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As the much quoted lines of a novel of L. P. Hartley put it, “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”
A little later another Milesian, Anaximenes, returned to the idea that everything is made of some one common substance, but for Anaximenes it was not water but air. He wrote one book, of which just one whole sentence has survived: “The soul, being our air, controls us, and breath and air encompass the whole world.”
Aristotle was a realist in a common modern sense: for him, though categories were deeply interesting, it was individual things, like individual pine trees, that were real, not Plato’s forms.
thing, Aristotle’s work was suffused with teleology: things are what they are because of the purpose they serve.
I can imagine how Aristotle might have classified fruits: All fruits come in three varieties—there are apples, and oranges, and fruits that are neither apples nor oranges.
One of Aristotle’s classifications was pervasive in his work, and became an obstacle for the future of science. He insisted on the distinction between the natural and the artificial. He begins Book II of Physics4 with “Of things that exist, some exist by nature, some from other causes.” It was only the natural that was worthy of his attention.
this yearning for a holistic approach to nature is precisely what scientists have had to outgrow. We simply do not find anything in the laws of nature that in any way corresponds to ideas of goodness, justice, love, or strife, and we cannot rely on philosophy as a reliable guide to scientific explanation.
