Aristotle (384–322 B.C.E.)
A student of Plato. and a teacher of Alexander the Great, Aristotle was, along with Plato and Socrates, one of the founding figures of Western philosophy. Writing on virtually every subject - from physics to poetry - Aristotle was one of the first philosophers to attempt a comprehensive system of philosophical thought that could account for all facets of existence. His conception of metaphysics as the ‘science of being qua being’ defined the concept for centuries to come. His writings on the natural and physical sciences remained the dominant paradigm in Western culture through the Renaissance, until they were replaced by the Newtonian worldview. Medieval scholasticism was itself the result of a reconciliation of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic theology with Aristotelian notions of causality. Aristotelian or syllogistic logic remained the paradigm for logic until well into the nineteenth century, when thinkers from Boole to Frege.developed new paradigms of conceptual extension. Jacques Brunschwig’s article in volume ten of the Cahiers pour l’Analyse is an analysis of Aristotle’s ‘formal logic’, which treats symbolic forms in their independence from matter, and its distinction from the formalism or tendencies toward formalisationof the modern age.