History of Philosophy
Portrait of Aristotle

 

Aristotle

384–322 BCE · Peripatetic (The Lyceum)

You're practical and curious about everything: biology, politics, ethics, logic. You think the good life is built from good habits, lived among other people.

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”

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What you’d believe

  1. Form is in things (hylomorphism)Every substance is a compound of matter and form; form is not in a separate realm but immanent.
  2. The four causesTo know a thing fully is to know its material, formal, efficient, and final cause (its end/purpose).
  3. Virtue as the golden meanMoral virtue is a disposition to choose the mean between excess and deficiency (courage between rashness and cowardice).

Who else you could have been