Metaphysics, Volume II

Aristotle, the great Greek philosopher, researcher, reasoner, and writer, was born at Stagirus in 384 BCE. He was the son of Nicomachus, a physician, and Phaestis. Aristotle studied under Plato at Athens and taught there between 367 and 347 BCE. Subsequently, he spent three years at the court of a former pupil, Hermeias, in Asia Minor, where he married Pythias, a relation of Hermeias. After spending some time in Mitylene, in 343–342 BCE, he was appointed by King Philip of Macedon to be the tutor of his teenaged son, Alexander. Following Philip's death in 336 BCE, Aristotle became the head of his own school of "Peripatetics," the Lyceum, at Athens. Due to anti-Macedonian sentiment after Alexander's death in 323, he withdrew to Chalcis in Euboea, where he died in 322 BCE.

Nearly all the works Aristotle prepared for publication are lost. The extant ones, which are priceless, consist of lecture materials, notes, and memoranda, although some are spurious. They 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 suspect) on topics including astronomy, generation and destruction, the senses, memory, sleep, dreams, life, and facts about animals.

IV. Metaphysics: On being as being.

V. On Art: Art of Rhetoric and Poetics.

VI. Other works: Including the Athenian Constitution and more works of doubtful authorship.

VII. Fragments: Various works, such as dialogues on philosophy and literature, and treatises on rhetoric, politics, and metaphysics.

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