Aristotle

We must now treat of youth and old age and life and death. We must probably also at the same time state the causes of respiration as well, since in some cases living and the reverse depend on this.

Philip Freeman is the author of more than twenty books on the ancient world, including the Cicero translations How to Think about God, How to Be a Friend, How to Grow Old, and How to Run a Country (all Princeton). He holds the Fletcher Jones Chair in Humanities at Pepperdine University. An inviting and highly readable new translation of Aristotle's complete Poetics-the first and best introduction to the art of writing and understanding stories Aristotle's...

The reasons for some animals being long-lived and others short-lived, and, in a word, causes of the length and brevity of life.

Generally seen as a pioneering work of zoology, Aristotle frames his text by explaining that he is investigating the existing facts about animals. History of Animals is one of the major texts on biology.

Elsewhere we have investigated in detail the movement of animals after their various kinds, the differences between them, and the reasons for their particular characters (for some animals fly, some swim, some walk, others move in various other ways); there remains an investigation of the common ground of any sort of animal movement whatsoever.

La Metafísica, uno de los tratados fundamentales de Aristóteles (384-322 a. C.), tuvo como génesis un conjunto de escritos independientes, cuya finalidad original era sobre todo educativa. Así pues, por su naturaleza, la Metafísica no puede considerarse tanto la exposición de un sistema perfectamente acabado como una obra que aborda diferentes temas a lo largo de catorce libros. No obstante, su concepción integral acaba dando a luz la ciencia...

One of the fundamental works of Western political thought, Aristotle's masterwork is the first systematic treatise on the science of politics. Aristotle in Politics examines the various options for governance and their respective values. A detailed and pragmatic approach to the subject, Politics provides much of the foundation for modern political thought. One of his central ideas is that "Man is a political animal," meaning that people can only...

THE ART OF RHETORIC Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of discovering the possible means of persuasion in reference to any subject whatever. This is the function of no other of the arts, each of which is able to instruct and persuade in its own special subject; thus, medicine deals with health and sickness, geometry with the properties of magnitudes, arithmetic with number, and similarly with all the other arts and sciences. But Rhetoric,...

Jonathan Barnes taught at the universities of Oxford, Geneva, and Paris-Sorbonne. He has published extensively on ancient philosophy and is the editor of The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation (Princeton). Melissa Lane is professor of politics at Princeton University and the author of The Birth of Politics (Princeton). Aristotle was the first philosopher in the Western tradition to address politics systematically and empirically,...