Aristotelian philosophy, emerging from Plato’s Academy in the 4th century BCE, fundamentally shaped Western thought through its systematic approach to knowledge, causation, and ethics. Aristotle’s doctrine of hylomorphism (matter and form), his four causes, and his teleological worldview provided a comprehensive framework that dominated medieval scholasticism and continues to influence contemporary virtue ethics and neo-Aristotelian metaphysics.
Yet this system naturalised hierarchies through its concept of natural slavery, relegated women to inferior status through claims about their supposedly defective rationality, and its teleological essentialism has been weaponised to oppose social change by treating contingent social arrangements as natural end points.