Aristotle through the ages

Introduction

To give a full historical account of the elements of modern science which Aristotle arguably first practised and popularised - most importantly, the use of observation as opposed to purely logical, philosophical reasoning to make deductions about the natural world - would require an article the length of a textbook. Indeed, many such books have been written; see e.g., Ross ( Citation: 2004 Ross, W. (2004). Aristotle (6. ed). Routledge. ), Natali and Hutchinson ( Citation: 2013 Natali, C. & Hutchinson, D. (2013). Aristotle: his life and school. Princeton University Press. ), and Alwishah and Hayes ( Citation: 2015 Alwishah, A. & Hayes, J. (2015). Aristotle and the Arabic Tradition (1st ed). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316182109 ). The history of these ideas is long, convoluted, and includes the reinterpretations and adaptations of said ideas by thousands of intermediate scholars over the course of the 2,300 years since Aristotle died.

This article will begin with a (comparatively) concise overview of how Aristotle’s ideas made their way to the modern day before exploring some of the most important details of his philosophy — in subsequent articles, we will see precisely how these informed Aristotle’s view of biology. While many (if not the vast majority) of Aristotle’s ideas were “wrong”, their shadows are nevertheless ubiquitous in modern science. If one knows where to look, one never need look far to see them.

Classical Antiquity

Aristotle was born in 384 BCE and is, perhaps, one of the most widely-known individuals in history. Together with Plato, he is broadly considered to be one of the two more important foundational figures of Western philosophy. Indeed, his works such as Ēthika Nikomacheia (Nicomachean Ethics), Tà Metà Tà Phusiká (Metaphysics), and Politiká (Politics), have shaped philosophical discourse and scientific thought for centuries. Aristotle studied at Plato’s Academy for twenty years before departing from Plato’s teachings (to an extent that will be explored later) and founding his own school, the Lyceum, which would be destroyed almost three hundred years later during the 86 BCE assault on Athens by the Romans.

Rather interestingly, our knowledge of Aristotle and his works come not via the route one would expect; that is, from the Greeks to the Romans then through to the rest of Europe. Aristotle’s works were studied and maintained throughout the Greek world following his death in 322 BCE; however, many of his texts were kept at the Library of Alexandria - a library famous for being destroyed several times over the course of its existence. With the rise of the Roman Republic and later Roman Empire, many elements of ancient Greek culture (and philosophy!) were incorporated into the Roman canon. However, the works of Aristotle were not held in any particular esteem, with Roman scholars typically overlooking them in favour of studying and revitalising the ideas of Aristotle’s mentor, Plato.

Eventually, in the fifth century CE, the Western Roman Empire fell - and with it, so too did most of the literary works of the ancient Greeks fall into obscurity or were lost entirely. However, the Eastern Roman Empire - what would later come to be known as the Byzantine Empire - retained these works. While Byzantium would stand for another millennium, many of its easternmost territorial holdings, particularly those in the Near East, would not. With the rise of Islam in the seventh century, the rapidly expanding Abbasid Caliphate would invade and annex Byzantine lands along the Southeastern mediterranean from the Levant to Western Egypt and, along the way, find great troves of literary works dating as far back as Plato.

The Islamic Golden Age

In 762 CE, the Abbasid Caliphate would found the city of Baghdad that, with the founding of the House of Wisdom, would soon find itself the intellectual capital of the world,¹ ushering in what is now known as the Islamic Golden Age. Islamic scholars translated the Greek texts that they found and began to study the works of the likes of Plato and Aristotle. To scholars of this Golden Age, Aristotle was referred to as al-Mu’allim al-Awwal - translated as “the First Teacher/Master” - a term first used and popularised by al-Fabari in the ninth and tenth centuries ( Citation: Naṣr & Leaman, 2003 Naṣr, Ḥ. & Leaman, O. (2003). History of Islamic philosophy (1st ed). Routledge. ). Indeed, al-Fabari himself is viewed in the Islamic world as the first Muslim to incorporate philosophy into Islam, and is known as the “Second Teacher”. Aristotle’s methods of logic and ideas regarding metaphysics were, subsequently, critiqued, modified, refuted, and in some cases incorporated into Islamic philosophy; refer to Naṣr amd Leaman ( Citation: 2003 Naṣr, Ḥ. & Leaman, O. (2003). History of Islamic philosophy (1st ed). Routledge. ) for a considerably more detailed history and description of Islamic philosophy over the ages.

Mediæval Europe

As Europe emerged from the “Dark Ages” in the 11th century, it increased its contact with the Islamic world and, most importantly to our tale, was exposed to the ideas of ancient Greek philosophers whose names had long been forgotten in the Western (now predominantly Catholic) intellectual canon. A translation movement, spearheaded by figures such as Gerard of Cremona, made the Arabic translations of the works of Aristotle and other Greek thinkers such as Ptolemy and Euclid available in Latin.² By the 13th century, with the establishing of Universities across Europe, these Greek texts became widely studied throughout Europe; notably by two of the most influential Christian theologians and philosophers of the Middle Ages: Roger Bacon, often credited with popularising empiricism in Europe,³ and St. Thomas Aquinas who, among other things,⁴ sought to integrate Aristotelian philosophy into Christian theology.

The Renaissance

By the time of the European Renaissance, owing to the centuries of scholarship during the Islamic golden age, the ideas of Plato and Aristotle had perfused all fields of scholarship - both directly and indirectly. While we have primarily discussed the transmission of Aristotelian thought, it is important to note that Plato’s ideas had similarly made their way to the west in the form of Neoplatonism. By the 16th century, Europe entered a period that is now called the Scientific Revolution; traditionally, this is considered to have begun with Copernicus’ 1543 publication On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, which offered a direct rebuttal to the cosmology of classical antiquity by suggesting that the planets revolved around the Sun as opposed to the previous “geocentric” model, where the universe was assumed to rotate around the Earth. The works of Galileo Galilei and Sir Isaac Newton further displaced physics as it was understood in the Aristotelian tradition, moving towards a mechanistic understanding of the natural world that would later develop to form the basis of modern scientific understanding.

To the Modern Day

The Renaissance and subsequent Scientific Revolution marked the beginning of a complete transformation in the way humanity understood the natural world. The adoption of empirical observation and the formulation of universal laws marked a clear departure from the methods and philosophy that had long dominated Aristotelian thought. It is at this point, then, that we end our tale of how Aristotle’s ideas reached the Western world, for it is shortly after the end of the Scientific Revolution that Aristotle’s philosophy would almost entirely cease to inform our understanding of biology. In 1735, the science of biology would undergo a paradigm shift, with the groundbreaking work of Carl Linnæus, which introduced a new system of classification that relied on observable characteristics that would seriously destabilise Aristotelian biological ideas. To add insult to injury, just over a century later, biology would undergo a yet more dramatic upheaval with the 1859 publication of On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin, introducing the concept of evolution by natural selection and entirely upending the way in which biologists understood the relationships between living organisms.

In the next section, we will explore the key philosophical concepts that shaped Aristotle’s approach to biology, with a view to understanding how his broader metaphysical and logical frameworks informed his study of living organisms.

Aristotle’s Philosophy

Known primarily as a philosopher, Aristotle was also highly interested in the natural world as it existed around him. While the modern reader may consider philosophy to be an entirely different matter to that of the natural sciences, to truly understand Aristotle’s conception of biology it is important to recognise that, to the Ancient Greeks (and Aristotle in particular), philosophy was considered to be the lens through which all else could and should be understood. As such, Aristotle’s conceptions of biology are inextricably linked to Aristotle’s philosophy. This section will explore the most important of these philosophical ideas before we examine Aristotle’s work on biology (more specifically, zoology) in the next.

Forms

Aristotle’s works spanned a variety of fields, including ethics, politics, logic, and metaphysics. Among these works included what we might now recognise as biology. In contrast to his predecessor (and mentor), Plato, Aristotle developed his own distinctive ideas about the natural world, particularly in relation to the concept of forms. Plato posited that Forms (loosely speaking, ideas or concepts) exist in a separate, non-material realm, independent of the physical world. Aristotle rejected this dualistic separation between the material world and the realm of Forms. Instead, Aristotle proposed that forms exist within objects in the physical world, and that an object’s form is inseparable from its constituent matter.

Τέλος and Teleology

Central to Aristotle’s understanding of the natural world was his concept of τέλος (télos), which can be translated variously as “end,” “purpose,” or “goal”. Aristotle believed that everything in nature could be explained by understanding its télos—its ultimate purpose or final cause. This perspective was foundational to his zoological investigations, where he sought to explain the functions and structures of living organisms in terms of their “inherent purpose”.

Bibliography