The Lagoon: How Aristotle Invented Science

by Armand Marie Leroi

To get from perception to wisdom, Aristotle gives us a hierarchy of understanding. When we perceive something, he says, we acquire a memory of it. And many memories of a given kind of thing allow us to generalize about it. Memories of Socrates and Plato, say, allow us to generalize about ‘men’. This is Aristotle opening another front contra Plato who held that we are born with all the knowledge that we have – indeed all the knowledge that we could have, that is, all the knowledge in the world. It’s just that, unfortunately, we have forgotten it; our task, then, is to retrieve that knowledge. Such an epistemology is, of course, a call to empirical quietism. If we already know everything, then we need not actually investigate the world; perhaps if we talk about it enough it will all come back to us. It is no accident that Plato wrote dialogues.