Why is Aristotle the most significant intellectual in world history? Aristotle #GreshamLecture Plato’s most brilliant student and perhaps the most significant intellectual in world history, Aristotle of Stageira built on the doctrines he had studied at the Academy but also radically disagreed with them. The founder of Athens’ second great university, the Lyceum, did not believe there was any perfect, ideal world that transcended human ability to see, touch, smell and hear it, and proposed that a