The Lagoon: How Aristotle Invented Science

by Armand Marie Leroi

He was born in 384 BC in Stagira, a coastal town not far from modern Thessalonika. His father, Nicomachus, was an Asclepiad – part priest, part physician. No common quack, he was physician royal to Amyntas III of Macedon. This is less impressive than it sounds. Macedon was a semi-barbaric backwoods state with a court to match. At the age of seventeen Aristotle was sent to Plato’s Academy in Athens. He remained there, as student and teacher, for nearly twenty years. By the time the teenaged Aristotle arrived at Athens to sit at Plato’s feet, the tradition of natural philosophy, no more than two centuries old, was dead. Literally so: Democritus of Abdera, the last and greatest of the physiologoi, had died just a few years earlier. Years later, Aristotle would see in Democritus a formidable adversary, a foil against which to test the mettle of his own system. Democritus, Aristotle says, made advances. ‘But [even] at this time men gave up inquiring into nature, and philosophers diverted their attention to political science and to practical goodness.’ He was talking about Socrates. Socrates (469–399 BC) was a stonemason with a taste for speculative thought. As a young man, he loved natural philosophy. At least that is what Plato makes him say in The Phaedo. He puzzled over the origin of life, the physical basis of thought and the motions of the heavens. His efforts were for naught. He followed, or tried to follow, the arguments of the physiologoi, now this one, now that, but he...