On the Heavens

Aristotle, a great Greek philosopher, researcher, reasoner, and writer, was born at Stagirus in 384 BCE as the son of Nicomachus, a physician, and Phaestis. He studied under Plato at Athens and taught there from 367 to 347 BCE. Subsequently, he spent three years at the court of a former pupil, Hermeias, in Asia Minor, and during this time, he married Pythias, one of Hermeias's relations.

After some time in Mitylene, in 343–2 BCE he was appointed by King Philip of Macedon to be the tutor of his teenage son, Alexander. After Philip's death in 336 BCE, Aristotle became the head of his own school, known as the "Peripatetics", at the Lyceum in Athens. Due to anti-Macedonian sentiment following Alexander's death in 323 BCE, he withdrew to Chalcis in Euboea, where he died in 322 BCE.

Nearly all the works Aristotle prepared for publication are lost; the extant pieces are priceless lecture materials, notes, and memoranda (some of which are spurious). They can be categorised as follows:

I. Practical: Nicomachean Ethics; Great Ethics (Magna Moralia); Eudemian Ethics; Politics; Oeconomica (on the good of the family); Virtues and Vices.

II. Logical: Categories; On Interpretation; Analytics (Prior and Posterior); On Sophistical Refutations; Topica.

III. Physical: Twenty-six works (some suspect) including topics on astronomy, generation and destruction, the senses, memory, sleep, dreams, life, facts about animals, etc.

IV. Metaphysics: On being as being.

V. On Art: Art of Rhetoric and Poetics.

VI. Other Works: Including the Athenian Constitution; with more works of doubtful authorship.

VII. Fragments: These include various works such as dialogues on philosophy and literature; and treatises on rhetoric, politics, and metaphysics.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Aristotle is available in twenty-three volumes.