Aristotle biography biology

They consist of dialogues, records of scientific observations and systematic works. Poetics is a scientific study of writing and poetry where Aristotle observes, analyzes and defines mostly tragedy and epic poetry. Compared to philosophy, which presents ideas, poetry is an imitative use of language, rhythm and harmony that represents objects and events in the world, Aristotle posited.

His book explores the foundation of storymaking, including character development, plot and storyline. That said, it was up to the individual to reason cautiously while developing his or her own judgment. While bad luck can affect happiness, a truly happy person, he believed, learns to cultivate habits and behaviors that help him or her to keep bad luck in perspective.

In his book MetaphysicsAristotle clarified the distinction between matter and form. To Aristotle, matter was the physical substance of things, while form was the unique nature of a thing that gave it its identity. In PoliticsAristotle examined human behavior in the context of society and government. Aristotle believed the purpose of government was make it possible for citizens to achieve virtue and happiness.

Intended to help guide statesmen and rulers, Politics explores, among other themes, how and why cities come into being; the roles of citizens and politicians; wealth and the class system; the purpose of the political system; types of governments and democracies; and the roles of slavery and women in the household and society. In RhetoricAristotle observes and analyzes public speaking with scientific rigor in order to teach readers how to be more effective speakers.

Aristotle believed rhetoric was essential in politics and law and helped defend truth and justice. Good rhetoric, Aristotle believed, could educate people and encourage them to consider both sides of a debate. These sorts of relationships were visually grafted in the future through the use of Venn diagrams.

Aristotle biography biology

In these works, Aristotle discusses his system for reasoning and for developing sound arguments. There are a number of other examples from natural science, including biological examples, in chapters 13—18 of book II especially. Most of these are discussed in the first three essays in Lennox b; cf. See as well BoltonCharlesLeunissen b and Lennoxch. For example, why do trees shed their leaves?

If it is because of solidification of the moisture, then if a tree sheds it leaves solidification must hold, and if solidification holds—not of anything whatever but of a tree—then the tree must shed its leaves 98b35— For a penetrating analysis of the relationship between definition and demonstration in the Posterior Analytics and a somewhat different account of its relation to the biological works, see Charles Aristotle stated in the History of Animals that all beings were arranged in a fixed scale of perfection, reflected in their form eidos.

The highest animals gave birth to warm and wet creatures alive, the lowest bore theirs cold, dry, and in thick eggs. These are arranged from the most energetic to the least, so the warm, wet young raised in a womb with a placenta were higher on the scale than the cold, dry, nearly mineral eggs of birds. Aristotle's pupil and successor at the LyceumTheophrastuswrote the History of Plantsthe first classical book of botany.

It has an Aristotelian structure, but rather than focus on formal causes, as Aristotle did, Theophrastus described how plants functioned. After Theophrastus, though interest in Aristotle's ideas survived, they were generally taken unquestioningly. The first medical teacher at Alexandria, Herophilus of Chalcedoncorrected Aristotle, placing intelligence in the brainand connected the nervous system to motion and sensation.

Herophilus also distinguished between veins and arteriesnoting that the latter pulse while the former do not. Many classical works including those of Aristotle were transmitted from Greek to Syriac, then to Arabic, then to Latin in the Middle Ages. Aristotle remained the principal authority in biology for the next two thousand years.

Michael Scot translated much of Aristotle's biology into Latin, c. Later in the 13th century, Thomas Aquinas merged Aristotle's metaphysics with Christian theology. Whereas Albert had treated Aristotle's biology as science, writing that experiment was the only safe guide and joining in with the types of observation that Aristotle had made, Aquinas saw Aristotle purely as theory, and Aristotelian thought became associated with scholasticism.

Renaissance zoologists made use of Aristotle's zoology in two ways. Especially in Italy, scholars such as Pietro Pomponazzi and Agostino Nifo lectured and wrote commentaries on Aristotle. Elsewhere, authors used Aristotle as one of their sources, alongside their own and their colleagues' observations, to create new encyclopedias such as Konrad Gessner 's Historia Animalium.

Edward Wotton similarly helped to found modern zoology by arranging the animals according to Aristotle's theories, separating out folklore from his De differentiis animalium. In the Early Modern period, Aristotle came to represent all that was obsolete, scholastic, and wrong, not helped by his association with medieval theology. That same year, William Harvey proved Aristotle aristotle biography biology by demonstrating that blood circulates.

Aristotle still represented the enemy of true science into the 20th century. Leroi noted that inPeter Medawar stated in "pure seventeenth century" [ 76 ] tones that Aristotle had assembled "a strange and generally speaking rather tiresome farrago of hearsayimperfect observation, wishful thinking and credulity amounting to downright gullibility".

D'Arcy Thompson translated History of Animals inmaking a classically educated zoologist's informed aristotle biography biology to identify the animals that Aristotle names, and to interpret and diagram his anatomical descriptions. Charles Darwin quoted a passage from Aristotle's Physics II 8 in The Origin of Specieswhich entertains the possibility of a selection process following the random combination of aristotle biography biology parts.

Darwin comments that "We here see the principle of natural selection shadowed forth". Firstly, Aristotle immediately rejected the possibility of such a process of assembling body parts. Secondly, according to Leroi, Aristotle was in any case discussing ontogenythe Empedoclean coming into being of an individual from component parts, not phylogeny and natural selection.

Zoologists have frequently mocked Aristotle for errors and unverified secondhand reports. However, modern observation has confirmed one after another of his more surprising claims, [ 68 ] including the active camouflage of the octopus [ 87 ] and the ability of elephants to snorkel with their trunks while swimming. Aristotle remains largely unknown to modern scientists, though zoologists are perhaps most likely to mention him as "the father of biology"; [ 89 ] the MarineBio Conservation Society notes that he identified " crustaceansechinodermsmollusksand fish ", that cetaceans are mammalsand that marine vertebrates could be either oviparous or viviparousso he "is often referred to as the father of marine biology ".

Held commented that [ 95 ]. The deep thinker who would be most amused by. Aristotle did not write anything that resembles a modern, unified textbook of biology. Instead, he wrote a large number of "books" which, taken together, give an idea of his approach to the science. Some of these interlock, referring to each other, while others, such as the drawings of The Anatomies are lost, but referred to in the History of Animalswhere the reader is instructed to look at the diagrams to understand how the animal parts described are arranged, [ 96 ] and it has even been possible to reconstruct admittedly with much associated uncertainty what some of these illustrations may have looked like, from Aristotle's descriptions.

Aristotle's main biological works are the five books sometimes grouped as On Animals De Animalibusnamely, with the conventional abbreviations shown in parentheses:. In addition, a group of seven short works, conventionally forming the Parva Naturalia "Short treatises on Nature"is also mainly biological:. Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk.

Read Edit View history. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects. Wikidata item. Aristotle's theories of biology. Context [ edit ]. Aristotle's background [ edit ]. Aristotelian forms [ edit ]. Main article: Hylomorphism. System [ edit ]. Soul as system [ edit ]. Processes [ edit ]. Metabolism [ edit ]. Temperature regulation [ edit ].

Information processing [ edit ]. Inheritance [ edit ]. See also: Telegony pregnancy. Embryogenesis [ edit ]. Method [ edit ]. Further information: History of scientific method. Scientific style [ edit ]. Mechanism and analogy [ edit ]. Complex causality [ edit ]. Main articles: Four causes and Tinbergen's four questions. Empirical research [ edit ].

Aristotle recorded that the embryo of a dogfish left was attached by a cord to something like a mammalian placenta rightin fact a yolk sac. Classification [ edit ]. Scale of being [ edit ]. Further information: Great chain of being. But while Aristotle was a major influence on philosophy, he also impacted science. As a philosopher, Aristotle spent his life contemplating how to live the best life possible—but his work on the biological purpose of life left a mark on the scientific community.

He used his philosophical mindset to inject meaning into life, positing that each living organism has a purpose interconnected with its form, functioning according to a natural set of rules inherently given. Scala Naturae — or the great chain of being — was first conceptualized by Aristotle in his work History of Animals. He took his observations of living things and began to rank them based on complexity.

He started by putting animals above plants since animals can move and have an awareness of their surroundings and continued by creating a hierarchy for animals themselves, separating them based on reproduction processes live births ranked above eggs and blood warm blood was higher than cold which was higher than seemingly bloodless invertebrates.

In the time of Aristotle, a popular belief was spontaneous generation, the idea that life could be created from non-living matter.