Collector"s Library No thinker has had a more profound influence on Western civilisation than Aristotle. In the Middle Ages many questions were settled by appeal to his authority alone, and his position was so preeminent that he was often referred to simply as "the philosopher". His work represents a vast, encyclopedic treatment of virtually every field of knowledge: logic, rhetoric, ethics, politics, metaphysics, poetry, biology, zoology, physics, psychology. The depth and clarity of his understanding are remarkable, and nowehere more so than in the Nicomachean Ethics and Politics. Modern science may have left the ancient Greeks far behind, but modern behaviour has not. The basic questions of human conduct, both for individuals and societies, remain largely unchanged; and no one has ever illuminated these more precisely, or more constructively, than Aristotle.