His extant writings span a wide range of disciplines from mind through aesthetics and rhetoric and into such primary fields as biology he excelled at detailed plant and animal taxonomy. This prodigious researcher and writer left a great body, perhaps numbering as many as two hundred treatises, from which 31 survive. Almost peerless, he shaped centuries from late antiquity through the Renaissance, and people even today continue to study him with keen, non-antiquarian interest. Philosophy of Saint Thomas Aquinas, the most influential thinker of the medieval period, combined doctrine of Aristotle within a context of Christianity.Īristotle numbers among the greatest of all time. German religious philosopher Saint Albertus Magnus later sought to apply his methods to current scientific questions. Greek philosopher Aristotle, a pupil of Plato and the tutor of Alexander the Great, authored works on ethics, natural sciences, politics, and poetics that profoundly influenced western thought empirical observation precedes theory, and the syllogism bases logic, the essential method of rational inquiry in his system, which led him to see and to criticize metaphysical excesses. The same distinction marks off Tragedy from Comedy for Comedy aims at representing men as worse, Tragedy as better than in actual life.

The same thing holds good of Dithyrambs and Nomes here too one may portray different types, as Timotheus and Philoxenus differed in representing their Cyclopes. Homer, for example, makes men better than they are Cleophon as they are Hegemon the Thasian, the inventor of parodies, and Nicochares, the author of the Deiliad, worse than they are. So again in language, whether prose or verse unaccompanied by music. Such diversities may be found even in dancing, flute-playing, and lyre-playing.

Now it is evident that each of the modes of imitation above mentioned will exhibit these differences, and become a distinct kind in imitating objects that are thus distinct. Polygnotus depicted men as nobler than they are, Pauson as less noble, Dionysius drew them true to life. Since the objects of imitation are men in action, and these men must be either of a higher or a lower type (for moral character mainly answers to these divisions, goodness and badness being the distinguishing marks of moral differences), it follows that we must represent men either as better than in real life, or as worse, or as they are.

Aristotle second book of poetics