Page 50 - DPOL201_WESTERN_POLITICAL_THOUGHT_ENGLISH

Western Political Thought

Notes

In Aristotle’s terminology, “natural philosophy” is a branch of philosophy examining the
phenomena of the natural world, and includes fields that would be regarded today as
physics, biology and other natural sciences.

In the larger sense of the word, Aristotle makes philosophy coextensive with reasoning, which he
also would describe as “science”. Note, however, that his use of the term science carries a different
meaning than that covered by the term “scientific method”. For Aristotle, “all science (dianoia) is
either practical, poetical or theoretical”. By practical science, he means ethics and politics; by
poetical science, he means the study of poetry and the other fine arts; by theoretical science, he
means physics, mathematics and metaphysics.
If logic (or “analytics”) is regarded as a study preliminary to philosophy, the divisions of Aristotelian
philosophy would consist of: (i) Logic; (ii) Theoretical Philosophy, including Metaphysics, Physics,
Mathematics, (iii) Practical Philosophy and (iv) Poetical Philosophy.
In the period between his two stays in Athens, between his times at the Academy and the Lyceum,
Aristotle conducted most of the scientific thinking and research for which he is renowned today.
In fact, most of Aristotle’s life was devoted to the study of the objects of natural science. Aristotle’s
metaphysics contains observations on the nature of numbers but he made no original contributions
to mathematics. He did, however, perform original research in the natural sciences, e.g., botany,
zoology, physics, astronomy, chemistry, meteorology, and several other sciences.
Aristotle’s writings on science are largely qualitative, as opposed to quantitative. Beginning in the
16th century, scientists began applying mathematics to the physical sciences, and Aristotle’s work
in this area was deemed hopelessly inadequate. His failings were largely due to the absence of
concepts like mass, velocity, force and temperature. He had a conception of speed and temperature,
but no quantitative understanding of them, which was partly due to the absence of basic
experimental devices, like clocks and thermometers.
His writings provide an account of many scientific observations, a mixture of precocious accuracy
and curious errors. For example, in his History of Animals he claimed that human males have
more teeth than females. In a similar vein, John Philoponus, and later Galileo, showed by simple
experiments that Aristotle’s theory that a heavier object falls faster than a lighter object is incorrect.
On the other hand, Aristotle refuted Democritus’s claim that the Milky Way was made up of
“those stars which are shaded by the earth from the sun’s rays,” pointing out (correctly, even if
such reasoning was bound to be dismissed for a long time) that, given “current astronomical
demonstrations” that “the size of the sun is greater than that of the earth and the distance of the
stars from the earth many times greater than that of the sun, then...the sun shines on all the stars
and the earth screens none of them.”
In places, Aristotle goes too far in deriving ‘laws of the universe’ from simple observation and
over-stretched reason. Today’s scientific method assumes that such thinking without sufficient
facts in ineffective, and that discerning the validity of one’s hypothesis requires far more rigorous
experimentation than that which Aristotle used to support his laws.
Aristotle also had some scientific blind spots. He posited a geocentric cosmology that we may
discern in selections of the Metaphysics, which was widely accepted up untill the 16th century.
From the 3rd century to the 16th century, the dominant view held that the Earth was the centre of
the universe (geocentrism).
Since he was perhaps the philosopher most respected by European thinkers during and after the
Renaissance, these thinkers often took Aristotle’s erroneous positions as given, which held back

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