II.

Works

Aristotle was a prolific writer. He wrote a vast number of works on a wide range of topics. Three ancient catalogues credit him with having written more than 170 separate texts, although it is likely that a significant number of these are false attributions. Like Plato, Aristotle published philosophical dialogues. However, apart from a few fragments in the works of later writers, his dialogues have been wholly lost. He also wrote summaries of the works of other philosophers, and is credited with works on topics as diverse as music and optics, and a book of proverbs. Of these, only a few brief excerpts have survived. Still in existence, however, is a substantial body of unpublished writings, usually taken to be the material on which courses in the Lyceum were based. These works were collected, arranged, and given titles by later editors, the first of whom was Andronicus of Rhodes, the last head of the Lyceum, who put together and published an edition of them c. 60 bc, over 200 years after Aristotle’s death. This edition provided the body of Aristotelian work on which so much of the later history of Western philosophy would be based.

As regards the traditional conception of the arrangement of Aristotle’s works, his treatises on logic came first. These became collectively known as the “Organon” (meaning “instrument” or “tool”), because they provided the requisite tools for gaining philosophical understanding. Next came a series on nature, including the Physics, in which Aristotle set out the principles that explain the natural world. Aristotle also wrote a number of detailed accounts of particular aspects of the natural world, including studies of the anatomy of animals, natural processes of generation and corruption, and astronomy and meteorology. After his writings on nature came a work in what Aristotle calls “first philosophy”, the philosophical study of being. Its traditional Greek title indicates its place in the series as “the works after the physics” (“Ta Meta ta Phusika”); from this originated the term “metaphysics”. To his son, Nicomachus, Aristotle dedicated his principal work on ethics, known therefore as the Nicomachean Ethics. Other important texts include the Rhetoric, the Poetics (which survives in incomplete form), and the Politics (also incomplete).