Reason steps in after, not before, experience; it sorts our observations into meaningful patterns and arrives at a knowledge as certain and exact as anything in Plato’s Forms. Aristotle’s term for this knowledge of the world was episteme, which later Latin commentators translated as scientia, or science. Aristotle is the true father of science and scientific method, by which we still mean a methodical process of observation, classification, and discovery.9 In this, Aristotle was his own best student.
