Aristotle divorced science from mathematics. To the modern mind, the most striking fact about medieval science is that it ignores numbers, weight, length, speed, duration, quantity. Instead of proceeding by observation and measurement, as the Pythagoreans did, Aristotle constructed, by that method of a priori reasoning which he so eloquently condemned, a weird system of physics ‘argued from notions and not from facts’. Borrowing his ideas from his favourite science, biology, he attributed to all inanimate objects a purposeful striving toward an end, which is defined by the inherent nature or
...more
