Aristotle and the Lyceum (335 BC): Founding Western Science

Aristotle founded his school at the Lyceum, a public gymnasium just outside Athens, in 335 or 334 BC, after more than a decade away from the city. Over the next twelve years he and his students lectured, debated and collected information on subjects from logic and ethics to animal anatomy and the constitutions of Greek states. The writings produced in and around the Lyceum shaped philosophy and science in the Islamic world and in Europe for almost 2,000 years.

Background: Aristotle before the Lyceum

Aristotle was born in 384 BC in Stagira, a small Greek town in Chalcidice in northern Greece. His father, Nicomachus, was a physician at the court of Amyntas III of Macedon, the father of Philip II. Both his parents died when he was young.

At about 17, in 367 BC, he went to Athens to study at Plato’s Academy, where he remained for about 20 years as student and then teacher. He admired Plato but came to reject central parts of his teaching, especially the theory that true reality lies in eternal, unchanging Forms separate from the physical world. A saying attributed to him in later sources, that Plato was dear but truth dearer, captures this attitude.

After Plato’s death in 347 BC Aristotle left Athens. He spent time at Assos in north-western Asia Minor, under the protection of the ruler Hermias of Atarneus, whose niece or adopted daughter Pythias he married. He then moved to the island of Lesbos, where, with his younger colleague Theophrastus, he carried out much of his research on marine animals in the lagoon of Pyrrha.

Around 343 BC Philip II of Macedon invited him to tutor his teenage son, the future Alexander the Great. The lessons took place at Mieza and lasted perhaps two or three years.

Founding the Lyceum

In 335 or 334 BC, after Alexander had become king and crushed the revolt of Thebes, Aristotle returned to Athens. As a metic, a resident foreigner, he could not legally own land in Attica, so he taught in a public space: the Lyceum, a gymnasium and grove sacred to Apollo Lykeios to the east of the city walls. Socrates had often talked with young men there decades earlier.

The school took its later name, the Peripatetic school, from the peripatos, a covered walkway in the grounds. Ancient biographers say Aristotle gave more technical lectures to advanced students in the morning and more popular lectures on rhetoric and politics to a wider audience in the afternoon or evening.

The Lyceum gathered a large library and collections of material for research. Aristotle and his students compiled descriptions of the constitutions of 158 Greek states, lists of victors at the Pythian Games, and records of earlier philosophers’ views. This organised, collaborative collecting of evidence was new and is one reason he is often called the first systematic scientist.

Teaching combined lectures with discussion and research. Students and colleagues worked on particular subjects, as Theophrastus did on plants and minerals, Eudemus of Rhodes on the history of mathematics and astronomy, and Aristoxenus on music. Unlike Plato’s Academy, which stressed mathematics as the path to knowledge, the Lyceum treated careful description of the natural and human world as the starting point of philosophy.

Aristotle’s work

Most of what survives of Aristotle are treatises that seem to be lecture notes or working texts, not polished books. His published dialogues, praised in antiquity for their style, are lost. Even so, the surviving corpus covers an astonishing range.

Logic. In the group of works later called the Organon (“tool”), Aristotle created formal logic. His theory of the syllogism, a form of argument in which a conclusion follows necessarily from two premises, was the core of logic in Europe until the 19th century.

Natural science. The Physics discusses change, motion, cause, place and time; On the Heavens describes a universe of nested spheres with the Earth at the centre. Aristotle’s theory of “four causes” (material, formal, efficient and final) became a standard way of explaining why things are as they are.

Biology. In the History of Animals, Parts of Animals and Generation of Animals he describes hundreds of species, often from his own observation or dissection. Some observations, such as the way certain dogfish nourish their young through a placenta-like structure, were only confirmed in the 19th century. He also made errors, for example believing that the heart, not the brain, was the seat of thought.

Metaphysics and the soul. The Metaphysics studies “being as being” and argues for an unmoved mover as the ultimate cause of motion. On the Soul treats the soul as the form or organising principle of a living body.

Ethics and politics. The Nicomachean Ethics argues that the goal of human life is eudaimonia, often translated as flourishing, achieved through virtue, which he describes as a mean between extremes. The Politics, drawing on the school’s collection of constitutions, calls the human being a political animal and compares monarchy, aristocracy and democracy. One of the collected studies, the Constitution of the Athenians, was rediscovered on a papyrus acquired by the British Museum and published in 1891.

Literature and speech. The Poetics analyses tragedy and introduced ideas such as catharsis and the unity of plot, and the Rhetoric remains a classic study of persuasion.

Leaving Athens

Aristotle’s connection with Macedon made him vulnerable. When news of Alexander’s death arrived in 323 BC, Athens rose against Macedonian rule, and he was reportedly charged with impiety, the same offence for which Socrates had been condemned. Later writers say he left the city so that the Athenians would not sin twice against philosophy, recalling the trial of Socrates.

He withdrew to Chalcis on the island of Euboea, his mother’s home town, and died there in 322 BC, aged about 62. His will, preserved by Diogenes Laertius, makes careful provision for his family and household.

The Lyceum after Aristotle

Theophrastus led the school for about 35 years and wrote pioneering works on plants. He was followed by Strato of Lampsacus, who emphasised physics. The Lyceum continued, with interruptions, until the Roman general Sulla devastated the grove during his siege of Athens in 86 BC.

According to Strabo and Plutarch, Aristotle’s own manuscripts passed to Neleus of Scepsis and lay neglected for generations before being taken to Rome in the 1st century BC. There Andronicus of Rhodes produced an edition that is the basis of the texts we read today. Some details of this story are questioned, but it explains why the works survive in their present arrangement.

Legacy

Aristotle’s influence is hard to overstate. Through Arabic translations, scholars such as Avicenna (Ibn Sina) and Averroes (Ibn Rushd) built on his work. In 12th- and 13th-century Europe Latin translations made him so central to university teaching that Thomas Aquinas referred to him simply as “the Philosopher”.

The Scientific Revolution overturned much of his physics and cosmology, and figures such as Galileo attacked the uncritical authority given to his texts. Yet his logic, ethics, political thought and biological method remain studied, and terms such as category, energy and substance owe their philosophical meaning to him.

The remains of the Lyceum were found in 1996 during excavations for a planned museum of modern art on Rigillis Street in central Athens. Archaeologists uncovered part of the palaestra, the wrestling ground of the gymnasium, and the site was opened to visitors in 2014.

Myths and facts

Myth: Aristotle thought the Earth was flat. In fact he gave some of the earliest surviving arguments that it is a sphere: the curved shadow of the Earth on the Moon during a lunar eclipse, and the way different stars become visible as a traveller moves north or south.

Myth: Galileo disproved Aristotle by dropping weights from the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Aristotle did teach that heavier bodies fall faster than lighter ones, and Galileo did argue against this. However, the famous tower demonstration is known only from a later account by Galileo’s pupil Vincenzo Viviani, and many historians doubt that it took place as described.

Myth: everything Aristotle wrote was careful observation. Alongside acute observations, his biology repeats hearsay and contains real mistakes, such as the claim that women have fewer teeth than men. His achievement lay less in being always right than in creating methods and categories that later researchers could test and correct.

Timeline

• 384 BC: Aristotle is born at Stagira.
• 367 BC: He joins Plato’s Academy in Athens.
• 347 BC: After Plato’s death he leaves Athens for Assos and later Lesbos.
• c. 343 BC: He becomes tutor to the young Alexander in Macedon.
• 335 or 334 BC: He returns to Athens and begins teaching at the Lyceum.
• 323 BC: After Alexander’s death he leaves Athens for Chalcis.
• 322 BC: Aristotle dies at Chalcis; Theophrastus heads the school.
• 86 BC: Sulla’s siege of Athens devastates the Lyceum grove.
• 1996: The remains of the Lyceum are discovered in central Athens.

Why it matters

At the Lyceum Aristotle turned philosophy into an organised programme of research across almost every field of knowledge. Even where later science proved him wrong, the habits he taught, of classifying, observing and arguing step by step, became foundations of Western and Islamic learning.