Aristotle (384 BC–322 BC) was an Ancient Greek philosopher. Together with Plato and Socrates, Aristotle is one of the most important founding figures in Western philosophy. He was the first to create a comprehensive philosophical system, encompassing morality and aesthetics, logic and science, politics and metaphysics. Aristotle's views on the physical sciences profoundly shaped medieval scholarship, and their influence extended well into the Renaissance.
Aristotle's scientific method had led him to conclude that the Earth was the center of the solar system, with all heavenly objects revolving around it. This idea gained wide acceptance, and was eventually adopted by the Catholic Church, as it supported Scripture.
Thus, Galileo's support for the Copernican view was not only heretical in the view of the Church, but ran contrary to the views of one of the most revered thinkers in Western civilization.
Aristotle stated in the Politics that some men were meant by nature to be the slaves of others, to improve the quality of life for free men. For the next two millennia, civilization took this idea for granted, but could not agree precisely on which men were meant to be slaves. Slavery was based, in various societies, on religion, skin color, and other arbitrary qualities.
In 1805, American abolitionist lawyer Alfred Douglas declared that nature had provided natural slaves not in the form of men, but of sims. Being incapable of written language or any other basic cornerstone of civilization on their own, sims were best used as bearers of burden for their civilized human cousins. As all men had the same basic cognitive abilities, sims were truly a kind of lower being who could never be expected to rise above servitude. Thus, the Aristotelian argument which Douglas presented at this court case led to the end of human slavery in America.
