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|Brief=an Ancient Greek philosopher who together with Socrates and Plato laid much of the groundwork for western philosophy and science
|Summary=Aristotle wrote on a broad range of topics encompassing what we would now call physics, ethics, biology, theatre, music, rhetoric, linguistics, politics, logic, zoology, metaphysics, and aesthetics. Those topics most relevant to issues of scientific change are his theory of causation, theories on metaphysics, and his method of science, which was based on intuition schooled by experience.
|Historical Context=Aristotle was born in Stagira, Chalkidice in central Macedonia in 384 BCE. His father was the court physician to the king of Macedonia. At the age of 17 or 18, he was sent to Athens to pursue a higher education at Plato's (427-347 BCE) Academy, then the premier Greek learning institution. He Plato had been the student of the renown Socrates (469-399 BCE). Aristotle was an outstanding scholar and remained there for twenty years. [[CiteRef::Biography.com Editors (2017)]][[CiteRef::Shields (2016)]] In 347 BCE, his teacher and philosophical companion, Plato, died. Because Aristotle disagreed with some of Plato's views, he did not, as he expected, receive directorship of Plato’s Academy. He returned home to Macedonia, and became a tutor to King Philip II of Macedon's son Alexander. Upon succeeding his father as king, Alexander won the appellation 'Alexander the Great' for his military conquests [[CiteRef::Biography.com Editors (2017)]][[CiteRef::Shields (2016)]] After conquering Aristotle's former home; Athens, for Macedonia, Alexander helped him found the Lyceum there as a school and library, where most of his works would be stored. Aristotle's students at the Lyceum became known as the Peripatetics.[[CiteRef::Shields (2016)]] The pro-Macedonian government of Athens was overthrown in 323 BCE. Because of his ties to Alexander, Aristotle was forced to flee to Chalcis on the Greek island of Euboea where he died a year later at the age of 62.
Aristotle drew on a preceding Greek tradition of inquiry which he saw as dating back to Thales of Miletus (circa 620-546 BCE) more than 150 years previously. He distinguished between a group of thinkers which he called 'inquirers into nature' as distinct from poetical 'myth-makers'. The latter, such as the Greek poet Hesiod (circa 750-650 BCE) explained the world primarily in terms of posited by positing divinities who behaved like super-powerful versions of human beings, with human-like genealogies and conflicts. These gods intervened in all aspects of the world, rendering it beyond mere human understanding. By contrast, 'inquirers into nature' saw the world as an ordered natural arrangement, or '''Kosmos''' not subject to supernatural intervention and potentially comprehensible to the human mind. Plato and Aristotle coined used the term '''philosophy''' to refer to this latter line of inquiry. [[CiteRef::Curd (2016)]]
As one of the first writers on method, Aristotle’s ideas on method are found mostly in a body of texts known as Organon. The most important of these ideas to philosophy of science come from Analytica Priora and Analytica Posteriora. In the former, Aristotle discusses deduction, while in the latter, he discusses induction. Out of the two, Analytica Priora forms the basis of most systems of logic found up until the late 19th century, while Analytica Posteriora forms the basis of empirical science to around the same date.[[CiteRef::Falcon (2015)]] The philosophies in Analytica Priora worked particularly well in taxonomical frameworks within biology. Beyond mentioned works, the Organon comprises 4 other works, Categoriae, Topica, De Sophisticis Elenchis, and De Interpretatione).
