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Aristotle, Plato’s student, is the philosopher most often called as a witness against Atlantis. In my research I have looked at what is actually in his surviving works and at the other places his name turns up, from Babylonian star records to the eruptions of Etna. These are the pages where I wrote about him.
Aristotle and Atlantis
On Ancient sources on Atlantis I note that Aristotle, who lived around 384 to 322 BC, is constantly cited for alleged criticisms of the Atlantis story, including the line that the man who invented it also destroyed it, a statement that only appears in the 1800s. The same page covers how Delambre in 1816 probably misread Casaubon’s 1587 commentary on Strabo, which spread the idea of Aristotle’s scepticism, and how scholars found no passage on Plato’s Atlantis in any of his surviving works. His silence suggests he did not comment, not that he doubted. That page also names Theophrastus, his student. Ancient Greek Sources sets these Greek witnesses side by side in one table.
The pupil and the teacher
In Laws by Plato Benjamin Jowett uses Aristotle to defend the dialogue: more than twenty citations of the Laws in Aristotle’s writings help prove it genuine, since Aristotle lived at Athens during the last twenty years of Plato’s life. On Alexandria and the Atlantis connection I quote Claire Heartsong’s Anna, Grandmother of Jesus, which calls Alexander of Macedonia a student of Aristotle.
Records, wonders and the moon
Ignatius Donnelly, on The antiquity of some of our great inventions, uses Aristotle to show how old Chaldean astronomy was:
Callisthenes, who accompanied Alexander the Great to Babylon, sent to Aristotle a series of Chaldean astronomical observations which he found preserved there, recorded on tablets of baked clay, and extending back as far as 2234 B.C.
Ignatius Donnelly, Atlantis: The Antediluvian World
On Mount Etna I note that Thucydides and Aristotle both wrote about Etna’s eruptions, and on Ancient cinnamon that Herodotus, Aristotle and others placed the source of cinnamon in Arabia and passed on the myth of the cinnamon birds. The Why Files episode on The Moon’s Dark Secret: Aliens Harvesting Human Souls for FOOD says Aristotle wrote about the Pelasgians who lived in Greece from the oldest days, at a time before the moon.
Related pages
- Ancient sources on Atlantis
- Ancient Greek Sources
- Laws by Plato
- Alexandria and the Atlantis connection
- The antiquity of some of our great inventions
- Mount Etna
- Ancient cinnamon
- The Moon’s Dark Secret: Aliens Harvesting Human Souls for FOOD
For every page I tagged with Aristotle, see the Aristotle tag archive.
