Aristotle is pretty clearly not a lone genius -- his philosophy is a direct descendant of Plato's (who was his teacher). He even (reputedely) began by writing d

Aristotle is pretty clearly not a lone genius -- his philosophy is a direct descendant of Plato's (who was his teacher). He even (reputedely) began by writing dialogues (like Plato. These are now lost). And though he has been the perhaps the most influential (entirely because of his adoption by Islamic and then Christian scholastics in the middle ages), he had numerous contemporaries (Diogenes and Xenophon are standouts here). But those thinkers work is simply lost to us, or was never written down (Socrates for example never wrote down his teaching and it was controverial of Plato to do so). Aristotle is one of the worst examples to give for evidence of the "lone genius", in any case. His work is clearly the output of constant dialogue with his students and with his contemporaries. It primarily consists of considering the various pre-Socratic, Platonic, Sophist, and other philosophical views of his time, and showing how they don't solve pressing philosophical problems (the aporia) then forming an argument which adopts parts of their thinking and rejects others so that the philosophical impasse can be overcome. If anything he's a synthetic thinker, a unifier of the whole of Greek thought (that is his particular genius). He's nothing without his contemporaries.