Although Theophrastus was a prolific author, little of his work has survived to modern times, and he is too often remembered only for his treatises on botany or for his brief work Characters (circa 319 B.C.). In fact he also wrote on logic, rhetoric, ethics, metaphysics, politics, theology, natural philosophy, and the history of philosophy. His most influential works, apart from those on botany, were the now mostly lost works on the history of philosophy (lost because absorbed and superseded in the works of his successors). Throughout his writings he seems to have been employing his critical mind to question the prevailing theories of his tradition (a tradition deriving from Aristotle) by gathering data that reveal problems and difficulties with those theories. Theophrastus wrote monographs on special topics, and several of these survive (On Winds, On Fire, and others) to reveal him as a wide-ranging thinker and an insightful observer.
Born about 371 B.C.
