Plato and Aristotle

The Academy and the Lyceum set the frame in which Europe will think for two thousand years. Plato, Socrates' pupil, founds the Academy and argues that behind changing things stand eternal forms, and that a just state must rest on knowledge. His own student Aristotle turns outward, describing and classifying everything—animals, stars, constitutions, rhetoric, the laws of logic. Arab and Jewish translators later return him to Europe.