Peripatetic School of Ancient Greek Philosophy Texts

The Peripatetic school was founded by Aristotle around 335 BCE in Athens, where he taught at the Lyceum, a public gymnasium east of the city. The name derives from περιπατητικός, "given to walking about", a reference to Aristotle's practice of lecturing while walking with his students. After Plato's death Aristotle left Athens, but he returned to establish the school, which he led until his death in 322 BCE.

The school's work took its start from what we perceive through the senses. Aristotle held that knowledge begins in sense-perception and rises from there to general accounts, and he built the tools for that ascent in logic, most famously the syllogism. Where Plato sought reality in a realm beyond the perceptible world, Aristotle kept his attention on the things of experience, and he treated philosophy, biology, physics, and politics as connected fields of a single inquiry. The major texts of this period include the <cite>Nicomachean Ethics</cite>, <cite>Politics</cite>, <cite>Physics</cite>, and <cite>Metaphysics</cite>.

In ethics the school's goal was εὐδαιμονία, the well-lived human life, reached through the cultivation of ἀρετή, excellence of character. Aristotle held that such excellence is not born in us but acquired through repeated practice and rational choice, so that a person becomes just or courageous by doing just or courageous things. The school's emphasis fell accordingly on practical wisdom and on the patient study of the natural world.

Theophrastus (c. 371–287 BCE) succeeded Aristotle as head and extended the school's work in the natural sciences, most notably in botany. Strato of Lampsacus (died c. 269 BCE), the third head, pushed the school's physics toward mechanical explanation and made sensory experience the starting point of understanding. In the Hellenistic period the school argued against Stoics, Epicureans, and sceptics, and in the 1st century BCE Andronicus of Rhodes produced an influential edition of Aristotle's writings that preserved the corpus and fixed its order. The school remained active for centuries, contributing to debates on the theory of knowledge and the principles of inquiry into nature.