Alexander The Great: A Philosophical Genius

Aristotle was considered a philosophical genius during his time. He was born in Macedonia in a town called Stagira in 384 B.C.E. (Lawhead 74). During Aristotle’s teen years, he set out to get the best education during his time and became a student at Plato’s Academy in Athens where he would study and help teach with Plato for nearly twenty years (Lawhead 74). During this time, King of Macedonia summoned Aristotle to tutor his son for several years who would later become known as a legendary figure named Alexander the Great. Alexander was very interested in the secrets of medicine considering it an art. He required most of this knowledge from Aristotle which helped Alexander save many lives of troops on various occasions and without this knowledge …show more content…
Aristotle even praised Plato as a man, “whom bad men have not even the right to praise, and who showed in his life and teachings how to be happy and good at the same time” (Lawhead 75). However, even though Plato impacted Aristotle, he was a very independent thinker and didn’t want to repeat the ideas from his teacher Plato so he modified some and rejected some as well. Plato’s ideas were more idealistic and inspiring looking towards mathematics while Aristotle’s ideas were realistic and scientific looking towards science of biology. Research has shown that Aristotle’s philosophy was based on preserving what was of value in Plato’s system while avoiding its shortcomings (Lawhead …show more content…
He also believed that true scientific knowledge required knowledge of ultimate principles from which particular facts can be derived from. This man was the first one to discover rules of reasoning that is now called logic. However, he was genius because he was able to realize the validity of reason doesn’t depend on the content but the structure of an argument. He also showed us how to replace category terms with symbols and an argument still be valid using a two-term theory. This was the first attempt in history to represent reasoning by means of symbols (Lawhead 77-79). This would be called the doctrine of syllogism. Aristotle’s definition of syllogism is an argument in which, certain things have been assumed, something other than these follows of necessity from their truth, without needing any term from outside (Ross). Individuals uses syllogism every day. For example, most cats like to eat fish, my pet is a cat, he likes to eat fish. This term teaches us to not assume things even the obvious before we can verify that the assumption is