Aristotle, student of Plato, is the founder of the Lyceum and the Peripatetic school of philosophy. He lived during the Classical period of philosophy in Ancient Greece. Aristotle’s views were formed largely in reaction to those of the Pre-Socratics, Socrates and Plato. He is far more of a scientist than his predecessors, and compared to Plato’s otherworldliness, Aristotle views are down to earth. Aristotle does not use the same kind of appealing images and allegories that makes some of Plato’s work so inspiring. Aristotle’s method was normally to summarize the views of other thinkers first, and then consider them carefully before explaining his own thoughts. Aristotle’s ideas in ethics and politics have been especially important and influential. He is famous for his view in Nichomachean Ethics that ‘moral virtue is a mean.’ He argued that happiness from fulfilling one’s capacities. He notoriously thought (and his view would have been standard in his own time) that different groups of people have characteristic capacities. In politics, he argued that the state should come ahead of family or individuals.

For Aristotle, the aim of philosophy and science is to understand this world. This world of physical objects and biological organisms such as octopuses, snails and eels is good enough, and is not to be despised. For Aristotle, science is the main paradigm of knowledge, and is done through an investigation of the world around us combined with rigorous thinking about it. The senses do lead us to knowledge when guided by the intellect. For Aristotle, human beings are rational animals. The soul is not something distinct from the body, but it is instead the “form” of the body, what makes it the particular sort of body that it is. All creatures have souls in the sense that they have the capacity to metabolize. Having a higher level of soul is simply the capacity to move about, to have desires and to fulfill them, to perceive and to contemplate.

Aristotle simply takes it for granted that relativism is wrong. It is obvious to him that scientific reality is independent of us, and that an action is not right simply because it seems to us to be so. Aristotle does not think that we can achieve as much certainty in ethics as we can in mathematics, and we should not ask for more certainty than the subject at hand allows. He believes that an ordinary citizen is able to make good decisions and lead a good life. We achieve fulfillment through developing and exercising our human capacities.