title: Columbia Pictures

text: The Columbia Pictures empire was sold on September 28, 1989, to the electronics giant Sony for the amount of $3.4 billion, one of several Japanese firms then buying American properties. The sale netted Coca-Cola a profit from its investment in the studio. Sony then hired two producers, Peter Guber and Jon Peters, to serve as co-heads of production when Sony also acquired the Guber-Peters Entertainment Company (the former game show production company, Barris Industries, Inc.) for $200 million on September 29, 1989. Guber and Peters had just signed a long-term contract with Warner Bros. in 1989, having been with the company since 1983. To extricate them from this contract, Steve Ross, who at the time the CEO of Warner Bros.'s then-corporate parent Warner Communications, sued Sony for $1 billion. Sony completed CPE's acquisition on November 8 and the Guber-Peters acquisition was completed on the following day.


title: Columbia Pictures

text: On December 1, 1989, Guber and Peters hired a longtime lawyer of GPEC, Alan J. Levine, to the post of president and COO of Columbia's newly formed company Filmed Entertainment Group (FEG). FEG consisted of Columbia Pictures, Tri-Star Pictures, Triumph Releasing, Columbia Pictures Television, Columbia Pictures Television Distribution, Merv Griffin Enterprises, RCA/Columbia Pictures Home Video (internationally known as RCA/Columbia Pictures International Video), Guber-Peters Entertainment Company, and ancillary and distribution companies.


title: Columbia Pictures

text: In 1990, Sony ended up paying hundreds of millions of dollars, gave up a half-interest in its Columbia House Records Club mail-order business, and bought from Time Warner the former Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio lot in Culver City, which Warner Communications had acquired in its takeover of Lorimar-Telepictures in 1989, thus ending the Burbank Studios partnership. Initially renamed Columbia Studios, Sony spent $100 million to refurbish the rechristened Sony Pictures Studios lot. Guber and Peters set out to prove they were worth this fortune, but though there were to be some successes, there were also many costly flops. The same year, Frank Price was made as the chairman of Columbia Pictures. His company Price Entertainment, Inc. that he founded in 1987, was merged with Columbia in March 1991. Price left Columbia on October 4, 1991, and was replaced by Warner Bros. executive Mark Canton and reactivated Price Entertainment as Price Entertainment Company with a non-exclusive deal with SPE. Peters was fired by his partner Guber in 1991, but Guber later resigned in 1994 to form Mandalay Entertainment the following year. The entire operation was reorganized and renamed Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE) on August 7, 1991, and at the same time, TriStar (which had officially lost its hyphen) relaunched its television division in October. In December 1991, SPE created Sony Pictures Classics for arthouse fare and was headed by Michael Barker, Tom Bernard, and Marcie Bloom, whom previously operated United Artists Classics and Orion Classics. Publicly humiliated, Sony suffered an enormous loss on its investment in Columbia, taking a $2.7-billion write-off in 1994. John Calley took over as SPE president in November 1996, installing Amy Pascal as Columbia Pictures president and Chris Lee as president of the production at TriStar. By the next spring, the studios were clearly rebounding, setting a record pace at the box office. On December 7, 1992, Sony Pictures acquired the Barry & Enright game show library.


title: Columbia Pictures

text: On February 21, 1994, Columbia Pictures Television and TriStar Television merged to form Columbia TriStar Television (CTT), including the rights to "Wheel of Fortune" and "Jeopardy!" after CTT folded Merv Griffin Enterprises in June. That same year, the company also purchased Stewart Television known for producing game shows like "Pyramid" and "Chain Reaction" among others. On July 21, 1995, Sony Pictures teamed up with Jim Henson Productions and created the joint venture Jim Henson Pictures.


title: Columbia Pictures

text: In the 1990s, Columbia announced plans of a rival James Bond franchise, since they owned the rights of "Casino Royale" and were planning to make a third version of "Thunderball" with Kevin McClory. MGM and Danjaq, LLC, owners of the franchise, sued Sony Pictures in 1997, with the legal dispute ending two years later in an out-of-court settlement. Sony traded the "Casino Royale" rights for $10 million, and the Spider-Man filming rights. The superhero became Columbia's most successful franchise: the first movie came out in 2002, and, as of 2021, there have been seven followup movies with US grosses in excess of $2.5 billion. Between the releases of the first and second sequels in 2004 and 2007, Sony led a consortium that purchased MGM – giving it distribution rights to the James Bond franchise.


title: Columbia Pictures

text: In 1997, Columbia Pictures ranked as the highest-grossing movie studio in the United States with a gross of $1.256 billion. In 1998, Columbia and TriStar merged to form the Columbia TriStar Motion Picture Group (a.k.a. Columbia TriStar Pictures), though both studios still produce and distribute under their own names. Pascal retained her position as president of the newly united Columbia Pictures, while Lee became the combined studio's head of production. On December 8, 1998, Sony Pictures Entertainment relaunched the Screen Gems brand as a horror and independent film distribution company after shutting down Triumph Films. In 1999, TriStar Television was folded into CTT. Two years later, CPT was folded into CTT as well.


title: Columbia Pictures

text: In the 2000s, Sony broadened its release schedule by backing Revolution Studios, the production/distribution company headed by Joe Roth. On October 25, 2001, CTT and CTTD merged to form Columbia TriStar Domestic Television. On September 16, 2002, Columbia TriStar Domestic Television was renamed Sony Pictures Television. Also in 2002, Columbia broke the record for biggest domestic theatrical gross, with a tally of $1.575 billion, coincidentally breaking its own record of $1.256 billion set in 1997, which was raised by such blockbusters as "Spider-Man", "Men in Black II" and "XXX". The studio was also the most lucrative of 2004, with over $1.338 billion in the domestic box office with movies such as "Spider-Man 2", "50 First Dates", and "The Grudge", and in 2006, Columbia, helped with such blockbusters as: "The Da Vinci Code", "The Pursuit of Happiness", "Casino Royale", and "Open Season", not only finished the year in first place, but it reached an all-time record high sum of $1.711 billion, which was an all-time yearly record for any studio until Warner Bros. surpassed it in 2009.


title: Columbia Pictures

text: On October 29, 2010, Matt Tolmach, the co-president of Columbia Pictures, stepped down in order to produce "The Amazing Spider-Man" and its sequel. Doug Belgrad, the other co-president of Columbia was promoted as sole president of the studio. Belgrad and Tolmach had been co-presidents of the studio since 2008 and had been working together as a team in 2003. The same day, Hanna Minghella was named president of production of Columbia.


title: Columbia Pictures

text: On November 18, 2012, Sony Pictures announced it has passed $4 billion worldwide with the success of Columbia's releases: "Skyfall", "The Amazing Spider-Man", "21 Jump Street", "Men in Black 3", and "Hotel Transylvania" and Screen Gems' releases: "", "The Vow", and "".


title: Columbia Pictures

text: On July 16, 2014, Doug Belgrad was named a president of the Sony Pictures Entertainment Motion Picture Group. He exited the post in June 2016. On June 2, Sanford Panitch, who had been the head of international local language production at the studio, was named president of Columbia Pictures.


title: Columbia Pictures

text: The Columbia Pictures logo, featuring a woman carrying a torch and wearing a drape (representing Columbia, a personification of the United States), has gone through five major changes. It has often been compared to the Statue of Liberty, which was an inspiration to the Columbia Pictures logo.


title: Columbia Pictures

text: Originally in 1924, Columbia Pictures used a logo featuring a female Roman soldier holding a shield in her left hand and a stick of wheat in her right hand, which appears to be based on the Standing Liberty quarter used from 1916 to 1930. The logo changed in 1928 with a new woman (Columbia, the female representative of America) wearing a draped flag and torch. The woman wore the stola and carried the palla of ancient Rome, and above her were the words "A Columbia Production" ("A Columbia Picture" or "Columbia Pictures Corporation") written in an arch. The illustration was based upon the actress Evelyn Venable, known for providing the voice of The Blue Fairy in Walt Disney's "Pinocchio".


title: Columbia Pictures

text: In 1936, the logo was changed: the Torch Lady now stood on a pedestal, wore no headdress, and the text "Columbia" appeared in chiseled letters behind her (Pittsburgh native Jane Chester Bartholomew, whom Harry Cohn discovered, portrayed the Torch Lady in the logo). There were several variations to the logo over the years—significantly, a color version was done in 1943 for "The Desperadoes". Two years earlier, the flag became just a drape with no markings. The latter change came after a federal law was passed making it illegal to wear an American flag as clothing. 1976's "Taxi Driver" was one of the last films released before the "Torch Lady" was revamped, although the classic logo would be later used in several Columbia releases, generally to match the year a given film is set in.


title: Columbia Pictures

text: From 1976 to 1993, Columbia Pictures used two logos. The first, from 1976 to 1981 (or until 1982 for international territories) used just a sunburst representing the beams from the torch. The score accompanying the first logo was composed by Suzanne Ciani. The studio hired visual effects pioneer Robert Abel to animate the first logo. The woman returned in 1981, but in a much smoother form described as resembling a Coke bottle.


title: Columbia Pictures

text: The current, and perhaps the best known, iteration of the logo was created in 1992 (same time as the television division's debut), and started its use in films the year after, when Scott Mednick and The Mednick Group was hired by Peter Guber to create logos for all the entertainment properties then owned by Sony Pictures. Mednick hired New Orleans artist Michael Deas, to digitally repaint the logo and return the woman to her "classic" look. Michael Deas hired Jennifer Joseph, a graphics artist for "The Times-Picayune", as a model for the logo. Due to time constraints, she agreed to help out on her lunch break. Deas also hired "The Times-Picayune" photographer Kathy Anderson to photograph the reference photography. The animation was created by Synthespian Studios in 1993 by Jeff Kleiser and Diana Walczak, who used 2D elements from the painting and converted it to 3D. The studio being part of Sony would not be referenced on-screen until 1996. In 2012, Jennifer Joseph gave an interview to WWL-TV: “So we just scooted over there come lunchtime and they wrapped a sheet around me and I held a regular little desk lamp, a side lamp,” she said, “and I just held that up and we did that with a light bulb." Deas went on to say, "I never thought it would make it to the silver screen and I never thought it would still be up 20 years later, and I certainly never thought it would be in a museum, so it’s kind of gratifying.”


title: Aristotle

text: Aristotle (; "Aristotélēs", ; 384–322 BC) was a Greek philosopher and polymath during the Classical period in Ancient Greece. Taught by Plato, he was the founder of the Peripatetic school of philosophy within the Lyceum and the wider Aristotelian tradition. His writings cover many subjects including physics, biology, zoology, metaphysics, logic, ethics, aesthetics, poetry, theatre, music, rhetoric, psychology, linguistics, economics, politics, meteorology, geology, and government. Aristotle provided a complex synthesis of the various philosophies existing prior to him. It was above all from his teachings that the West inherited its intellectual lexicon, as well as problems and methods of inquiry. As a result, his philosophy has exerted a unique influence on almost every form of knowledge in the West and it continues to be a subject of contemporary philosophical discussion.


title: Aristotle

text: Little is known about his life. Aristotle was born in the city of Stagira in Northern Greece. His father, Nicomachus, died when Aristotle was a child, and he was brought up by a guardian. At seventeen or eighteen years of age he joined Plato's Academy in Athens and remained there until the age of thirty-seven (). Shortly after Plato died, Aristotle left Athens and, at the request of Philip II of Macedon, tutored his son Alexander the Great beginning in 343 BC. He established a library in the Lyceum which helped him to produce many of his hundreds of books on papyrus scrolls. Though Aristotle wrote many elegant treatises and dialogues for publication, only around a third of his original output has survived, none of it intended for publication.


title: Aristotle

text: Aristotle's views profoundly shaped medieval scholarship. The influence of physical science extended from Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages into the Renaissance, and were not replaced systematically until the Enlightenment and theories such as classical mechanics were developed. Some of Aristotle's zoological observations found in his biology, such as on the hectocotyl (reproductive) arm of the octopus, were disbelieved until the 19th century. He also influenced Judeo-Islamic philosophies during the Middle Ages, as well as Christian theology, especially the Neoplatonism of the Early Church and the scholastic tradition of the Catholic Church. Aristotle was revered among medieval Muslim scholars as "The First Teacher", and among medieval Christians like Thomas Aquinas as simply "The Philosopher", while the poet Dante called him "the master of those who know". His works contain the earliest known formal study of logic, and were studied by medieval scholars such as Peter Abelard and John Buridan.


title: Aristotle

text: Aristotle's influence on logic continued well into the 19th century. In addition, his ethics, though always influential, gained renewed interest with the modern advent of virtue ethics. Aristotle has been called the father of logic, biology, political science, zoology, embryology, natural law, scientific method, rhetoric, psychology, realism, criticism, individualism, teleology, and meteorology.


title: Aristotle

text: In general, the details of Aristotle's life are not well-established. The biographies written in ancient times are often speculative and historians only agree on a few salient points.


title: Aristotle

text: Aristotle was born in 384 BC in Stagira, Chalcidice, about 55 km (34 miles) east of modern-day Thessaloniki. His father, Nicomachus, was the personal physician to King Amyntas of Macedon. While he was young, Aristotle learned about biology and medical information, which was taught by his father. Both of Aristotle's parents died when he was about thirteen, and Proxenus of Atarneus became his guardian. Although little information about Aristotle's childhood has survived, he probably spent some time within the Macedonian palace, making his first connections with the Macedonian monarchy.


title: Aristotle

text: At the age of seventeen or eighteen, Aristotle moved to Athens to continue his education at Plato's Academy. He probably experienced the Eleusinian Mysteries as he wrote when describing the sights one viewed at the Eleusinian Mysteries, "to experience is to learn" [παθείν μαθεĩν]. Aristotle remained in Athens for nearly twenty years before leaving in 348/47 BC. The traditional story about his departure records that he was disappointed with the Academy's direction after control passed to Plato's nephew Speusippus, although it is possible that he feared the anti-Macedonian sentiments in Athens at that time and left before Plato died. Aristotle then accompanied Xenocrates to the court of his friend Hermias of Atarneus in Asia Minor. After the death of Hermias, Aristotle travelled with his pupil Theophrastus to the island of Lesbos, where together they researched the botany and zoology of the island and its sheltered lagoon. While in Lesbos, Aristotle married Pythias, either Hermias's adoptive daughter or niece. She bore him a daughter, whom they also named Pythias. In 343 BC, Aristotle was invited by Philip II of Macedon to become the tutor to his son Alexander.


title: Aristotle

text: Aristotle was appointed as the head of the royal academy of Macedon. During Aristotle's time in the Macedonian court, he gave lessons not only to Alexander but also to two other future kings: Ptolemy and Cassander. Aristotle encouraged Alexander toward eastern conquest, and Aristotle's own attitude towards Persia was unabashedly ethnocentric. In one famous example, he counsels Alexander to be "a leader to the Greeks and a despot to the barbarians, to look after the former as after friends and relatives, and to deal with the latter as with beasts or plants". By 335 BC, Aristotle had returned to Athens, establishing his own school there known as the Lyceum. Aristotle conducted courses at the school for the next twelve years. While in Athens, his wife Pythias died and Aristotle became involved with Herpyllis of Stagira, who bore him a son whom he named after his father, Nicomachus. If the "Suda" an uncritical compilation from the Middle Ages is accurate, he may also have had an "erômenos", Palaephatus of Abydus.


title: Aristotle

text: This period in Athens, between 335 and 323 BC, is when Aristotle is believed to have composed many of his works. He wrote many dialogues, of which only fragments have survived. Those works that have survived are in treatise form and were not, for the most part, intended for widespread publication; they are generally thought to be lecture aids for his students. His most important treatises include "Physics", "Metaphysics", "Nicomachean Ethics", "Politics", "On the Soul" and "Poetics". Aristotle studied and made significant contributions to "logic, metaphysics, mathematics, physics, biology, botany, ethics, politics, agriculture, medicine, dance, and theatre."


title: Aristotle

text: Near the end of his life, Alexander and Aristotle became estranged over Alexander's relationship with Persia and Persians. A widespread tradition in antiquity suspected Aristotle of playing a role in Alexander's death, but the only evidence of this is an unlikely claim made some six years after the death. Following Alexander's death, anti-Macedonian sentiment in Athens was rekindled. In 322 BC, Demophilus and Eurymedon the Hierophant reportedly denounced Aristotle for impiety, prompting him to flee to his mother's family estate in Chalcis, on Euboea, at which occasion he was said to have stated: "I will not allow the Athenians to sin twice against philosophy" – a reference to Athens's trial and execution of Socrates. He died on Euboea of natural causes later that same year, having named his student Antipater as his chief executor and leaving a will in which he asked to be buried next to his wife.


title: Aristotle

text: With the "Prior Analytics", Aristotle is credited with the earliest study of formal logic, and his conception of it was the dominant form of Western logic until 19th-century advances in mathematical logic. Kant stated in the "Critique of Pure Reason" that with Aristotle logic reached its completion.


title: Aristotle

text: What is today called "Aristotelian logic" with its types of syllogism (methods of logical argument), Aristotle himself would have labelled "analytics". The term "logic" he reserved to mean "dialectics". Most of Aristotle's work is probably not in its original form, because it was most likely edited by students and later lecturers. The logical works of Aristotle were compiled into a set of six books called the "Organon" around 40 BC by Andronicus of Rhodes or others among his followers. The books are:


title: Aristotle

text: The order of the books (or the teachings from which they are composed) is not certain, but this list was derived from analysis of Aristotle's writings. It goes from the basics, the analysis of simple terms in the "Categories," the analysis of propositions and their elementary relations in "On Interpretation", to the study of more complex forms, namely, syllogisms (in the "Analytics") and dialectics (in the "Topics" and "Sophistical Refutations"). The first three treatises form the core of the logical theory "stricto sensu": the grammar of the language of logic and the correct rules of reasoning. The "Rhetoric" is not conventionally included, but it states that it relies on the "Topics".


title: Aristotle

text: The word "metaphysics" appears to have been coined by the first century AD editor who assembled various small selections of Aristotle's works to the treatise we know by the name "Metaphysics". Aristotle called it "first philosophy", and distinguished it from mathematics and natural science (physics) as the contemplative ("theoretikē") philosophy which is "theological" and studies the divine. He wrote in his "Metaphysics" (1026a16):


title: Aristotle

text: Aristotle examines the concepts of substance ("ousia") and essence ("to ti ên einai", "the what it was to be") in his "Metaphysics" (Book VII), and he concludes that a particular substance is a combination of both matter and form, a philosophical theory called hylomorphism. In Book VIII, he distinguishes the matter of the substance as the substratum, or the stuff of which it is composed. For example, the matter of a house is the bricks, stones, timbers, etc., or whatever constitutes the "potential" house, while the form of the substance is the "actual" house, namely 'covering for bodies and chattels' or any other differentia that let us define something as a house. The formula that gives the components is the account of the matter, and the formula that gives the differentia is the account of the form.


title: Aristotle

text: Like his teacher Plato, Aristotle's philosophy aims at the universal. Aristotle's ontology places the universal ("katholou") in particulars ("kath' hekaston"), things in the world, whereas for Plato the universal is a separately existing form which actual things imitate. For Aristotle, "form" is still what phenomena are based on, but is "instantiated" in a particular substance.


title: Aristotle

text: Plato argued that all things have a universal form, which could be either a property or a relation to other things. When one looks at an apple, for example, one sees an apple, and one can also analyse a form of an apple. In this distinction, there is a particular apple and a universal form of an apple. Moreover, one can place an apple next to a book, so that one can speak of both the book and apple as being next to each other. Plato argued that there are some universal forms that are not a part of particular things. For example, it is possible that there is no particular good in existence, but "good" is still a proper universal form. Aristotle disagreed with Plato on this point, arguing that all universals are instantiated at some period of time, and that there are no universals that are unattached to existing things. In addition, Aristotle disagreed with Plato about the location of universals. Where Plato spoke of the forms as existing separately from the things that participate in them, Aristotle maintained that universals exist within each thing on which each universal is predicated. So, according to Aristotle, the form of apple exists within each apple, rather than in the world of the forms.


title: Aristotle

text: Concerning the nature of change ("kinesis") and its causes, as he outlines in his "Physics" and "On Generation and Corruption ("319b–320a), he distinguishes coming-to-be ("genesis", also translated as 'generation') from:


title: Aristotle

text: Coming-to-be is a change where the substrate of the thing that has undergone the change has itself changed. In that particular change he introduces the concept of potentiality ("dynamis") and actuality ("entelecheia") in association with the matter and the form. Referring to potentiality, this is what a thing is capable of doing or being acted upon if the conditions are right and it is not prevented by something else. For example, the seed of a plant in the soil is potentially ("dynamei") a plant, and if it is not prevented by something, it will become a plant. Potentially beings can either 'act' ("poiein") or 'be acted upon' ("paschein"), which can be either innate or learned. For example, the eyes possess the potentiality of sight (innate – being acted upon), while the capability of playing the flute can be possessed by learning (exercise – acting). Actuality is the fulfilment of the end of the potentiality. Because the end ("telos") is the principle of every change, and potentiality exists for the sake of the end, actuality, accordingly, is the end. Referring then to the previous example, it can be said that an actuality is when a plant does one of the activities that plants do.


title: Aristotle

text: In summary, the matter used to make a house has potentiality to be a house and both the activity of building and the form of the final house are actualities, which is also a final cause or end. Then Aristotle proceeds and concludes that the actuality is prior to potentiality in formula, in time and in substantiality. With this definition of the particular substance (i.e., matter and form), Aristotle tries to solve the problem of the unity of the beings, for example, "what is it that makes a man one"? Since, according to Plato there are two Ideas: animal and biped, how then is man a unity? However, according to Aristotle, the potential being (matter) and the actual one (form) are one and the same.


title: Aristotle

text: Aristotle's immanent realism means his epistemology is based on the study of things that exist or happen in the world, and rises to knowledge of the universal, whereas for Plato epistemology begins with knowledge of universal Forms (or ideas) and descends to knowledge of particular imitations of these. Aristotle uses induction from examples alongside deduction, whereas Plato relies on deduction from "a priori" principles.


title: Aristotle

text: Aristotle's "natural philosophy" spans a wide range of natural phenomena including those now covered by physics, biology and other natural sciences. In Aristotle's terminology, "natural philosophy" is a branch of philosophy examining the phenomena of the natural world, and includes fields that would be regarded today as physics, biology and other natural sciences. Aristotle's work encompassed virtually all facets of intellectual inquiry. Aristotle makes philosophy in the broad sense coextensive with reasoning, which he also would describe as "science". However, his use of the term "science" carries a different meaning than that covered by the term "scientific method". For Aristotle, "all science ("dianoia") is either practical, poetical or theoretical" ("Metaphysics" 1025b25). His practical science includes ethics and politics; his poetical science means the study of fine arts including poetry; his theoretical science covers physics, mathematics and metaphysics.


title: Aristotle

text: In his "On Generation and Corruption", Aristotle related each of the four elements proposed earlier by Empedocles, earth, water, air, and fire, to two of the four sensible qualities, hot, cold, wet, and dry. In the Empedoclean scheme, all matter was made of the four elements, in differing proportions. Aristotle's scheme added the heavenly aether, the divine substance of the heavenly spheres, stars and planets.


title: Aristotle

text: Aristotle describes two kinds of motion: "violent" or "unnatural motion", such as that of a thrown stone, in the "Physics" (254b10), and "natural motion", such as of a falling object, in "On the Heavens" (300a20). In violent motion, as soon as the agent stops causing it, the motion stops also: in other words, the natural state of an object is to be at rest, since Aristotle does not address friction. With this understanding, it can be observed that, as Aristotle stated, heavy objects (on the ground, say) require more force to make them move; and objects pushed with greater force move faster. This would imply the equation


title: Aristotle

text: Natural motion depends on the element concerned: the aether naturally moves in a circle around the heavens, while the 4 Empedoclean elements move vertically up (like fire, as is observed) or down (like earth) towards their natural resting places.


title: Aristotle

text: In the "Physics" (215a25), Aristotle effectively states a quantitative law, that the speed, v, of a falling body is proportional (say, with constant c) to its weight, W, and inversely proportional to the density, ρ, of the fluid in which it is falling:;


title: Aristotle

text: Aristotle implies that in a vacuum the speed of fall would become infinite, and concludes from this apparent absurdity that a vacuum is not possible. Opinions have varied on whether Aristotle intended to state quantitative laws. Henri Carteron held the "extreme view" that Aristotle's concept of force was basically qualitative, but other authors reject this.


title: Aristotle

text: Archimedes corrected Aristotle's theory that bodies move towards their natural resting places; metal boats can float if they displace enough water; floating depends in Archimedes' scheme on the mass and volume of the object, not, as Aristotle thought, its elementary composition.


title: Aristotle

text: Aristotle's writings on motion remained influential until the Early Modern period. John Philoponus (in the Middle Ages) and Galileo are said to have shown by experiment that Aristotle's claim that a heavier object falls faster than a lighter object is incorrect. A contrary opinion is given by Carlo Rovelli, who argues that Aristotle's physics of motion is correct within its domain of validity, that of objects in the Earth's gravitational field immersed in a fluid such as air. In this system, heavy bodies in steady fall indeed travel faster than light ones (whether friction is ignored, or not), and they do fall more slowly in a denser medium.


title: Aristotle

text: Newton's "forced" motion corresponds to Aristotle's "violent" motion with its external agent, but Aristotle's assumption that the agent's effect stops immediately it stops acting (e.g., the ball leaves the thrower's hand) has awkward consequences: he has to suppose that surrounding fluid helps to push the ball along to make it continue to rise even though the hand is no longer acting on it, resulting in the Medieval theory of impetus.


title: Aristotle

text: Aristotle suggested that the reason for anything coming about can be attributed to four different types of simultaneously active factors. His term "aitia" is traditionally translated as "cause", but it does not always refer to temporal sequence; it might be better translated as "explanation", but the traditional rendering will be employed here.


title: Aristotle

text: Aristotle describes experiments in optics using a camera obscura in "Problems", book 15. The apparatus consisted of a dark chamber with a small aperture that let light in. With it, he saw that whatever shape he made the hole, the sun's image always remained circular. He also noted that increasing the distance between the aperture and the image surface magnified the image.


title: Aristotle

text: According to Aristotle, spontaneity and chance are causes of some things, distinguishable from other types of cause such as simple necessity. Chance as an incidental cause lies in the realm of accidental things, "from what is spontaneous". There is also more a specific kind of chance, which Aristotle names "luck", that only applies to people's moral choices.


title: Aristotle

text: In astronomy, Aristotle refuted Democritus's claim that the Milky Way was made up of "those stars which are shaded by the earth from the sun's rays," pointing out correctly that if "the size of the sun is greater than that of the earth and the distance of the stars from the earth many times greater than that of the sun, then... the sun shines on all the stars and the earth screens none of them."


title: Aristotle

text: Aristotle was one of the first people to record any geological observations. He stated that geological change was too slow to be observed in one person's lifetime.


title: Aristotle

text: The geologist Charles Lyell noted that Aristotle described such change, including "lakes that had dried up" and "deserts that had become watered by rivers", giving as examples the growth of the Nile delta since the time of Homer, and "the upheaving of one of the Aeolian islands, previous to a volcanic eruption."'


title: Aristotle

text: Aristotle also made many observations about the hydrologic cycle and meteorology (including his major writings "Meteorologica"). For example, he made some of the earliest observations about desalination: he observed early – and correctly – that when seawater is heated, freshwater evaporates and that the oceans are then replenished by the cycle of rainfall and river runoff ("I have proved by experiment that salt water evaporated forms fresh and the vapor does not when it condenses condense into sea water again.")


title: Aristotle

text: Aristotle was the first person to study biology systematically, and biology forms a large part of his writings. He spent two years observing and describing the zoology of Lesbos and the surrounding seas, including in particular the Pyrrha lagoon in the centre of Lesbos. His data in "History of Animals", "Generation of Animals", "Movement of Animals", and "Parts of Animals" are assembled from his own observations, statements given by people with specialized knowledge such as beekeepers and fishermen, and less accurate accounts provided by travellers from overseas. His apparent emphasis on animals rather than plants is a historical accident: his works on botany have been lost, but two books on plants by his pupil Theophrastus have survived.


title: Aristotle

text: Aristotle reports on the sea-life visible from observation on Lesbos and the catches of fishermen. He describes the catfish, electric ray, and frogfish in detail, as well as cephalopods such as the octopus and paper nautilus. His description of the hectocotyl arm of cephalopods, used in sexual reproduction, was widely disbelieved until the 19th century. He gives accurate descriptions of the four-chambered fore-stomachs of ruminants, and of the ovoviviparous embryological development of the hound shark.


title: Aristotle

text: He notes that an animal's structure is well matched to function, so, among birds, the heron, which lives in marshes with soft mud and lives by catching fish, has a long neck and long legs, and a sharp spear-like beak, whereas ducks that swim have short legs and webbed feet. Darwin, too, noted these sorts of differences between similar kinds of animal, but unlike Aristotle used the data to come to the theory of evolution. Aristotle's writings can seem to modern readers close to implying evolution, but while Aristotle was aware that new mutations or hybridizations could occur, he saw these as rare accidents. For Aristotle, accidents, like heat waves in winter, must be considered distinct from natural causes. He was thus critical of Empedocles's materialist theory of a "survival of the fittest" origin of living things and their organs, and ridiculed the idea that accidents could lead to orderly results. To put his views into modern terms, he nowhere says that different species can have a common ancestor, or that one kind can change into another, or that kinds can become extinct.


title: Aristotle

text: Aristotle did not do experiments in the modern sense. He used the ancient Greek term "pepeiramenoi" to mean observations, or at most investigative procedures like dissection. In "Generation of Animals", he finds a fertilized hen's egg of a suitable stage and opens it to see the embryo's heart beating inside.


title: Aristotle

text: Instead, he practiced a different style of science: systematically gathering data, discovering patterns common to whole groups of animals, and inferring possible causal explanations from these.; This style is common in modern biology when large amounts of data become available in a new field, such as genomics. It does not result in the same certainty as experimental science, but it sets out testable hypotheses and constructs a narrative explanation of what is observed. In this sense, Aristotle's biology is scientific.


title: Aristotle

text: From the data he collected and documented, Aristotle inferred quite a number of rules relating the life-history features of the live-bearing tetrapods (terrestrial placental mammals) that he studied. Among these correct predictions are the following. Brood size decreases with (adult) body mass, so that an elephant has fewer young (usually just one) per brood than a mouse. Lifespan increases with gestation period, and also with body mass, so that elephants live longer than mice, have a longer period of gestation, and are heavier. As a final example, fecundity decreases with lifespan, so long-lived kinds like elephants have fewer young in total than short-lived kinds like mice.


title: Aristotle

text: Aristotle distinguished about 500 species of animals, arranging these in the "History of Animals" in a graded scale of perfection, a nonreligious version of the "scala naturae", with man at the top. His system had eleven grades of animal, from highest potential to lowest, expressed in their form at birth: the highest gave live birth to hot and wet creatures, the lowest laid cold, dry mineral-like eggs. Animals came above plants, and these in turn were above minerals. He grouped what the modern zoologist would call vertebrates as the hotter "animals with blood", and below them the colder invertebrates as "animals without blood". Those with blood were divided into the live-bearing (mammals), and the egg-laying (birds, reptiles, fish). Those without blood were insects, crustacea (non-shelled – cephalopods, and shelled) and the hard-shelled molluscs (bivalves and gastropods). He recognised that animals did not exactly fit into a linear scale, and noted various exceptions, such as that sharks had a placenta like the tetrapods. To a modern biologist, the explanation, not available to Aristotle, is convergent evolution. Philosophers of science have generally concluded that Aristotle was not interested in taxonomy, but zoologists who studied this question recently think otherwise. He believed that purposive final causes guided all natural processes; this teleological view justified his observed data as an expression of formal design.


title: Aristotle

text: Aristotle's psychology, given in his treatise "On the Soul" ("peri psychēs"), posits three kinds of soul ("psyches"): the vegetative soul, the sensitive soul, and the rational soul. Humans have a rational soul. The human soul incorporates the powers of the other kinds: Like the vegetative soul it can grow and nourish itself; like the sensitive soul it can experience sensations and move locally. The unique part of the human, rational soul is its ability to receive forms of other things and to compare them using the "nous" (intellect) and "logos" (reason).


title: Aristotle

text: For Aristotle, the soul is the form of a living being. Because all beings are composites of form and matter, the form of living beings is that which endows them with what is specific to living beings, e.g. the ability to initiate movement (or in the case of plants, growth and chemical transformations, which Aristotle considers types of movement). In contrast to earlier philosophers, but in accordance with the Egyptians, he placed the rational soul in the heart, rather than the brain. Notable is Aristotle's division of sensation and thought, which generally differed from the concepts of previous philosophers, with the exception of Alcmaeon.


title: Aristotle

text: In "On the Soul", Aristotle famously criticizes Plato's theory of the soul and develops his own in response to Plato's. The first criticism is against Plato's view of the soul in the "Timaeus" that the soul takes up space and is able to come into physical contact with bodies. 20th-century scholarship overwhelmingly opposed Aristotle's interpretation of Plato and maintained that he had misunderstood Plato. Today's scholars have tended to re-assess Aristotle's interpretation and have warmed up to it. Aristotle's other criticism is that Plato's view of reincarnation entails that it is possible for a soul and its body to be mis-matched; in principle, Aristotle alleges, any soul can go with any body, according to Plato's theory. Aristotle's claim that the soul is the form of a living being is meant to eliminate that possibility and thus rule out reincarnation.


title: Aristotle

text: According to Aristotle in "On the Soul", memory is the ability to hold a perceived experience in the mind and to distinguish between the internal "appearance" and an occurrence in the past. In other words, a memory is a mental picture (phantasm) that can be recovered. Aristotle believed an impression is left on a semi-fluid bodily organ that undergoes several changes in order to make a memory. A memory occurs when stimuli such as sights or sounds are so complex that the nervous system cannot receive all the impressions at once. These changes are the same as those involved in the operations of sensation, Aristotelian , and thinking.


title: Aristotle

text: Aristotle uses the term 'memory' for the actual retaining of an experience in the impression that can develop from sensation, and for the intellectual anxiety that comes with the impression because it is formed at a particular time and processing specific contents. Memory is of the past, prediction is of the future, and sensation is of the present. Retrieval of impressions cannot be performed suddenly. A transitional channel is needed and located in past experiences, both for previous experience and present experience.


title: Aristotle

text: Because Aristotle believes people receive all kinds of sense perceptions and perceive them as impressions, people are continually weaving together new impressions of experiences. To search for these impressions, people search the memory itself. Within the memory, if one experience is offered instead of a specific memory, that person will reject this experience until they find what they are looking for. Recollection occurs when one retrieved experience naturally follows another. If the chain of "images" is needed, one memory will stimulate the next. When people recall experiences, they stimulate certain previous experiences until they reach the one that is needed. Recollection is thus the self-directed activity of retrieving the information stored in a memory impression. Only humans can remember impressions of intellectual activity, such as numbers and words. Animals that have perception of time can retrieve memories of their past observations. Remembering involves only perception of the things remembered and of the time passed.


title: Aristotle

text: Aristotle believed the chain of thought, which ends in recollection of certain impressions, was connected systematically in relationships such as similarity, contrast, and contiguity, described in his laws of association. Aristotle believed that past experiences are hidden within the mind. A force operates to awaken the hidden material to bring up the actual experience. According to Aristotle, association is the power innate in a mental state, which operates upon the unexpressed remains of former experiences, allowing them to rise and be recalled.


title: Aristotle

text: Aristotle describes sleep in "On Sleep and Wakefulness". Sleep takes place as a result of overuse of the senses or of digestion, so it is vital to the body. While a person is asleep, the critical activities, which include thinking, sensing, recalling and remembering, do not function as they do during wakefulness. Since a person cannot sense during sleep they cannot have desire, which is the result of sensation. However, the senses are able to work during sleep, albeit differently, unless they are weary.


title: Aristotle

text: Dreams do not involve actually sensing a stimulus. In dreams, sensation is still involved, but in an altered manner. Aristotle explains that when a person stares at a moving stimulus such as the waves in a body of water, and then looks away, the next thing they look at appears to have a wavelike motion. When a person perceives a stimulus and the stimulus is no longer the focus of their attention, it leaves an impression. When the body is awake and the senses are functioning properly, a person constantly encounters new stimuli to sense and so the impressions of previously perceived stimuli are ignored. However, during sleep the impressions made throughout the day are noticed as there are no new distracting sensory experiences. So, dreams result from these lasting impressions. Since impressions are all that are left and not the exact stimuli, dreams do not resemble the actual waking experience. During sleep, a person is in an altered state of mind. Aristotle compares a sleeping person to a person who is overtaken by strong feelings toward a stimulus. For example, a person who has a strong infatuation with someone may begin to think they see that person everywhere because they are so overtaken by their feelings. Since a person sleeping is in a suggestible state and unable to make judgements, they become easily deceived by what appears in their dreams, like the infatuated person. This leads the person to believe the dream is real, even when the dreams are absurd in nature. In "De Anima" iii 3, Aristotle ascribes the ability to create, to store, and to recall images in the absence of perception to the faculty of imagination, "phantasia".


title: Aristotle

text: One component of Aristotle's theory of dreams disagrees with previously held beliefs. He claimed that dreams are not foretelling and not sent by a divine being. Aristotle reasoned naturalistically that instances in which dreams do resemble future events are simply coincidences. Aristotle claimed that a dream is first established by the fact that the person is asleep when they experience it. If a person had an image appear for a moment after waking up or if they see something in the dark it is not considered a dream because they were awake when it occurred. Secondly, any sensory experience that is perceived while a person is asleep does not qualify as part of a dream. For example, if, while a person is sleeping, a door shuts and in their dream they hear a door is shut, this sensory experience is not part of the dream. Lastly, the images of dreams must be a result of lasting impressions of waking sensory experiences.


title: Aristotle

text: Aristotle considered ethics to be a practical rather than theoretical study, i.e., one aimed at becoming good and doing good rather than knowing for its own sake. He wrote several treatises on ethics, most notably including the "Nicomachean Ethics".


title: Aristotle

text: Aristotle taught that virtue has to do with the proper function ("ergon") of a thing. An eye is only a good eye in so much as it can see, because the proper function of an eye is sight. Aristotle reasoned that humans must have a function specific to humans, and that this function must be an activity of the "psuchē" ("soul") in accordance with reason ("logos"). Aristotle identified such an optimum activity (the virtuous mean, between the accompanying vices of excess or deficiency) of the soul as the aim of all human deliberate action, "eudaimonia", generally translated as "happiness" or sometimes "well-being". To have the potential of ever being happy in this way necessarily requires a good character ("ēthikē" "aretē"), often translated as moral or ethical virtue or excellence.


title: Aristotle

text: Aristotle taught that to achieve a virtuous and potentially happy character requires a first stage of having the fortune to be habituated not deliberately, but by teachers, and experience, leading to a later stage in which one consciously chooses to do the best things. When the best people come to live life this way their practical wisdom ("phronesis") and their intellect ("nous") can develop with each other towards the highest possible human virtue, the wisdom of an accomplished theoretical or speculative thinker, or in other words, a philosopher.


title: Aristotle

text: In addition to his works on ethics, which address the individual, Aristotle addressed the city in his work titled "Politics". Aristotle considered the city to be a natural community. Moreover, he considered the city to be prior in importance to the family, which in turn is prior to the individual, "for the whole must of necessity be prior to the part". He famously stated that "man is by nature a political animal" and argued that humanity's defining factor among others in the animal kingdom is its rationality. Aristotle conceived of politics as being like an organism rather than like a machine, and as a collection of parts none of which can exist without the others. Aristotle's conception of the city is organic, and he is considered one of the first to conceive of the city in this manner.


title: Aristotle

text: The common modern understanding of a political community as a modern state is quite different from Aristotle's understanding. Although he was aware of the existence and potential of larger empires, the natural community according to Aristotle was the city ("polis") which functions as a political "community" or "partnership" ("koinōnia"). The aim of the city is not just to avoid injustice or for economic stability, but rather to allow at least some citizens the possibility to live a good life, and to perform beautiful acts: "The political partnership must be regarded, therefore, as being for the sake of noble actions, not for the sake of living together." This is distinguished from modern approaches, beginning with social contract theory, according to which individuals leave the state of nature because of "fear of violent death" or its "inconveniences".


title: Aristotle

text: As Plato's disciple Aristotle was rather critical concerning democracy and, following the outline of certain ideas from Plato's "Statesman", he developed a coherent theory of integrating various forms of power into a so-called mixed state:


title: Aristotle

text: To illustrate this approach, Aristotle proposed a first-of-its-kind mathematical model of voting, albeit textually described, where the democratic principle of "one voter–one vote" is combined with the oligarchic "merit-weighted voting"; for relevant quotes and their translation into mathematical formulas see.


title: Aristotle

text: Aristotle made substantial contributions to economic thought, especially to thought in the Middle Ages. In "Politics", Aristotle addresses the city, property, and trade. His response to criticisms of private property, in Lionel Robbins's view, anticipated later proponents of private property among philosophers and economists, as it related to the overall utility of social arrangements. Aristotle believed that although communal arrangements may seem beneficial to society, and that although private property is often blamed for social strife, such evils in fact come from human nature. In "Politics", Aristotle offers one of the earliest accounts of the origin of money. Money came into use because people became dependent on one another, importing what they needed and exporting the surplus. For the sake of convenience, people then agreed to deal in something that is intrinsically useful and easily applicable, such as iron or silver.


title: Aristotle

text: Aristotle's discussions on retail and interest was a major influence on economic thought in the Middle Ages. He had a low opinion of retail, believing that contrary to using money to procure things one needs in managing the household, retail trade seeks to make a profit. It thus uses goods as a means to an end, rather than as an end unto itself. He believed that retail trade was in this way unnatural. Similarly, Aristotle considered making a profit through interest unnatural, as it makes a gain out of the money itself, and not from its use.


title: Aristotle

text: Aristotle gave a summary of the function of money that was perhaps remarkably precocious for his time. He wrote that because it is impossible to determine the value of every good through a count of the number of other goods it is worth, the necessity arises of a single universal standard of measurement. Money thus allows for the association of different goods and makes them "commensurable". He goes on to state that money is also useful for future exchange, making it a sort of security. That is, "if we do not want a thing now, we shall be able to get it when we do want it".


title: Aristotle

text: Aristotle's "Rhetoric" proposes that a speaker can use three basic kinds of appeals to persuade his audience: "ethos" (an appeal to the speaker's character), "pathos" (an appeal to the audience's emotion), and "logos" (an appeal to logical reasoning). He also categorizes rhetoric into three genres: epideictic (ceremonial speeches dealing with praise or blame), forensic (judicial speeches over guilt or innocence), and deliberative (speeches calling on an audience to make a decision on an issue). Aristotle also outlines two kinds of rhetorical proofs: "enthymeme" (proof by syllogism) and "paradeigma" (proof by example).


title: Aristotle

text: Aristotle writes in his "Poetics" that epic poetry, tragedy, comedy, dithyrambic poetry, painting, sculpture, music, and dance are all fundamentally acts of "mimesis" ("imitation"), each varying in imitation by medium, object, and manner. He applies the term "mimesis" both as a property of a work of art and also as the product of the artist's intention and contends that the audience's realisation of the "mimesis" is vital to understanding the work itself. Aristotle states that "mimesis" is a natural instinct of humanity that separates humans from animals and that all human artistry "follows the pattern of nature". Because of this, Aristotle believed that each of the mimetic arts possesses what Stephen Halliwell calls "highly structured procedures for the achievement of their purposes." For example, music imitates with the media of rhythm and harmony, whereas dance imitates with rhythm alone, and poetry with language. The forms also differ in their object of imitation. Comedy, for instance, is a dramatic imitation of men worse than average; whereas tragedy imitates men slightly better than average. Lastly, the forms differ in their manner of imitation – through narrative or character, through change or no change, and through drama or no drama.


title: Aristotle

text: While it is believed that Aristotle's "Poetics" originally comprised two books – one on comedy and one on tragedy – only the portion that focuses on tragedy has survived. Aristotle taught that tragedy is composed of six elements: plot-structure, character, style, thought, spectacle, and lyric poetry. The characters in a tragedy are merely a means of driving the story; and the plot, not the characters, is the chief focus of tragedy. Tragedy is the imitation of action arousing pity and fear, and is meant to effect the catharsis of those same emotions. Aristotle concludes "Poetics" with a discussion on which, if either, is superior: epic or tragic mimesis. He suggests that because tragedy possesses all the attributes of an epic, possibly possesses additional attributes such as spectacle and music, is more unified, and achieves the aim of its mimesis in shorter scope, it can be considered superior to epic. Aristotle was a keen systematic collector of riddles, folklore, and proverbs; he and his school had a special interest in the riddles of the Delphic Oracle and studied the fables of Aesop.


title: Aristotle

text: Aristotle's analysis of procreation describes an active, ensouling masculine element bringing life to an inert, passive female element. The biological differences are a result of the fact that the female body is well-suited for reproduction, which changes her body temperature, which in turn makes her, in Aristotle's view, incapable of participating in political life. On this ground, proponents of feminist metaphysics have accused Aristotle of misogyny and sexism. However, Aristotle gave equal weight to women's happiness as he did to men's, and commented in his "Rhetoric" that the things that lead to happiness need to be in women as well as men.


title: Aristotle

text: More than 2300 years after his death, Aristotle remains one of the most influential people who ever lived. He contributed to almost every field of human knowledge then in existence, and he was the founder of many new fields. According to the philosopher Bryan Magee, "it is doubtful whether any human being has ever known as much as he did". Among countless other achievements, Aristotle was the founder of formal logic, pioneered the study of zoology, and left every future scientist and philosopher in his debt through his contributions to the scientific method. Taneli Kukkonen, writing in "The Classical Tradition", observes that his achievement in founding two sciences is unmatched, and his reach in influencing "every branch of intellectual enterprise" including Western ethical and political theory, theology, rhetoric and literary analysis is equally long. As a result, Kukkonen argues, any analysis of reality today "will almost certainly carry Aristotelian overtones ... evidence of an exceptionally forceful mind." Jonathan Barnes wrote that "an account of Aristotle's intellectual afterlife would be little less than a history of European thought".


title: Aristotle

text: Aristotle's pupil and successor, Theophrastus, wrote the "History of Plants", a pioneering work in botany. Some of his technical terms remain in use, such as carpel from "carpos", fruit, and pericarp, from "pericarpion", seed chamber.


title: Aristotle

text: Theophrastus was much less concerned with formal causes than Aristotle was, instead pragmatically describing how plants functioned.


title: Aristotle

text: The immediate influence of Aristotle's work was felt as the Lyceum grew into the Peripatetic school. Aristotle's students included Aristoxenus, Dicaearchus, Demetrius of Phalerum, Eudemos of Rhodes, Harpalus, Hephaestion, Mnason of Phocis, Nicomachus, and Theophrastus. Aristotle's influence over Alexander the Great is seen in the latter's bringing with him on his expedition a host of zoologists, botanists, and researchers. He had also learned a great deal about Persian customs and traditions from his teacher. Although his respect for Aristotle was diminished as his travels made it clear that much of Aristotle's geography was clearly wrong, when the old philosopher released his works to the public, Alexander complained "Thou hast not done well to publish thy acroamatic doctrines; for in what shall I surpass other men if those doctrines wherein I have been trained are to be all men's common property?"


title: Aristotle

text: After Theophrastus, the Lyceum failed to produce any original work. Though interest in Aristotle's ideas survived, they were generally taken unquestioningly. It is not until the age of Alexandria under the Ptolemies that advances in biology can be again found.


title: Aristotle

text: The first medical teacher at Alexandria, Herophilus of Chalcedon, corrected Aristotle, placing intelligence in the brain, and connected the nervous system to motion and sensation. Herophilus also distinguished between veins and arteries, noting that the latter pulse while the former do not. Though a few ancient atomists such as Lucretius challenged the teleological viewpoint of Aristotelian ideas about life, teleology (and after the rise of Christianity, natural theology) would remain central to biological thought essentially until the 18th and 19th centuries. Ernst Mayr states that there was "nothing of any real consequence in biology after Lucretius and Galen until the Renaissance."


title: Aristotle

text: Greek Christian scribes played a crucial role in the preservation of Aristotle by copying all the extant Greek language manuscripts of the corpus. The first Greek Christians to comment extensively on Aristotle were Philoponus, Elias, and David in the sixth century, and Stephen of Alexandria in the early seventh century. John Philoponus stands out for having attempted a fundamental critique of Aristotle's views on the eternity of the world, movement, and other elements of Aristotelian thought. Philoponus questioned Aristotle's teaching of physics, noting its flaws and introducing the theory of impetus to explain his observations.


title: Aristotle

text: After a hiatus of several centuries, formal commentary by Eustratius and Michael of Ephesus reappeared in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries, apparently sponsored by Anna Comnena.


title: Aristotle

text: Aristotle was one of the most revered Western thinkers in early Islamic theology. Most of the still extant works of Aristotle, as well as a number of the original Greek commentaries, were translated into Arabic and studied by Muslim philosophers, scientists and scholars. Averroes, Avicenna and Alpharabius, who wrote on Aristotle in great depth, also influenced Thomas Aquinas and other Western Christian scholastic philosophers. Alkindus greatly admired Aristotle's philosophy, and Averroes spoke of Aristotle as the "exemplar" for all future philosophers. Medieval Muslim scholars regularly described Aristotle as the "First Teacher". The title was later used by Western philosophers (as in the famous poem of Dante) who were influenced by the tradition of Islamic philosophy.


title: Aristotle

text: With the loss of the study of ancient Greek in the early medieval Latin West, Aristotle was practically unknown there from c. AD 600 to c. 1100 except through the Latin translation of the "Organon" made by Boethius. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, interest in Aristotle revived and Latin Christians had translations made, both from Arabic translations, such as those by Gerard of Cremona, and from the original Greek, such as those by James of Venice and William of Moerbeke. After the Scholastic Thomas Aquinas wrote his "Summa Theologica", working from Moerbeke's translations and calling Aristotle "The Philosopher", the demand for Aristotle's writings grew, and the Greek manuscripts returned to the West, stimulating a revival of Aristotelianism in Europe that continued into the Renaissance. These thinkers blended Aristotelian philosophy with Christianity, bringing the thought of Ancient Greece into the Middle Ages. Scholars such as Boethius, Peter Abelard, and John Buridan worked on Aristotelian logic.


title: Aristotle

text: A cautionary medieval tale held that Aristotle advised his pupil Alexander to avoid the king's seductive mistress, Phyllis, but was himself captivated by her, and allowed her to ride him. Phyllis had secretly told Alexander what to expect, and he witnessed Phyllis proving that a woman's charms could overcome even the greatest philosopher's male intellect. Artists such as Hans Baldung produced a series of illustrations of the popular theme.


title: Aristotle

text: Besides Dante's fellow poets, the classical figure that most influenced the "Comedy" is Aristotle. Dante built up the philosophy of the "Comedy" with the works of Aristotle as a foundation, just as the scholastics used Aristotle as the basis for their thinking. Dante knew Aristotle directly from Latin translations of his works and indirectly through quotations in the works of Albert Magnus. Dante even acknowledges Aristotle's influence explicitly in the poem, specifically when Virgil justifies the Inferno's structure by citing the "Nicomachean Ethics".


title: Aristotle

text: Moses Maimonides (considered to be the foremost intellectual figure of medieval Judaism) adopted Aristotelianism from the Islamic scholars and based his "Guide for the Perplexed" on it and that became the basis of Jewish scholastic philosophy. Maimonides also considered Aristotle to be the greatest philosopher that ever lived, and styled him as the "chief of the philosophers". Also, in his letter to Samuel ibn Tibbon, Maimonides observes that there is no need for Samuel to study the writings of philosophers who preceded Aristotle because the works of the latter are "sufficient by themselves and [superior] to all that were written before them. His intellect, Aristotle's is the extreme limit of human intellect, apart from him upon whom the divine emanation has flowed forth to such an extent that they reach the level of prophecy, there being no level higher".


title: Aristotle

text: In the Early Modern period, scientists such as William Harvey in England and Galileo Galilei in Italy reacted against the theories of Aristotle and other classical era thinkers like Galen, establishing new theories based to some degree on observation and experiment. Harvey demonstrated the circulation of the blood, establishing that the heart functioned as a pump rather than being the seat of the soul and the controller of the body's heat, as Aristotle thought. Galileo used more doubtful arguments to displace Aristotle's physics, proposing that bodies all fall at the same speed whatever their weight.


title: Aristotle

text: The 19th-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche has been said to have taken nearly all of his political philosophy from Aristotle. Aristotle rigidly separated action from production, and argued for the deserved subservience of some people ("natural slaves"), and the natural superiority (virtue, "arete") of others. It was Martin Heidegger, not Nietzsche, who elaborated a new interpretation of Aristotle, intended to warrant his deconstruction of scholastic and philosophical tradition.


title: Aristotle

text: The English mathematician George Boole fully accepted Aristotle's logic, but decided "to go under, over, and beyond" it with his system of algebraic logic in his 1854 book "The Laws of Thought". This gives logic a mathematical foundation with equations, enables it to solve equations as well as check validity, and allows it to handle a wider class of problems by expanding propositions of any number of terms, not just two.


title: Aristotle

text: Charles Darwin regarded Aristotle as the most important contributor to the subject of biology. In an 1882 letter he wrote that "Linnaeus and Cuvier have been my two gods, though in very different ways, but they were mere schoolboys to old Aristotle". Also, in later editions of the book "On the Origin of Species', Darwin traced evolutionary ideas as far back as Aristotle; the text he cites is a summary by Aristotle of the ideas of the earlier Greek philosopher Empedocles.


title: Aristotle

text: James Joyce's favoured philosopher was Aristotle, whom he considered to be "the greatest thinker of all times". Samuel Taylor Coleridge said: Everybody is born either a Platonist or an Aristotelian. Ayn Rand acknowledged Aristotle as her greatest influence and remarked that in the history of philosophy she could only recommend "three A's"—Aristotle, Aquinas, and Ayn Rand. She also regarded Aristotle as the greatest of all philosophers.


title: Aristotle

text: Karl Marx considered Aristotle to be the "greatest thinker of antiquity", and called him a "giant thinker", a "genius", and "the great scholar".


title: Aristotle

text: argued that "almost every serious intellectual advance has had to begin with an attack on some Aristotelian doctrine". Russell called Aristotle's ethics "repulsive", and labelled his logic "as definitely antiquated as Ptolemaic astronomy". Russell stated that these errors made it difficult to do historical justice to Aristotle, until one remembered what an advance he made upon all of his predecessors.


title: Aristotle

text: The Dutch historian of science Eduard Jan Dijksterhuis wrote that Aristotle and his predecessors showed the difficulty of science by "proceed[ing] so readily to frame a theory of such a general character" on limited evidence from their senses. In 1985, the biologist Peter Medawar could still state in "pure seventeenth century" tones that Aristotle had assembled "a strange and generally speaking rather tiresome farrago of hearsay, imperfect observation, wishful thinking and credulity amounting to downright gullibility".


title: Aristotle

text: By the start of the 21st century, however, Aristotle was taken more seriously: Kukkonen noted that "In the best 20th-century scholarship Aristotle comes alive as a thinker wrestling with the full weight of the Greek philosophical tradition." Alasdair MacIntyre has attempted to reform what he calls the Aristotelian tradition in a way that is anti-elitist and capable of disputing the claims of both liberals and Nietzscheans. Kukkonen observed, too, that "that most enduring of romantic images, Aristotle tutoring the future conqueror Alexander" remained current, as in the 2004 film "Alexander", while the "firm rules" of Aristotle's theory of drama have ensured a role for the "Poetics" in Hollywood.


title: Aristotle

text: Biologists continue to be interested in Aristotle's thinking. Armand Marie Leroi has reconstructed Aristotle's biology, while Niko Tinbergen's four questions, based on Aristotle's four causes, are used to analyse animal behaviour; they examine function, phylogeny, mechanism, and ontogeny.


title: Aristotle

text: The works of Aristotle that have survived from antiquity through medieval manuscript transmission are collected in the Corpus Aristotelicum. These texts, as opposed to Aristotle's lost works, are technical philosophical treatises from within Aristotle's school. Reference to them is made according to the organization of Immanuel Bekker's Royal Prussian Academy edition ("Aristotelis Opera edidit Academia Regia Borussica", Berlin, 1831–1870), which in turn is based on ancient classifications of these works.


title: Aristotle

text: Aristotle wrote his works on papyrus scrolls, the common writing medium of that era. His writings are divisible into two groups: the "exoteric", intended for the public, and the "esoteric", for use within the Lyceum school. Aristotle's "lost" works stray considerably in characterization from the surviving Aristotelian corpus. Whereas the lost works appear to have been originally written with a view to subsequent publication, the surviving works mostly resemble lecture notes not intended for publication. Cicero's description of Aristotle's literary style as "a river of gold" must have applied to the published works, not the surviving notes. A major question in the history of Aristotle's works is how the exoteric writings were all lost, and how the ones now possessed came to be found. The consensus is that Andronicus of Rhodes collected the esoteric works of Aristotle's school which existed in the form of smaller, separate works, distinguished them from those of Theophrastus and other Peripatetics, edited them, and finally compiled them into the more cohesive, larger works as they are known today.


title: Aristotle

text: Aristotle has been depicted by major artists including Lucas Cranach the Elder, Justus van Gent, Raphael, Paolo Veronese, Jusepe de Ribera, Rembrandt, and Francesco Hayez over the centuries. Among the best-known depictions is Raphael's fresco "The School of Athens", in the Vatican's Apostolic Palace, where the figures of Plato and Aristotle are central to the image, at the architectural vanishing point, reflecting their importance. Rembrandt's "Aristotle with a Bust of Homer", too, is a celebrated work, showing the knowing philosopher and the blind Homer from an earlier age: as the art critic Jonathan Jones writes, "this painting will remain one of the greatest and most mysterious in the world, ensnaring us in its musty, glowing, pitch-black, terrible knowledge of time."


title: Aristotle

text: The Aristotle Mountains in Antarctica are named after Aristotle. He was the first person known to conjecture, in his book "Meteorology", the existence of a landmass in the southern high-latitude region and called it "Antarctica". Aristoteles is a crater on the Moon bearing the classical form of Aristotle's name.


title: Wes Anderson

text: Wesley Wales Anderson (born May 1, 1969) is an American filmmaker. His films are known for their eccentricity and unique visual and narrative styles. They often contain themes of grief, loss of innocence, and dysfunctional families. Cited by some critics as a modern-day example of the work of an auteur, three of Anderson's films have appeared in BBC Culture's 2016 poll of the greatest films since 2000.


title: Wes Anderson

text: He gained acclaim for his early work "Bottle Rocket" (1996), and "Rushmore" (1998). During this time he often collaborated with the Luke Wilson and Owen Wilson and founded his production company American Empirical Pictures which he currently runs. He then received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for "The Royal Tenenbaums" (2001). His next films included "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou" (2004), "The Darjeeling Limited" (2007), and his first stop-motion film "Fantastic Mr. Fox" (2009) for which he received an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature nomination, and then "Moonrise Kingdom" (2012) earning his second Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay nomination.


title: Wes Anderson

text: With Anderson's film "The Grand Budapest Hotel" (2014), he received his first Academy Award nominations for Best Director and Best Picture, and won the Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy and the BAFTA Award for Best Original Screenplay. The next films included his second stop-motion film "Isle of Dogs" (2018), which earned him the Silver Bear for Best Director, and "The French Dispatch" (2022).


title: Wes Anderson

text: Wesley Wales Anderson was born on May 1, 1969, in Houston, Texas, to Texas Ann Anderson (née Burroughs), a realtor and archaeologist, and Melver Leonard Anderson, who worked in advertising and public relations. He is the second of three boys; his parents divorced when he was eight. His older brother, Mel, is a physician, and his younger brother, Eric Chase Anderson, is a writer and artist whose paintings and designs have appeared in several of Anderson's films, such as "The Royal Tenenbaums". Anderson is of English, Swedish and Norwegian ancestry.


title: Wes Anderson

text: He graduated from St. John's School in Houston in 1987, which he later used as a prominent location throughout "Rushmore". As a child, Anderson made silent films on his father's Super 8 camera which starred his brothers and friends, although his first ambition was to be a writer. Anderson worked part-time as a cinema projectionist while attending the University of Texas at Austin, where he met his roommate and future collaborator Owen Wilson in 1989. In 1991 he graduated with a B.A. in philosophy.


title: Wes Anderson

text: Anderson's first film was "Bottle Rocket" (1996), based on a short film of the same name that he made with Luke and Owen Wilson. It was a crime caper about a group of young Texans aspiring to achieve major heists. It was well reviewed but performed poorly at the box office.


title: Wes Anderson

text: His next film was "Rushmore" (1998), a quirky comedy about a high school student's crush on an elementary school teacher starring Jason Schwartzman, Bill Murray, and Olivia Williams. It was a critical and financial success. The film launched Murray's second act as a respected actor within independent cinema. Murray has since appeared in every Anderson film to date. At the 1999 Independent Spirit Awards, Anderson won the Best Director award and Murray won Best Supporting Male. Murray also earned a nomination for Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor – Motion Picture. In 2000, filmmaker Martin Scorsese praised "Bottle Rocket" and "Rushmore". Since its release, "Rushmore" has gained cult status, and in 2016, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".


title: Wes Anderson

text: Anderson's next comedy-drama, "The Royal Tenenbaums", was released in 2001. The film focuses on a successful and artistic New York City family and its ostracized patriarch played by Gene Hackman. The film also starred Anjelica Huston as the ex-wife and Ben Stiller, Luke Wilson, and Gwyneth Paltrow as the children. The film was a box-office and critical success. It represented his greatest financial success until "Moonrise Kingdom" in 2012, earning more than $50 million in domestic box-office receipts. "The Royal Tenenbaums" was nominated for an Academy Award and ranked by an "Empire" poll as the 159th greatest film ever made.


title: Wes Anderson

text: Anderson's next feature was "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou" (2004) about a Jacques Cousteau-esque documentary filmmaker played by Bill Murray. The film also starred Owen Wilson, Cate Blanchett, Willem Dafoe, Jeff Goldblum, Anjelica Huston, and Michael Gambon. The film serves as a classic example of Anderson's style, but its critical reception was less favorable than his previous films, and its box office did not match the heights of "The Royal Tenenbaums". In September 2006, Steely Dan's Walter Becker and Donald Fagen released a tongue-in-cheek "letter of intervention" for Anderson's artistic "malaise" following the disappointing commercial and critical reception of "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou", proclaiming themselves to be fans of World Cinema and of Anderson in particular. They offered Anderson their soundtrack services for "The Darjeeling Limited", including lyrics for a title track.


title: Wes Anderson

text: "The Darjeeling Limited" (2007) was about three emotionally distant brothers traveling together on a train in India. It reflected the more dramatic tone of "The Royal Tenenbaums" but faced criticisms similar to "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou". Anderson has acknowledged that he went to India to film the movie partly as a tribute to Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray, whose "films have also inspired all my other movies in different ways" (the film is dedicated to him). The film starred Anderson staples Jason Schwartzman and Owen Wilson in addition to Adrien Brody, and the script was co-written by Anderson, Schwartzman, and Roman Coppola.


title: Wes Anderson

text: Anderson has also made several notable short films. In addition to the original "Bottle Rocket" short, he made the Paris-set "Hotel Chevalier" (2007), which was created as a prologue to "The Darjeeling Limited" and starred Jason Schwartzman alongside Natalie Portman, and the Italy-set "Castello Cavalcanti" (2013), which was produced by Prada and starred Jason Schwartzman as an unsuccessful race-car driver. Additionally, he has directed a number of television commercials for companies such as Stella Artois and Prada, including an elaborate American Express ad, in which he starred as himself. Anderson wrote a script for Brian Glazer for an English-language remake of Patrice Leconte's "My Best Friend". In 2010 he said that he did not plan to direct the film, tentatively called "The Rosenthaler Suite".


title: Wes Anderson

text: In 2009, Anderson's stop-motion-animated film adaptation based on the Roald Dahl book "Fantastic Mr Fox" was released. Voice talents included George Clooney, Meryl Streep, Owen Wilson, Bill Murray, Willem Dafoe, Jason Schwartzman, Adrien Brody, and Michael Gambon. The film was highly praised among critics and nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, although it barely made back its production budget.


title: Wes Anderson

text: In 2012, Anderson's film "Moonrise Kingdom" was released, debuting at the Cannes Film Festival, where it competed for the Palme d'Or. The film is a coming-of-age comedy set in a fictional New England town. The film includes ensemble performances from Bill Murray, Edward Norton, Bruce Willis, Frances McDormand, and Tilda Swinton. The film was emblematic of Anderson's style and earned Anderson another Academy Award nomination for his screenplay. The film was also a financial success, earning $68.3 million at the box office against a budget of only $16 million.


title: Wes Anderson

text: In 2014, Anderson's next film, "The Grand Budapest Hotel", was released and starred Ralph Fiennes, Tony Revolori, Saoirse Ronan, Jeff Goldblum, Willem Dafoe, F. Murray Abraham, as well as several of his regular collaborators, including Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, Tilda Swinton and Jason Schwartzman. It is mostly set in the 1930s and follows the adventures of M. Gustave, the hotel's concierge, making "a marvelous mockery of history, turning its horrors into a series of graceful jokes and mischievous gestures," according to "The New York Times". The film represented one of Anderson's greatest critical and commercial successes, grossing nearly $175 million worldwide and earning dozens of award nominations, including nine Oscar nominations with four wins for Best Production Design, Best Costume Design, Best Makeup, and Best Original Score. These nominations also included his first for Best Director.


title: Wes Anderson

text: Anderson returned to stop-motion animation with "Isle of Dogs". Production on the film started in the United Kingdom in October 2016, and it was released in March–April 2018. The film received Academy Award nominations for Best Animated Feature and Best Original Score.


title: Wes Anderson

text: Anderson's next film, "The French Dispatch", is set in post-war France and stars Benicio Del Toro, Jeffrey Wright, Bill Murray, Frances McDormand, Owen Wilson, Willem Dafoe, Adrien Brody, Tilda Swinton and Timothée Chalamet. Its release was delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, finally premiering at the Cannes Film Festival on July 12, 2021, with a general release in the United States on October 22, 2021. In the meantime, Searchlight Pictures released in September 2021 an animated music video of Christophe's "Aline" covered by Jarvis Cocker, directed by Anderson with animations by Javi Aznarez.


title: Wes Anderson

text: In November 2021, Anderson finished filming his latest feature entitled "Asteroid City", but very few details have transpired to the press. In May 2021 it was announced that it would be filmed in the Spanish city of Chinchón, where a huge diorama set reproducing Monument Valley were under construction. The film stars Tom Hanks, Margot Robbie, Scarlett Johansson, Adrien Brody, Tilda Swinton, Bryan Cranston, Jeff Goldblum, Hope Davis, and Jeffrey Wright among many others.


title: Wes Anderson

text: In January 2022, it was announced that Anderson would direct an adaptation of Roald Dahl's short story collection "The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More" for Netflix, which holds the rights to Dahl's works, with Benedict Cumberbatch, Dev Patel, Ralph Fiennes, and Ben Kingsley set to star.


title: Wes Anderson

text: Anderson's cinematic influences include Pedro Almodóvar, Satyajit Ray, Hal Ashby, and Roman Polanski. Anderson has a unique directorial style that has led several critics to consider him an auteur. Wes Anderson is considered a central figure in the American Eccentric Cinema tradition.


title: Wes Anderson

text: Anderson has chosen to direct mostly fast-paced comedies marked by more serious or melancholic elements, with themes often centered on grief, loss of innocence, dysfunctional families, parental abandonment, adultery, sibling rivalry and unlikely friendships. His movies have been noted for being unusually character-driven, and by turns both derided and praised with terms like "literary geek chic". The plots of his movies often feature thefts and unexpected disappearances, with a tendency to borrow liberally from the caper genre.


title: Wes Anderson

text: Anderson has been noted for extensive use of flat space camera moves, symmetrical compositions, knolling, snap-zooms, slow-motion walking shots, a deliberately limited color palette, and hand-made art direction often utilizing miniatures. These stylistic choices give his movies a highly distinctive quality that has provoked much discussion, critical study, supercuts, mash-ups, and even parody. Many writers, critics, and even Anderson himself, have commented that this gives his movies the feel of being "self-contained worlds," or a "scale model household". According to Jesse Fox Mayshark, his films have "a baroque pop bent that is not realist, surrealist or magic realist," but rather might be described as "fabul[ist]". In 2019, the company Murals Wallpaper from the UK launched a line of wallpapers inspired by the visual design of Anderson's films.


title: Wes Anderson

text: From "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou" on, Anderson has relied more heavily on stop motion animation and miniatures, even making entire features with stop motion animation with "Fantastic Mr. Fox" and "Isle of Dogs".


title: Wes Anderson

text: Anderson frequently uses pop music from the 1960s and '70s on the soundtracks of his films, and one band or musician tends to dominate each soundtrack. "Rushmore" prominently featured Cat Stevens and British Invasion groups; "The Royal Tenenbaums" featured Nico; "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou," David Bowie, including both originals and covers performed by Seu Jorge; "The Darjeeling Limited" and "Rushmore," the Kinks";" "Fantastic Mr. Fox", the Beach Boys; and "Moonrise Kingdom", Hank Williams. (Much of "Moonrise Kingdom" is filled with the music of Benjamin Britten, which is tied to a number of major plot points for that film.) "The Darjeeling Limited" also borrowed music styles from Satyajit Ray's films. "The Grand Budapest Hotel", which is mostly set in the 1930s, is notable for being the first Anderson film to eschew using any pop music, and instead used original music composed by Alexandre Desplat. Its soundtrack won Desplat the Academy Award for Best Original Score, the BAFTA Award for Best Film Music, and World Soundtrack Award for Best Original Score of the Year. The soundtracks for his films have often brought renewed attention to the artists featured, most prominently in the case of "These Days", which was used in "The Royal Tenenbaums".


title: Wes Anderson

text: Anderson's work has been classified as postmodern, on account of his nostalgic attention to detail, his subversion of mainstream conventions of narrative, his references to different genres in the same film, and his love for eccentric characters with complex sexual identities.


title: Wes Anderson

text: Anderson is in a romantic relationship with Lebanese writer, costume designer, and voice actress Juman Malouf, who is the daughter of novelist Hanan al-Shaykh. Malouf gave birth to the couple's daughter, Freya, in 2016. She is named after a character from the film "The Mortal Storm."


title: Wes Anderson

text: Anderson currently lives in Paris but spent most of his adult life in New York City. He is the brother of author, illustrator and actor Eric Chase Anderson, who illustrated the Criterion Collection releases of some of Anderson's films ("Rushmore," "The Royal Tenenbaums," "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou" and "The Darjeeling Limited") and provided the voice of Kristofferson Silverfox in "Fantastic Mr. Fox".


title: Wes Anderson

text: Anderson's distinctive filmmaking style has led to numerous homages and parodies. Notable examples include:


title: Wes Anderson

text: Anderson's films feature many recurring actors, including the Wilson brothers (Owen, Luke, and Andrew), Bill Murray, Jason Schwartzman, Anjelica Huston, Willem Dafoe, Jeff Goldblum, Edward Norton, Adrien Brody, Bob Balaban, and Tilda Swinton. Robert Yeoman has served as director of photography for all of Anderson's live-action films, while Mark Mothersbaugh composed Anderson's first four films, with Alexandre Desplat with six films, taking over composing since "Fantastic Mr. Fox". Randall Poster has served as music supervisor for all of Anderson's films since "Rushmore". Anderson has frequently co-written his films alongside various writers including Owen Wilson, Jason Schwartzman, Noah Baumbach, Roman Coppola, and Hugo Guinness.


title: Wes Anderson

text: Wes Anderson designed a carriage for the Belmond’s British Pullman train, which began running on October 13, 2021.


title: Tunisia

text: Tunisia, officially the Republic of Tunisia, is the northernmost country in Africa. It is a part of the Maghreb region of North Africa, bordered by Algeria to the west and southwest, Libya to the southeast, and the Mediterranean Sea to the north and east. It features the archaeological sites of Carthage dating back to the 9th century BC, as well as the Great Mosque of Kairouan. Known for its ancient architecture, souks and blue coasts, it covers , and has a population of 12.1 million. It contains the eastern end of the Atlas Mountains and the northern reaches of the Sahara desert; much of its remaining territory is arable land. Its of coastline include the African conjunction of the western and eastern parts of the Mediterranean Basin. Tunisia is home to Africa's northernmost point, Cape Angela; and its capital and largest city is Tunis, which is located on its northeastern coast, and lends the country its name.


title: Tunisia

text: Beginning in early antiquity, Tunisia was inhabited by the indigenous Imazighen. Phoenicians began to arrive in the 12th century BC, establishing several settlements, of which Carthage emerged as the most powerful by the 7th century BC. Carthage was a major mercantile empire and a military rival to the Roman Republic until 146 BC, when it was defeated by the Romans who occupied Tunisia for most of the next 800 years. The Romans introduced Christianity and left architectural legacies like the Amphitheatre of El Jem. In the 7th century AD, Muslims conquered all of Tunisia (finally succeeding in 697 after several attempts starting in 647), and they brought Islam and Arab culture to the local inhabitants. Then, in 1546, the Ottoman Empire established control there, holding sway for over 300 years, until 1881, when the French conquered Tunisia. In 1956, Tunisia gained independence as the Tunisian Republic under the leadership of Habib Bourguiba with the help of activists such as Chedly Kallala, Farhat Hached and Salah ben Youssef. Today, Tunisia's culture and identity are rooted in this centuries-long intersection of different cultures and ethnicities.


title: Tunisia

text: In 2011, the Tunisian Revolution, which was triggered by dissatisfaction with the lack of freedom and democracy under the 24-year rule of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, overthrew his regime and catalyzed the broader Arab Spring movement across the region. Free multiparty parliamentary elections were held shortly thereafter; the country again voted for parliament on 26 October 2014, and for president on 23 November 2014. After the 2022 constitutional referendum, Tunisia became a unitary presidential representative democratic republic. From 2014 to 2020, it was considered the only democratic state in the Arab World, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit's Democracy Index, and was rated a hybrid regime in the 2021 Index. It is one of the few countries in Africa ranking high in the Human Development Index, with one of the highest per capita incomes on the continent, ranking 129th in GDP per capita income.


title: Tunisia

text: Tunisia is well integrated into the international community. It is a member of the United Nations, La Francophonie, the Arab League, the OIC, the African Union, the COMESA, the Non-Aligned Movement, the International Criminal Court, and the Group of 77, among others. It maintains close economic and political relations with some European countries, particularly with France, and Italy, due to their geographical proximity. Tunisia also has an association agreement with the European Union and has attained the status of a major non-NATO ally of the United States.


title: Tunisia

text: The word "Tunisia" is derived from Tunis; a central urban hub and the capital of modern-day Tunisia. The present form of the name, with its Latinate suffix "", evolved from French , in turn generally associated with the Berber root , transcribed , which means "to lay down" or "encampment". It is sometimes also associated with the Punic goddess Tanith (or Tunit), and the ancient city of Tynes.


title: Tunisia

text: The French derivative was adopted in some European languages with slight modifications, introducing a distinctive name to designate the country. Other languages have left the name untouched, such as the Russian () and Spanish . In this case, the same name is used for both country and city, as with the Arabic , and only by context can one tell the difference.


title: Tunisia

text: Farming methods reached the Nile Valley from the Fertile Crescent region about 5000 BC, and spread to the Maghreb by about 4000 BC. Agricultural communities in the humid coastal plains of central Tunisia then were ancestors of today's Berber tribes.


title: Tunisia

text: It was believed in ancient times that Africa was originally populated by Gaetulians and Libyans, both nomadic peoples. According to the Roman historian Sallust, the demigod Hercules died in Spain and his polyglot eastern army was left to settle the land, with some migrating to Africa. Persians went to the West and intermarried with the Gaetulians and became the Numidians. The Medes settled and were known as Mauri, later Moors.


title: Tunisia

text: The Numidians and Moors belonged to the race from which the Berbers are descended. The translated meaning of Numidian is Nomad and indeed the people were semi-nomadic until the reign of Masinissa of the Massyli tribe.


title: Tunisia

text: At the beginning of recorded history, Tunisia was inhabited by Berber tribes. Its coast was settled by Phoenicians starting as early as the 12th century BC (Bizerte, Utica). The city of Carthage was founded in the 9th century BC by Phoenicians. Legend says that Dido from Tyre, now in modern-day Lebanon, founded the city in 814 BC, as retold by the Greek writer Timaeus of Tauromenium. The settlers of Carthage brought their culture and religion from Phoenicia, now present-day Lebanon and adjacent areas.


title: Tunisia

text: After the series of wars with Greek city-states of Sicily in the 5th century BC, Carthage rose to power and eventually became the dominant civilization in the Western Mediterranean. The people of Carthage worshipped a pantheon of Middle Eastern gods including Baal and Tanit. Tanit's symbol, a simple female figure with extended arms and long dress, is a popular icon found in ancient sites. The founders of Carthage also established a Tophet, which was altered in Roman times.


title: Tunisia

text: A Carthaginian invasion of Italy led by Hannibal during the Second Punic War, one of a series of wars with Rome, nearly crippled the rise of Roman power. From the conclusion of the Second Punic War in 202 BC, Carthage functioned as a client state of the Roman Republic for another 50 years.


title: Tunisia

text: Following the Battle of Carthage which began in 149 BC during the Third Punic War, Carthage was conquered by Rome in 146 BC. Following its conquest, the Romans renamed Carthage to Africa, incorporating it as a province.


title: Tunisia

text: During the Roman period, the area of what is now Tunisia enjoyed a huge development. The economy, mainly during the Empire, boomed: the prosperity of the area depended on agriculture. Called the "Granary of the Empire", the area of actual Tunisia and coastal Tripolitania, according to one estimate, produced one million tons of cereals each year, one quarter of which was exported to the Empire. Additional crops included beans, figs, grapes, and other fruits.


title: Tunisia

text: By the 2nd century, olive oil rivaled cereals as an export item. In addition to the cultivations and the capture and transporting of exotic wild animals from the western mountains, the principal production and exports included the textiles, marble, wine, timber, livestock, pottery such as African Red Slip, and wool.


title: Tunisia

text: There was even a huge production of mosaics and ceramics, exported mainly to Italy, in the central area of El Djem (where there was the second biggest amphitheater in the Roman Empire).


title: Tunisia

text: Berber bishop Donatus Magnus was the founder of a Christian group known as the Donatists. During the 5th and 6th centuries (from 430 to 533 AD), the Germanic Vandals invaded and ruled over a kingdom in Northwest Africa that included present-day Tripoli. The region was easily reconquered in 533–534 AD, during the rule of Emperor Justinian I, by the Eastern Romans led by General Belisarius.


title: Tunisia

text: Sometime between the second half of the 7th century and the early part of the 8th century, Arab Muslim conquest occurred in the region. They founded the first Islamic city in Northwest Africa, Kairouan. It was there in 670 AD that the Mosque of Uqba, or the Great Mosque of Kairouan, was constructed. This mosque is the oldest and most prestigious sanctuary in the Muslim West with the oldest standing minaret in the world; it is also considered a masterpiece of Islamic art and architecture.


title: Tunisia

text: Tunis was taken in 695, re-taken by the Byzantine Eastern Romans in 697, but lost permanently in 698. The transition from a Latin-speaking Christian Berber society to a Muslim and mostly Arabic-speaking society took over 400 years (the equivalent process in Egypt and the Fertile Crescent took 600 years) and resulted in the final disappearance of Christianity and Latin in the 12th or 13th century. The majority of the population were not Muslim until quite late in the 9th century; a vast majority were during the 10th. Also, some Tunisian Christians emigrated; some richer members of society did so after the conquest in 698 and others were welcomed by Norman rulers to Sicily or Italy in the 11th and 12th centuries – the logical destination because of the 1200 year close connection between the two regions.