Aristotle was the greatest and most influential of all Greek philosophers; he was born in the town of Stageira in the year of 384 B.C. His farther, Nicomachus, was the friend and physician of Amynats II, king of Macedonia, father of Phillip and grandfather of Alexander the Great. Aristotle's education seems to have been directed toward the same profession, but it would appear that he early abandoned this intention, and aspired to that cultivation of universal knowledge for its own sake, in which he obtained a distinction without parallel in the history of the human race. In his 18th year he left Stageira for Athens, then the intellectual center of Greece and of the civilized world. Here he became the pupil of Plato, but soon made his master aware of the remarkable penetration and reach of his intellect, for we are told that Plato spoke of Aristotle as the
             " Intellect of the School." He remained at Athens for twenty years, during which only facts recorded, in addition to his studying with Plato, are, that he set up a class in rhetoric, and that in so doing, he became the rival of the celebrated orator and rhetorical reader, Isocrates. Upon the death of Aristotle's teacher Plato (347 B. C.,) Aristotle left Athens and went to the Mysian town of Atarneus, and thence to Mitylene. After two years stay at latter place, he was invited (in the year 342 B. C.,) by Phillip to Macedonia, to educate his son Alexander. When Alexander was commenced his expedition into Asia, (334 B. C.,) Aristotle returned to Athens. Aristotle also had other actions as in studying with Plato and educating Alexander.
             In Metaphysics Aristotle tried to justify the entire enterprise by grounding it all in an abstract study of being qua being. Although Aristotle rejected the Plantonic theory of forms, he defended his own vision of ultimate reality , including the eternal existence of substance. One The Soul uses the notion of a hylomorphic composite to prov...