Athenian Constitution. Eudemian Ethics. Virtues and Vices

Aristotle, the eminent Greek philosopher, researcher, reasoner, and writer, was born in Stagirus in 384 BCE. He was the son of Nicomachus, a physician, and Phaestis. Aristotle studied under Plato in Athens and taught there from 367 to 347 BCE. He later spent three years at the court of a former pupil, Hermeias, in Asia Minor, during which he married Pythias, one of Hermeias' relations.

After spending some time in Mitylene, Aristotle was appointed in 343–342 BCE by King Philip of Macedon as the tutor of his teen-aged son, Alexander. Following Philip's death in 336 BCE, Aristotle became the head of his own school, the Lyceum in Athens, also known as the "Peripatetics." Due to anti-Macedonian sentiments in Athens after Alexander's death in 323 BCE, he withdrew to Chalcis in Euboea, where he passed away in 322 BCE.

Most of Aristotle's published works have been lost; the invaluable ones that remain are lecture materials, notes, and memoranda, some of which are spurious. These works can be categorised as follows:

I. Practical: Nicomachean Ethics; Great Ethics (Magna Moralia); Eudemian Ethics; Politics; Oeconomica (on the good of the family); Virtues and Vices.

II. Logical: Categories; On Interpretation; Analytics (Prior and Posterior); On Sophistical Refutations; Topica.

III. Physical: Twenty-six works (some of which are suspect) encompassing astronomy, generation and destruction, the senses, memory, sleep, dreams, life, facts about animals, etc.

IV. Metaphysics: on being as being.

V. On Art: Art of Rhetoric and Poetics.

VI. Other works including the Athenian Constitution; additional works also of doubtful authorship.

VII. Fragments of various works such as dialogues on philosophy and literature; and treatises on rhetoric, politics, and metaphysics.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Aristotle is contained in twenty-three volumes.