The Lyceum

The Lyceum was the school founded by Aristotle at Athens around 335 BCE, named for the grove of Apollo Lyceus where it met. Its members were called Peripatetics, 'those who walk about', from the covered walkway (peripatos) where, tradition says, Aristotle taught while strolling.

Unlike the Academy's focus on the eternal Forms, the Lyceum turned outward to the world, undertaking vast empirical research across logic, physics, biology, ethics, politics, and poetics. Under Aristotle's successor Theophrastus it flourished as the first great research institution.

Though it later declined, the recovery and editing of Aristotle's works in the first century BCE revived Peripatetic philosophy, and through the commentary tradition — including Neoplatonist commentators — Aristotle's thought was carried, alongside Plato's, into the medieval world.