In all these topics, he provided illumination, met with resistance, sparked debate, and generally stimulated the sustained interest of an abiding readership. His extant writings span a wide range of disciplines from mind through aesthetics and rhetoric and into such primary fields as biology he excelled at detailed plant and animal taxonomy. This prodigious researcher and writer left a great body, perhaps numbering as many as two hundred treatises, from which 31 survive. Almost peerless, he shaped centuries from late antiquity through the Renaissance, and people even today continue to study him with keen, non-antiquarian interest. Philosophy of Saint Thomas Aquinas, the most influential thinker of the medieval period, combined doctrine of Aristotle within a context of Christianity.Īristotle numbers among the greatest of all time.

German religious philosopher Saint Albertus Magnus later sought to apply his methods to current scientific questions. Greek philosopher Aristotle, a pupil of Plato and the tutor of Alexander the Great, authored works on ethics, natural sciences, politics, and poetics that profoundly influenced western thought empirical observation precedes theory, and the syllogism bases logic, the essential method of rational inquiry in his system, which led him to see and to criticize metaphysical excesses. It is accompanied by an extended introduction, which discusses the key concepts in detail and includes suggestions for further reading. Malcolm Heath’s lucid English translation makes the Poetics fully accessible to the modern reader. One of the most powerful, perceptive and influential works of criticism in Western literary history, the Poetics has informed serious thinking about drama ever since.

Aristotle explains how the most effective tragedies rely on complication and resolution, recognition and reversals, centring on characters of heroic stature, idealized yet true to life. Taking examples from the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, The Poetics introduces into literary criticism such central concepts as mimesis (‘imitation’), hamartia (‘error’), and katharsis (‘purification’). In his near-contemporary account of Greek tragedy, Aristotle examines the dramatic elements of plot, character, language and spectacle that combine to produce pity and fear in the audience, and asks why we derive pleasure from this apparently painful process. ‘The plot is the source and the soul of tragedy’

Aristotle second book of poetics