*John Sellars, author of Aristotle: Understanding the World’s Greatest Philosopher.*

This week we’re heading back to the fourth century BC to take a look at one of the world’s greatest ever philosophers. Indeed, according to today’s guest, John Sellars, Aristotle is even more than that. He might well be the single most important human ever to have lived.

* [About our format] *

Although he lived almost two and a half millenniums ago, we know a good deal about the life and work of the Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle. Born in 384 BC in Stagira, on the northern coast of Greece, he lived at a enchanting moment in history.

Not long before Aristotle’s birth, Socrates had challenged people to think more carefully about the business of living. ‘The unexamined life’, he memorably stated, ‘is not worth living.’ Socrates was now dead but by the time of Aristotle’s childhood, Plato, was taking his work forward. In Athens Plato has established an Academy, where he taught the precepts of ‘Platonism’. It was into this Academy that Aristotle enrolled at the age of about seventeen in 367 BC.

Aristotle would spend the next twenty years at Plato’s Academy. Plato considered philosophy as being very much of discussion and debate. Although Aristotle was later said to be a more reserved character – one happier with alone with books than busy with company – his years at the Academy were powerfully formative. He would have picked over teasing metaphysical and moral issues with his fellow students. All this time Aristotle was practising something that had become a central belief inside the Academy. That ‘we not only ought to do philosophy’ but that philosophy was also ‘the only route to a fully happy life.’

So John Sellars, this week’s guest on Travel Through Time, expresses it. In his book Aristotle: Understanding the World’s Greatest Philosopher, he begins his evaluation of Aristotle’s life and thought with these years at the Academy. Plato’s Academy was a place alive with energy and bright with ideas, but in the year 347 BC everything changed. In that year (or possibly the year before) Plato died. Overlooked as his successor at the Academy, Aristotle decided to leave Athens and to strike out on his own.

The years that followed were some of the most vibrant and productive of Aristotle’s life. As Sellars explains, he first became something of a proto-natural philosopher, in the mould of a Charles Darwin, catching and examining creatures by a lagoon on the island of Lesbos. In this vivid location, rich with wildlife, he threw himself into the study of nature. What is it that makes something alive? What distinguishes a living being from a corpse? Where was the centre of cognition in the body? ‘In all natural things,’ Aristotle believed, ‘there is something marvellous.’

It was during this colourful period of his life that Aristotle forged a strong friendship with Theophrastus and was famously asked to tutor the young Alexander the Great.

After about a decade away from Athens, Aristotle returned in 335 BC. Shortly afterwards he founded his own philosophical school, the Lyceum. ‘It was here’, Sellars writes,

towards the end of his life, that Aristotle gathered with like-minded friends and pupils to think about and reflect on a dizzying array of topics, from abstract questions in philosophy, the study of the natural world, and the foundations of logic, to rhetoric, drama, politics, and more. Together at the Lyceum they lived the life of the mind, absorbed in intellectual inquiry.

As ever with our episodes concerning the deep past, we give our guests increased scope to explore their subject. In this, Sellars takes us back to three vital moments in Aristotle’s life and career: his departure from Plato’s Academy; his arrival on Lesbos; his foundation of the Lyceum. In these moments we can glimpse, as Sellars points out, much of what made Aristotle one of the most important humans to have ever lived.

***

Aristotle: Understanding the World’s Greatest Philosopher by John Sellars is out now.

* Listen to the Podcast *

Show Notes

Scene One: 347 BC. Aristotle leaves Plato’s Academy after twenty years.

Scene Two: 344 BC. Aristotle arrives on Lesbos and begins to study animals.

Scene Three: 335 BC. Aristotle returns to Athens, founds the Lyceum and embarks on a dizzying array of philosophical work.

Memento: A papyrus scroll containing one of Aristotle’s lost dialogues.

People/Social

Presenter: Peter Moore

Guest: John Sellars

Production: Maria Nolan

Podcast partner: Ace Cultural Tours

Theme music: ‘Love Token’ from the album ‘This Is Us’ By Slava and Leonard Grigoryan

Follow us on Twitter: @tttpodcast_

See where 347 BC fits on our Timeline

About John Sellars

John Sellars is a Reader in Philosophy at Royal Holloway, a Visiting Research Fellow at King's College London and a Member of Common Room, Wolfson College, Oxford. He is the author of a sleek and stylish new short book, Aristotle: Understanding the World’s Greatest Philosopher.