Every human life is a collection of experiences, moments, images. A product of the books, stories, places and people that shaped the person. And the work can never be separated from the man as neatly as some histories of philosophy pretend. Life and work form a whole, and in order to understand the one, we always also have to look at the other.

Aristotle’s life and work

This is never so clear as it is with philosophers. Not dependent on observation or experiment for their theories, philosophers are freer than other academics to shape their theories to follow the contours of their own personalities. Kant’s ethics of stern duty is just the thing you would imagine this sourly man to produce, who was famous for living his life by the clock, going for his precisely measured walk at exactly the same minute every day. Quarrelsome Schopenhauer, the man who once didn’t get a philosophy prize in an essay contest in which he was the only contestant, is famous for his pessimist attitude to life. And nagging Socrates, walking around barefoot and poking fun at experts, is just the character to embody a philosophy of radical questioning of authority and striving for a higher wisdom that was rooted in the personal and the unconventional.

Aristotle himself is a man of contradictions. A philosopher, whose main body of work is not about philosophy at all — but about biology, astronomy, literary theory and practically everything else that one could scientifically explore in his time. More than a philosopher, Aristotle was a comprehensive “scientist.” It just so happens that his scientific work was not as enduring as his philosophy so that today we don’t think of him as a bad biologist or a failed astronomer; we think of him as a good philosopher.

Aristotle himself is a man of contradictions. A philosopher, whose main body of work is not about philosophy at all. 

But this is not due to any feature in Aristotle’s thought; rather, it is a result of the lack of progress in philosophy since the ancient times. All the natural sciences have long left Aristotle’s ideas behind, always discovering new ways to explain the world: evolution, natural selection, cellular biology, genetic material, neurons. Or stars, planets, nuclear fusion, the solar system, asteroids, other galaxies, exoplanets, …

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