Aristotle's Lyceum

 My account of Aristotle is not quite in chronological order: we looked at his birthplace and where his ashes were buried – now it’s time to fill in some of the in-between times.  We know Aristotle was educated by Plato at his Academy in Athens. This was a place of worship, a place for military exercise as well as a centre of education.

Aristotle followed in his teacher’s dialectic mode of interaction with his students but his thinking was to diverge greatly from that of Plato and for that reason, he founded his Lyceum in 335 BC. This was set in a lush, green area and was also called the Peripatetic School since Aristotle and his students often carried out their instruction while walking in these peaceful grounds.  Following the same schedules as Plato’s Academy, at the Lyceum, philosophy was taught in the morning, rhetoric in the early evening.

                    In 1996, as excavation was going on to clear a space for the new Museum of Contemporary Art, the original site of The Lyceum was uncovered. The excavation was carried out by archaeologist, Effie Lygouri and the site was opened to the public in June 2014. Right is an artist’s impression of what the construction would have been like.

  Beautifully landscaped, it covers a large area of over 11,000 square metres and is an ideal place to explore this rich historical find, the area where Plato and Aristotle strolled in the groves in bygone days, as well as to enjoy a charming oasis in the city centre.          

Plato was exceptionally interested in establishing what was understood by Truth and the Ideal; he searched for the immutable in terms of morals in society and in nature. His understanding was that there were two worlds: the Material World of substances which is temporal, and the World of Ideas which is eternal, containing the concepts, or moulds, if you like, of all contained in the Material World.  He believed that man, being of substance, with no direct access to the World of Ideas, can only have partial understanding. Similarly, he concluded that man cannot aspire to having an ideal political state, but that the Constitutional State is the next best thing.

We must appreciate that Aristotle was very interested in nature, in fact, he can be said to be Europe’s first great biologist, intent on classifying living objects around him. He felt that Plato, with his World of the Material and his World of Ideas, was unnecessarily doubling things!  Aristotle believed that the concept of ‘horse’, for example, was not in another world, but was in our consciousness - a product of what we had heard and seen around us. As a biologist, he classified objects according to their characteristics. In the same way, man constructs the concept ‘horse’ by classifying similar characteristics as common to one set of things.

Quite a complexity of thinking there! Just as it never fails to astound me that toddlers can see many different types of dogs, yet readily accept that quite different characteristics still belong to the same animal set. So this little person, with limited life experience and undeveloped reasoning faculty, can see a poodle and a Great Dane together and have no difficulty in assigning them to the same taxonomy of animal, have no doubts in comprehending their shared concept of ‘dogness’! And there they were, then, these philosophers, struggling over how to explain that phenomenon of sameness but difference at the same time! Man’s mind is a wonderful thing!

I end on a relevant, artistic note.  Below we see a part of the oil painting entitled ‘The School of Athens’, created by the Italian Renaissance artist, Raphael, between 1509 and 1511, now decorating a palace wall in the Vatican. You can see Plato making a point, while Aristotle and the other students listen intently.

                    

Next  painted on a shop shutter in central Athens, is an amazing piece of graffiti of the two main characters.  The Banksy-type artist has helpfully written the name of each philosopher below, and rather irreverently now has Plato effortlessly balancing a football on his index finger! Respect!!