Aristotle Research Paper

Aristotle was an ancient Greek scientist and philosopher. He was born in 384 B.C. in Stagira, a small town on the northern coast of Greece, to Nicomachus and Phaestis who raised him there at his childhood home. Both his parents came from families in the medical field. Aristotle’s father, Nicomachus, served as court physician to King Amyntus III of Macedonia, which likely inspired some of his interest in science. Sadly, both of Aristotle’s parents died while he was pretty young. After the death of Aristotle’s parents, Proxenus of Atarneus, who was married to his sister, Arimneste, became Aristotle’s guardian until he came of age. When he was around 17 years old he moved to Athens, which was considered the academic center of the universe at the

His work has remained a significant starting point for any argument in the fields of logic, aesthetics, physics, politics, ethics, etc. He made major contributions to what we know today about modern day mathematics, metaphysics, physics, biology, botany, politics, medicine, and much more. One large contribution Aristotle made was inventing the logic of the categorical syllogism. A syllogism (Greek word for "conclusion, inference”) is a form of logical argument that applies deductive reasoning to arrive at a conclusion based on two or more propositions that are asserted or assumed to be true. The basic concept of a syllogism was to combine a general statement (the major premise) and a specific statement (the minor premise), and from those a conclusion is deduced. Syllogistical arguments are written in three-line sentences. Each of the three sentences is called a proposition. An example of this would be to say “All humans breathe. I am human. Therefore I breathe.” Given the structure of these arguments, as long as the premises were true, then the conclusion was also guaranteed to be true. Aristotle’s form of logic dominated this area of thought until the rise of modern propositional logic and predicate logic 2000 years

He wrote a book called “Historia Animalium” (Latin, meaning “history of animals”), in which he classified different animals based on their similar and different traits such as animals that live in water and animals that live on land. Aristotle was the first person in history to ever give classifications to living beings. He believed that all living beings had a hierarchy and could be placed from lowest to highest in this hierarchy based on their position. He placed humans in the highest strata of the hierarchy. His system of classification was not evolutionary, and the various species in the hierarchy had no specific genetic relationship to each other. Aristotle regarded the essence of species as fixed and unchanging, and this view persisted for the next two thousand years. He formulated the binomial naming convention as well. This was a system where all living organisms could be given two different sets of nomenclature defined by name of organism’s ‘genus’ and ‘difference’. Aristotle defined the ‘genus’ of a living being to be its collective family/group as a whole. The ‘difference’ is what defines what makes the living organism different from other members of the family it falls