Of the writings endorsed to Aristotle (384-322 BC), the polished essays and dialogues which he intended for publication have been almost completely lost, with the exception of a few fragments. The great body of Aristotle's thought that has come down to us is in the form of "treatise" on various subjects, such as logic, physics, ethics, psychology, biology, and politics. It seems that these treatise began as notes on (or summaries of) Aristotle's lectures at the Lyceum in Athens. He continued to edit and revise them throughout his life, as his views evolved, but never brought them to a state of completion for publication. Subsequently they were edited and organized into "books" by his students, and then the whole corpus was transmitted through a series of transcribers, translators, and commentators.
The story of how Aristotle came to be considered the prime authority on matters of reason is interesting. His writings certainly didn't have such a commanding status in his own time, nor at any later time in the ancient world. Even following the collapse of ancient civilization in around 500 AD, the only work of Aristotle known in the west was a Latin translation (by Boethius) of his treatise on logic. Not until the twelfth century did scholars in Western Europe begin to gain access to the full range of Aristotle's treatise, and even then they did not acquire the actual Greek texts. Aristotle's teachings had survived in various scholarly communities in the east, such as among the Syrians, and these works were acquired by the Arabs when they conquered Syria around 650 AD. Eventually the works of Aristotle, along with the commentaries of Arab scholars, spread throughout the Islamic world. Beginning with the re-conquest of Toledo in 1085 and Sicily in 1091, western scholars began to encounter these works and translate them into Latin. The structure of the Arab language is quite different from Greek and Latin (which are fairly similar to each other), so there was unavoidable paraphrasing in the passage from the original Greek to Arabic, and then again in the translation from Arabic to Latin. In effect, the first exposure to the full extent of Aristotle's writings came in the form of Latin paraphrases of Arab paraphrases of (and commentaries on) Syriac paraphrases of second-hand copies of the original Greek texts. Not surprisingly, the resulting Latin renderings were somewhat unreliable.
In 1204 the great Byzantine capital of Constantinople was captured by western armies during the 4th crusade, and western scholars gained access to Greek texts that were much closer to Aristotle's original writings. Around 1265, the Flemish Dominican William of Moerbeke (1215-1286) and other scholars translated these Greek texts into Latin and Thomas Aquinas undertook to integrate and reconcile the Aristotelian principles of reason and rational thought with Christian theology, resulting in his monumental Summa teologica. The view of Aristotle as the indisputable epitome of reason dates from this time, and held sway for about 250 years, until being superseded by the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, and the Scientific Revolution, each of which was, in some measure, a reaction against Aristotelian thought. As a result, today we often find Aristotle cited, especially in the sciences, as an example of erroneous thinking.
Nevertheless, the works of Aristotle are, if nothing else, a very interesting record of the attempts of one (obviously very intelligent) man to understand and systematize a wide range of knowledge on the basis of primitive principles and perceptions. For example, Books V and VI of Aristotle's Physics presents an interesting argument that space, time, and motion must all be continuous rather than discrete The argument relies on a number of definitions, most crucially on the definition of the word "between". This also gives a good illustration of the challenges that a scholar faces when trying to determine, first, exactly what Aristotle wrote, and second, exactly what he meant. Two of the most widely-available English translations of Aristotle's Physics are the Loeb Classic Library version by Wicksteed and Cornford (W&C), and another translation by Hardie and Gaye (H&G).
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