'The Lagoon: How Aristotle Invented Science,' by Armand Marie Leroi - The New York Times - 0 views
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Armand Marie Leroi is a scientist, and Aristotle is his hero. This conjunction is interesting because, in the official telling of modern science’s origins, Aristotle is hardly regarded as heroic. Instead he’s portrayed as the obstacle over which the early heroes of the scientific revolution — Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo — had to leap in order to impose a genuinely explanatory methodology over the often deceptive input of sense perception.
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What Aristotle had sundered, the celestial and the terrestrial, were united under one mechanics. And the rest, as they say, is history.
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He cannot mention Plato without hissing, often characterizing him as anti-scientific or, at the very best, a poor scientist: “Plato’s science is barely distinguishable from theology.” Instead Leroi’s heart belongs to Aristotle, who not only was, like him, an enthusiastic student of biology, particularly of zoology, but who also, unlike Plato, was besotted by the world of appearances. Aristotle, as Leroi makes wonderfully clear, exemplifies one kind of scientific aptitude. He was an enthralled observer of the natural world, bedazzled by data, seeking causal explanations not in abstract numbers but in concrete details acquired through avid sense perception.
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Plato and Aristotle: What an accident of history that two such contrasting orientations toward the physical world, animated by two such different aesthetic sensibilities, should have been pedagogically entangled with each other.
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To read some semblance of our science into these ancients requires charitably imaginative interpretations that clarify their obscurities with insights toward which they were themselves, perhaps, groping. Some of us are prepared to extend such interpretations toward Plato. Leroi extends them toward Aristotle, so much so that he would vehemently reject my statement that Aristotle, like Plato, was not the finished scientific article.
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Leroi follows closely in the footsteps of such generous elucidators. The modern understanding of genetically encoded information is applied not only to Aristotle’s formal cause, his “eidos,” and to his notion that all change is potentiality actualized, but also to his notion of the soul. “Aristotle’s belief that we should attend less to the matter than to the informational structure of living things makes him seem like a molecular geneticist avant la lettre.”
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“I have kept Aristotle’s theos in the shadows. It may even be that I have done so deliberately; that I have been reluctant to reveal the degree to which my hero’s scientific system is riddled with religion. Yet it is.”