Aristotle

Aristotle was born in 384 BC at Stagira, a Greek town in the north of the Aegean, the son of Nicomachus, a physician attached to the Macedonian royal court. At about the age of seventeen he went to Athens and joined Plato's Academy, where he studied and taught for some twenty years, until Plato's death in 347 BC.

After leaving Athens he spent some years at Assos and on Lesbos, and about 343 BC he was called by Philip II of Macedon to educate his young son, the future Alexander the Great. He returned to Athens in 335 BC and founded his own school, the Lyceum, where he taught and wrote for about a dozen years.

When Alexander died in 323 BC, feeling in Athens turned against Macedon, and Aristotle withdrew to Chalcis on the island of Euboea, where he died in 322 BC. The writings that survive are for the most part lecture treatises, on logic, nature, the soul, ethics, politics and poetics; the Metaphysics, whose title was given later by his editors, is his treatise on first philosophy.