Aristotle, a towering figure in ancient philosophy, stands as one of the most influential thinkers in the Western intellectual tradition. Born in 384 BCE in Stagira, a small town in northern Greece, Aristotle studied under Plato at the Academy in Athens before going on to tutor Alexander the Great. His contributions to a wide range of subjects—from metaphysics to logic, biology to politics—are vast and far-reaching. However, it is in his Nicomachean Ethics that Aristotle's ideas on ethics and moral philosophy are most clearly articulated, and it is this work that would come to profoundly shape Scholastic thought in the Middle Ages.