The Top 100 Heroes of Western Culture
Individuals have most contributed to replacing ignorance with knowledge, savagery with civilization, disease with health, tyranny with liberty, poverty with abundance, and despair with happiness.



#1: Aristotle(384-322 BC)

Greek philosopher Aristotle can be considered the originator of a pro-reason, pro-this-world, pro-happiness approach to philosophy. In other words, his philosophy -- in terms of fundamentals -- is the philosophy of Western culture.

Aristotle's system has been the springboard for every major human achievement of the past 1,000 years. Without his ideas, the development of modern science, the Industrial Revolution as well as the creation of the United States could not have occurred. People have achieved unprecedented success using Aristotle's philosophy because, in its essentials, it is true -- making his system an exceedingly rare phenomenon in the history of thought.

Aristotle laid the foundation for reason—that is, for an explicit, consciously defined and objective method of acquiring knowledge. In particular, he established the basic principles of scientific epistemology: the role of the senses, the role of abstraction, the laws of logic, the types of reasoning, the basic rules of validity in deductive reasoning.

Further, he established principles of a naturalistic, this-worldly metaphysics: one reality, a world of particulars, of entities acting in accordance with their natures, lawful, intelligible and graspable by man.

In ethics, he laid the foundation for a this-worldly ethics, which states that man's goal is to achieve personal happiness and personal pride by using his intellectual ability to the fullest.

His errors are many and include but are not limited to an inadequate explanation of sense perception and the nature of the mind. In addition, his doctrine of god, of teleology, of contingency, of prime matter, of the golden mean, of contemplation as an end in itself, his politics, his cosmology -- are all deficient.1

Aristotle's errors, however, were able to be corrected by later thinkers largely through the use of Aristotle's scientific epistemology. In other words, Aristotle's mistakes were often identified and rectified because of the fundamentals of his own philosophy. Further, it is difficult to fault Aristotle for his errors given the relatively primitive knowledge of his time and that he had to create his philosophy largely from scratch, i.e., there was no rational philosophy that preceded him from which he could build on.

Many individuals have made major contributions to the development of Western culture. But it is Aristotle who, more than anyone, deserves to be considered the greatest hero of Western culture because the clear majority of the culture's characteristics ultimately stem from his ideas.