Aristotle was one of the greatest and most influential of the classical philosophers. A Greek born in 384 BCE, he was a master and a founder of fields from poetics to zoology.

Aristotle was a member of Plato’s Academy, a principled and idealistic forum for teaching and study. He would build on what he learned there when he founded his own famous school, the Lyceum. He was the first to articulate formal logic, but also mastered fewer abstract sciences and disciplines; he made careful studies of stars, animals, and plants as well as human-scale questions of ethics and governance. His curiosity was boundless.

Well-known and influential even during his lifetime, Aristotle’s enduring significance was cemented when medieval scholars and theologians rediscovered his work. His metaphysics, in particular, revolutionized religious thought across Judaism, Christianity, and Islam and profoundly influenced the shape of the early modern world. Thinkers today still build on ideas Aristotle articulated.