First Things. Aristotle, a great Greek philosopher, researcher, logician, and writer, born in Stagira in 384 BC, was the son of a physician. He studied under Plato in Athens and taught there (367–347). Then, he spent three years at the court of a former student of his in Asia Minor. After some time in Mytilene, in 343–342 he was appointed by King Philip of Macedonia as the teacher of his teenage son, Alexander. After the death of Philip in 336, Aristotle became the head of his own school (the "Peripatetics"), the Lyceum in Athens. Due to the anti-Macedonian atmosphere after Alexander's death in 323, he retired to Chalcis in Euboea, where he died in 322.

Almost all the works Aristotle prepared for publication have been lost. The invaluable remnants are lecture materials, notes, and memoranda (some are spurious). These can be categorized as follows:

I. Practical: Nicomachean Ethics; Magna Moralia (Great Ethics); Eudemian Ethics; Politics; Economics (for the welfare of the household); On Virtues and Vices.

II. Logical: Categories; Analytics (Prior and Posterior); Interpretation; Sophistical Refutations; Topics.

III. Physical: Twenty-six works (some disputed) including astronomy, generation and corruption, the senses, memory, sleep, dreams, life, facts about animals, etc.

IV. Metaphysics: on being as being.

V. Art: Rhetoric and Poetics.

VI. Other works including the Athenian Constitution; more works of also disputed authorship.

VII. Fragments of various works such as dialogues on philosophy and literature and treatises on rhetoric, politics, and metaphysics.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Aristotle is in twenty-three volumes.