At the age of 17, Aristotle joined Plato's Academy in Athens where he studied science and philosophy for 20 years. Shortly after Plato's death, Aristotle left the Academy and went to live on the Greek island of Lesbos, where he continued to study. In 343 B.C. he was appointed tutor to the young Alexander the Great. When Alexander succeeded to the throne, Aristotle returned to Athens and set up his own school, the Lyceum. He directed the Lyceum for 12 years, devoting himself to a wide range of teaching, writing and research. His output was enormous and included collections of historical information as well as scientific and philosophcal works.
For Aristotle, psychology was a study of the soul. Insisting that form (the essence, or unchanging characteristic element in an object) and matter (the common undifferentiated substratum of things) always exist together, Aristotle defined a soul as a kind of functioning of a body organized so that it can support vital functions. In considering the soul as essentially associated with the body, he challenged the Pythagorean doctrine that the soul is a spiritual entity imprisoned in the body. Aristotle's doctrine is a synthesis of the earlier notion that the soul does not exist apart from the body and of the Platonic notion of a soul as a separate, nonphysical entity. Whether any part of the human soul is immortal, and, if so, whether its immortality is personal, are not entirely clear in his treatise On the Soul. Through the functioning of the soul, the moral and intellectual aspects of humanity are developed. Aristotle argued that human insight in its highest form (nous poetikos, active mind) is not reducible to a mechanical physical process. Such insight, however, presupposes an individual passive mind that does not appear to transcend physical nature. Aristotle clearly stated the relationship between human insight and the senses in what has become a slogan of empiricism the view that knowledge is grounded in sense experience. There is nothing in the intellect, he wrote, that was not first in the senses.
In the Middle Ages Aristotle's work was rediscovered by Arab scholars and translated into Latin. He was regarded as the supreme authority in science and philosophy and his ideas reamained a key part of university education in Europe from the 13th to 17th centuries.
QuotationsAristotle
Aristotle