From Logic to Ethics

Aristotle spent twenty years studying under Plato, then walked away and built a rival system that would dominate Western thought for two millennia. This episode traces his life from the court physician's son in Stagira, through the Academy, his years tutoring Alexander the Great, and the founding of the Lyceum in Athens. It examines his major contributions across logic, metaphysics, ethics, politics, and poetics: the categories of being, hylomorphism, the four causes, the unmoved mover, the function argument, eudaimonia as the highest good, the doctrine of the mean, practical wisdom, and the vision of the good life laid out in the Nicomachean Ethics. Dante called him the Master of Those Who Know, and for centuries no one in the Western or Islamic world could think seriously about the world without first thinking through Aristotle.