Aristotle

Aristotle was born in Stagira in northern Greece, studied under Plato at the Academy for twenty years, tutored the young Alexander, and returned to Athens to found his own school, the Lyceum. What survives are lecture notes rather than finished books, on logic, physics, the heavens, animals, the soul, ethics, politics, rhetoric and poetry, an attempt to organise everything that could be known. Medieval Europe called him simply the Philosopher. The Nicomachean Ethics, the Politics and the Poetics are on every list; the Physics and Metaphysics anchor the programmes that read philosophy in order.