Most Famous Peripatetic School Philosophers

The Peripatetic school was the philosophical school founded by Aristotle in 335 BC at the Lyceum in Athens. The name derives from the colonnaded walks of the Lyceum where members are said to have walked while discussing. The school continued Aristotle's empirical and systematic method across logic, biology, ethics, and metaphysics. Major figures after Aristotle included Theophrastus and Strato of Lampsacus. The school's texts and methods exerted lasting influence on medieval scholasticism through Arabic and Latin translators.

Philosophers in this tradition

Aristotle 384 BC – 322 BC · Greek
Aristotle was a Greek philosopher and polymath born in Stagira in 384 BC. A student of Plato and tutor to Alexander the Great, he founded the Peripatetic school at the Lyceum in...
Alexander of Aphrodisias c. 150 – c. 210 · Greek
Alexander of Aphrodisias was a Peripatetic philosopher of the late second and early third centuries AD, head of the Aristotelian school in Athens at the end of the second centur...
Theophrastus c. 371 BC – c. 287 BC · Greek
Theophrastus of Eresus was an ancient Greek philosopher and the immediate successor of Aristotle as head of the Peripatetic School at the Lyceum in Athens. He directed the schoo...
Andronicus of Rhodes c. 100 BC – c. 40 BC · Greek
Andronicus of Rhodes was a Greek Peripatetic philosopher of the first century BC, traditionally counted as the eleventh head of the Aristotelian school in Athens, and the editor...
Aristoxenus c. 360 BC – c. 300 BC · Greek
Aristoxenus of Tarentum was a Greek Peripatetic philosopher and music theorist of the fourth century BC, a pupil of Aristotle and a son of the Pythagorean musician Spintharus. H...
Cesare Cremonini 1550 – 1631 · Italian
Cesare Cremonini was an Italian philosopher, professor at the University of Padua for more than forty years, and the most prominent academic Aristotelian of his age. A friend an...
Critolaus of Phaselis c. 200 BC – c. 118 BC · Greek
Critolaus of Phaselis was a Greek Peripatetic philosopher and the head of the Aristotelian school in the second century BC, one of the three philosophers, with Diogenes of Babyl...
Demetrius of Phalerum c. 350 BC – c. 280 BC · Greek
Demetrius of Phalerum was a Peripatetic philosopher and Athenian statesman who governed Athens for ten years on behalf of Cassander before fleeing in exile to the court of Ptole...
Eudemus of Rhodes c. 370 BC – c. 300 BC · Greek
Eudemus of Rhodes was a Greek Peripatetic philosopher of the fourth century BC, a senior pupil of Aristotle who, on Aristotle's death, was passed over in the succession to Theop...
Heraclides Lembus c. 200 BC – c. 130 BC · Greek
Heraclides Lembus was a Greek Peripatetic philosopher and Egyptian official of the second century BC, who served Ptolemy VI Philometor and is credited with negotiating the famou...
Themistius 317 AD – 388 AD · Greek
Themistius was a fourth-century Greek philosopher, rhetorician, and prefect of Constantinople. Committed to the Aristotelian tradition rather than to the dominant Neoplatonism o...
Strato of Lampsacus c. 335 BC – c. 269 BC · Greek
Strato of Lampsacus was an ancient Greek philosopher and the third head of the Peripatetic School at the Lyceum in Athens, succeeding Theophrastus in 287 BC. Known in antiquity ...