Perhaps no other philosopher has been as influential or original as the ancient philosopher Aristotle, and only the greatest have been as productive and consistent in their entire world view. It's one thing to have opinions about particular subjects (we all do that), but it takes true genius to come to make sense of the totality of our experience of the world (moral reasoning, critical thinking, political discourse, taxonomic categorization, aesthetic judgment, scientific inquiry, etc.) in terms of a single all-encompassing metaphysical theory, and Aristotle did that with enough philosophical elegance and coherence to become the unquestioned authority in virtually every discipline of human inquiry for more than two thousand years.It would take other great geniuses like Galileo, Descartes, Linnaeus, Darwin, Boole and Frege to question and ultimately replace the pervading Aristotelian framework with more modern conceptions and approaches to questions of knowledge and logical analysis. In this amusing lecture, Mark Steel provides a nice introduction to the importance of this great thinker.
Click here if you want the more serious treatment of Aristotle's genius and philosophical importance, with Martha Nussbaum.
Or click here and here for an analysis of Aristotle's thoughts on justice and the good society.
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