Here is a broad overview of Aristotle’s life, works and thought. While any summary must omit many details, it should give you the main outlines of what we know.

1. Life and Historical Context  
 • Born 384 BC in Stagira (Chalcidice), northern Greece; son of Nicomachus, court physician to the Macedonian king.  
 • At age 17–18 went to Athens to study at Plato’s Academy (ca. 367–347 BC). Remained there about twenty years.  
 • Around 343 BC invited to Pella in Macedonia to tutor the young Alexander (the Great).  
 • In 335 BC returned to Athens and founded his own school, the Lyceum (the Peripatetic school). Taught and wrote there until 323 BC.  
 • Left Athens shortly after Alexander’s death (323 BC) and died in Chalcis on Euboea in 322 BC.

2. Works and Writings  
Aristotle’s surviving corpus is traditionally divided into two parts:  
 a) The “exoteric” or popular writings (lost except in fragments) intended for a wider audience.  
 b) The “esoteric” or technical writings—lecture notes, drafts, treatises—compiled by his students. Key works include:  
   – Organon (six books on logic: Categories; On Interpretation; Prior Analytics; Posterior Analytics; Topics; Sophistical Refutations)  
   – Physics (four-book treatise on nature and change)  
   – On the Heavens; On Generation and Corruption; Meteorology (natural philosophy)  
   – On the Soul (De Anima; the first systematic study of mind and life)  
   – Nicomachean Ethics; Eudemian Ethics; Magna Moralia (ethical treatises)  
   – Politics (study of the city-state and its constitutions)  
   – Rhetoric; Poetics (theory of persuasion and literary genres)  
   – Metaphysics (treatise “beyond” the physical, on being-as-being, substance, causation)

3. Methodology and Approach  
 • Empirical observation: Aristotle collected data (especially in biology and zoology) and stressed careful observation and classification.  
 • Syllogistic logic: Developed the first formal system of logic, centered on deductive syllogisms.  
 • Four causes: Explained change and existence by material, formal, efficient and final causes (teleology).  
 • Moderate empiricism: While valuing sense-experience, he held that universal concepts are grasped by an active intellect.

4. Major Doctrines and Contributions  
 a) Logic  
   – Syllogism: Propositions combining terms to derive conclusions from premises.  
   – Distinction of inference forms, fallacies, definitions of terms (genus/species).  
 b) Metaphysics  
   – Substance (ousia): Primary beings—individual substances are composites of matter (hyle) and form (morphe).  
   – Act and potency: Change conceived as actualizing potential.  
   – Prime mover: Unmoved cause of motion, purely actual, divine thought thinking itself.  
 c) Natural Science and Biology  
   – Classification of animals (blooded vs. bloodless; heart as seat of sensation).  
   – Teleological explanations: Features exist for ends (e.g. eyes for seeing).  
   – Physics: Place, void, time, motion—rejected atomism and vacuum.  
 d) Psychology (On the Soul)  
   – Soul as form of the body; faculties: nutritive, perceptive, desiderative, locomotive, intellective (passive vs. active intellect).  
 e) Ethics  
   – Eudaimonia (flourishing, happiness) as highest human good.  
   – Virtue (arete) as mean between extremes (the Golden Mean).  
   – Role of character, habituation, practical wisdom (phronesis).  
 f) Politics  
   – Man as “political animal”; importance of the polis (city-state) for realizing virtue.  
   – Analysis of constitutions (monarchy, aristocracy, polity vs. their corrupt forms).  
   – Property, slavery, education, justice, the middle class.  
 g) Rhetoric and Poetics  
   – Rhetoric: Three means of persuasion—logos, ethos, pathos; enthymeme as rhetorical syllogism.  
   – Poetics: Tragedy’s elements (plot, character, thought, diction, melody, spectacle); catharsis.

5. Influence and Legacy  
 • Immediate: The Lyceum produced a large school; Aristotle’s works circulated in Hellenistic, Roman periods.  
 • Medieval: Re-discovered in the Latin West via Arabic translations (Avicenna, Averroes); became the scholastic backbone of Thomas Aquinas and others.  
 • Early modern science: Some doctrines (e.g. teleology, impetus theory) were later challenged by Galileo, Newton, but his emphasis on observation endured.  
 • Contemporary: Metaphysics, logic (though supplanted by modern symbolic logic), ethics and political theory remain central to philosophical curricula.

6. Criticisms and Debates  
 • Teleology: Modern biology rejects purposive explanations in favor of mechanistic/ evolutionary accounts.  
 • Physics: Aristotle’s notions of motion, place and time were superseded by modern physics.  
 • Slavery and women: His endorsement of natural slavery and the inferior status of women are ethically rejected today.  
 • Method: His reliance on qualitative observation lacked systematic experimentation; modern science demands quantitative methods and controlled experiments.

This summary necessarily leaves out many subtleties—Aristotle’s writings are large, often unfinished or disorganized, and have generated millennia of commentary. Still, these points capture the core of what he sought: a systematic account of reality—from logic through nature, mind, ethics and politics—grounded in empirical observation yet oriented by teleological principles, and aimed at human flourishing.
