The Lagoon: How Aristotle Invented Science

by Armand Marie Leroi

The science that Aristotle began has grown great, but his descendants have all but forgotten him. Throw a stone in some boroughs of London, Paris, New York or San Francisco and you’ll be sure to hit a molecular biologist on the head. But, having felled your biologist, ask her – what did Aristotle do? You will be met with – at best – a puzzled frown. Yet Gesner, Aldrovandi, Vesalius, Fabricius, Redi, Leeuwenhoek, Harvey, Ray, Linnaeus, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire père et fils and Cuvier – to name just a few of many – read him. They absorbed the very structure of his thought. And so his thought became our thought, even when we do not know it. His ideas flow like a subterranean river through the history of our science, surfacing now and then as a spring, with ideas that are apparently new but are, in fact, very old.* This book is an exploration of the source: the beautiful scientific works that Aristotle wrote, and taught, at the Lyceum. Beautiful, but enigmatic too, for the very terms of his thought are so remote from us that they are hard to understand. He requires translation: not merely into English, but into the language of modern science. That, of course, is a perilous enterprise: the risk of mistranslating him, of attributing to him ideas that he could not possibly have had, is always there.