Aristotle's Empiricism: Experience & Mechanics in the 4th Century BC: Experience and Mechanics in the 4th Century BC - Softcover

Jean De Groot

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1930972830 ISBN 13: 9781930972834

Publisher: Parmenides Press, 2014

Synopsis

In Aristotles Empiricism, Jean De Groot argues that an important part of Aristotles natural philosophy has remained largely unexplored. She shows that much of Aristotles analysis of natural movement is influenced by mathematical mechanics that emerged from late Pythagorean thought. De Groot draws upon the pseudo-Aristotelian Physical Problems XVI to reconstruct the context of mechanics of Aristotles time and to trace the development of kinematic thinking from Archytas to the Aristotelian Mechanics. She argues that the influence of kinematics on Aristotle pinpoints the original meaning of his concept of power, or potentiality, as a physicalistic meaning addressed to the problem of movement. De Groot identifies epistemic features of kinematics as a scientific enterprise, including economy of explanation and direct inference to a principle. She shows how these features are woven into Aristotles thinking in the motion books of the Physics, On the Heavens, and Movement of Animals. The book places in doubt both the view that Aristotles natural philosophy codifies opinions held by convention and, alternatively, the view that the cogency of his scientific ideas depends on metaphysics.

About this title

Review:

This book presents an 'other' or alternative Aristotle to the caricature and straw man set up through the mistaken Baconian capitulation to Democratean 'sense data', a non-empirical ideology that distorts rather than enhances our radical, unavoidable, pre-philosophic experience of power and necessity. This is a revolutionary book that transforms our view of Aristotle and specifically our evaluation of his natural philosophy". - Heythrop Journal

From the Back Cover:

Although Aristotle s philosophy is generally considered empiricist (inthe sensethat he believes the ultimate source of knowledge is perception), a number of contemporary scholars havedenied that he held perception to bethe ultimate source of knowledgeorhaveclaimed that his empiricismis at best naive. In this highly original and important work, Jean De Groot defends Aristotle the empiricist, and she does so by examining the nature of his empiricism, and its connection to mathematics, through a detailed study and evaluation of his work on mechanics and its role in his natural philosophy (in the context of fourth century philosophy and science)."Aristotle s Empiricism"includes a fresh reading of many texts, from the"Physics," "De Caelo," "De Motu Animalium," "Metaphysics," " Generation of Animals," "Categories," and"Posterior Analytics," and its author is to be applauded for enriching our understanding of Aristotle s thought through the careful use and analysis of twolikely inauthentic works in the "corpus Aristotelicum" the"Mechanics," and"Problemata"XVI. New light is shed on such important Aristotelian concepts as"dunamis," "eidos," "phainomena," "empeiria," and"automata," and onissuesthat have not received much attention (for example, Aristotle's conception ofweight). This book should beof great interest toanyone working on Aristotle s natural philosophy.
Robert Mayhew Professor of PhilosophySeton Hall University
Jean De Groot explores the appropriation and use of mechanical principles in Aristotle s natural philosophy. Her exploration offers a new approach to Aristotle s thought and a fresh perspective on the method Aristotle adopts in the study of nature. The book is a most welcome addition to the existing body of literature on Aristotle s natural philosophy.
Andrea FalconAssociate ProfessorConcordia University
This highly original and widely informed book presents the [yet] uncaptured Aristotle at the core of whose thought lies an empirical approach to the world s phenomena, with mechanical processes as paradigmatic. In its instructive coordination of the historical context with current debates, this erudite and innovative work introduces an Aristotle who is deeply influenced by mechanical analogies and walks the road of an empiricism orthogonal to the neo-Platonic teleology of later Aristotelians. We have here a major contribution to our understanding of the great Stagyrite.
Dr. Nicholas RescherDistinguished University Professor of Philosophy University of Pittsburgh
In this highly original book at the same time deep and wide-ranging, erudite and exciting, Jean De Groot overturns widespread conceptions of Aristotle s natural philosophy as the polar opposite of early modern science, Aristotelianism being qualitative and dialectical, whereas early modern science was mathematical and experimental. Drawing upon a much wider range of Aristotelian and Platonic texts than is usual in studies of Aristotle s physics, De Groot makes the case that at the foundation of Aristotle s theories of motion was mechanics or what she calls the moving radius principle. Made conscious by the kinesthetic awareness that the mechanical advantage of a lever derives from the rotation of a rigid body, the moving radius principle states that in such a rotation points farther from the point or axis at rest move greater distances in fixed proportion. Thus for Aristotle as well as for others before him, De Groot argues, at the least, some objects and properties of a mathematical sort just are part of nature and sometimes are principles of nature. This means, she suggests, that to understand Aristotle it should be realized that in his time the boundaries between what is mathematical and what is physical were still in flux: some branches of m"

About this edition

• Publisher: Parmenides Press
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1930972830
• ISBN 13: 9781930972834
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 468