The Hour Between Dog and Wolf: How Risk Taking Transforms Us, Body and Mind

by John Coates

Aristotle created, more or less on his own, the template of the Western mind. Traces of his influence linger in every subject. Any student, no matter what department he or she studies in, will probably read something by Aristotle in her first year at a university, even if it is just a paragraph or two: political science students might read the Politics, law students the Ethics, philosophers the Metaphysics, logicians the Analytics and the Categories, biologists the History of Animals, physicists and chemists a quotation or two from the Physics, and literature students—as well as aspiring Hollywood scriptwriters—the Poetics, in which Aristotle codified the structure of Western narrative. Indeed, it could be argued that within universities the departmental divisions themselves owe their very existence to the way Aristotle carved up our knowledge into its various branches, based on their subject matter and method of study.