’s it for α. Until it’s time for β, feel free to nominate ancient great Greeks of any letter of the alphabet following α in the comments section!

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About the author: E P Wohlfart is a twenty-something freelance writer with a Classical Archaeology degree, a laptop and a maxed-out library card. Aside from administrating PastPresenters.com, which she started in 2008, she works with several historical publications and is a regular contributor at Suite101.