Theophrastus (c.371–c.287 BC)

TheophrastusTheophrastus was a Greek philosopher of the Peripatetic
school, and immediate successor of Aristotle in leadership of the
Lyceum. He was a native of Eresus in Lesbos, and studied philosophy at
Athens, first under Plato and afterwards under Aristotle. He became
the favorite pupil of Aristotle, who named Theophrastus his successor,
and bequeathed to him his library and manuscripts of his own writings.
Theophrastus sustained the Aristotelian character of the Lyceum. He is
said to have had 2,000 disciples, among them the comic poet Menander.
He was esteemed by the kings Philippus, Cassander, and Ptolemy. He was
tried for impiety, but acquitted by the Athenian jury. He died in 287
BCE, having presided over the Lyceum about thirty-five years. His age
is sometimes put at 85, and 107 by others. He is said to have closed
his life with the complaint about the short duration of human life,
that it ended just when the insight into its problems was beginning.

Although Theophrastus generally followed Aristotle's lead in
philosophy, he was no mere slavish imitator, and he continued
important empirical and philosophical investigations of his own. Very
little of his work survives, but he seems in general to have
emphasized the empiricist side of Aristotle's thought and downplayed
remaining Platonist elements, a trend that was further continued by
Theophrastus' successor as head of the Lyceum, Strato. Theophrastus
criticized some of Aristotle's arguments for the existence of a Prime
Mover, and he expressed dissatisfaction with Aristotle's universal
application of teleological (that is, goal-directed) explanations.
Theophrastus also composed a large compendium of the doctrines of
previous philosophers, which itself is lost, but which probably formed
the basis for much of the later doxography which is our main source of
information on the pre-Socratic philosophers.