Aristotle classifies the world

Aristotle systematized logic, biology, ethics, politics and poetics — the first person to organize knowledge into fields and investigate them empirically.

Why it matters

His logic dominated for two millennia; his empirical bent — dissecting animals, collecting constitutions — models the union of observation and theory. The medieval world called him simply 'the Philosopher'.

People

Aristotle

Related events

• 387 BCE – 86 BCE

  Plato founds the Academy

  Plato's school outside Athens — 'let no one ignorant of geometry enter' — pursued definitions, mathematics and the theory of Forms for centuries.

  Philosophy · europe

• 334 BCE – 323 BCE

  Alexander's campaigns fuse East and West

  In a decade Alexander carried Macedonian arms from Greece to the Indus; the Hellenistic kingdoms that followed mixed Greek, Persian, Egyptian and Indian worlds.

  Empires

• c. 1025

  Ibn Sina's Canon of Medicine

  Avicenna's Canon organized all medical knowledge of its day into a systematic encyclopedia of diseases, drugs and clinical method.

  Medicine · middle east

Sources

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — Aristotle