Aristotle studied with Plato for twenty years. He thought that Plato’s world of perfect forms was perfect nonsense and these perfect forms were part of life, not apart from it. Studying nature convinced him that everything was striving towards its own unique form of perfection.he knew that all acorns were potential oak trees, even though many landed on barren soil. He also knew that a duck’s egg would never hatch into an eagle. Aristotle was a great organizer. He looked at the chaotic jumble of creation and tried to sort it into tidy piles. His aim was to categorize all areas of human knowledge. He sifted through everything, even separating language into ten basic word -types. Aristotle excelled at marine biology and identified 500 different species of sea life. He found out that he could sort everything on Earth into animal, vegetable, and mineral.

But he did make errors, and pigeon-holing woman as “unfinished man” was his big mistake. With no such thing as microbiology to prove otherwise, he said only men carried human “seed”. This put women on a par with soil and deeply harmed their credibility centuries later. He branded women second-class citizens, unfit for any legal and political rights. It was, once more, against Plato’s idea that men and women had the same intellectual powers and they should receive the same education.

Aristotle and the Church: In the Middle Ages much of Aristotle’s thinking was accepted by the Church. Even his view that were inferior to men seemed to fit in with the Bible story of Eve’s creation from Adam’s rib.