arXiv:physics/0209063v1 [physics.

hist-ph] 17 Sep 2002

A Ciencia Cierta 2(12)

The Bimestral Publication of the Potosinian Commettee of Science & Technology

San Luis Potos August 2002 Enlarged version in English September 2002

ARISTOTLE: THE FIRST ENCYCLOPEDIST

Haret C. Rosu1
Abstract. Aristotle was the rst to declare himself in the class of natural philosophers (physiologoi) and he was the rst physicist because he spelled out the rst denitions of some basic physical concepts. Moreover, he was the rst encyclopedist of the world and perhaps the greatest.

In the January 2002 issue of the IOP magazine Physics World, M. RowanRobinson published the paper Was Aristotle the rst physicist ? [1]. This paper generated several reactions [2] and stimulated me to learn more about one of the greatest thinkers of all times. I believe the answer to the question of Rowan-Robinson is positive, rst of all because the rst known physics books that have been conserved through the centuries belong to Aristotle. But Aristotle was much much more. He was the rst encyclopedist of mankind. Because of his extremely imaginative mind he left behind him a multitude of systematic studies on almost all of the cultural elds of his epoch, including cosmology. He is the founder of Logics, where he developed the syllogism as a basic argument of the theory of deduction. The syllogism starts from two dierent premises that lead to a unique conclusion. Aristotle revised many of Platos ideas insisting on methods based on observation and experiment (he was practically a very acute observer of nature whereas his experiments were mainly dissections). Aristotle argued that mankind, though a component of nature, was dierent from the rest of the known world due to his capacity for thinking and reasoning. In his opinion, human beings are rational animals and despite the fact they do not act always according to reason, they have always the choice of exerting this superior quality. To be happy, human
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e-mail: [email protected]; IPICyT, San Luis Potos , Mexico

beings have the ethical duty to live in the realm of reason. Concerning politics, he believed that a monarchy with a clever king could be an ideal social structure, but he agreed that a limited democracy may be one of the best compromises. The arts have been interpreted by Aristotle as a form of intelectual pleasure. His analyses of the Greek tragedies have been used as models of literary critical commentaries. Moreover, he asserted that the observed material objects as well as the persons examining them are under continuous transformations. But since knowledge should be associated only with the universal unchangeable elements Aristotle claimed that knowledge and perception are fundamentally dierent, one from the other. As for the basic blocks of the material world, Aristotle believed that in addition to the four elements of Empedocles - re, air, earth, and water - there was a fth one that he called ether lling the whole universe and being actually the unique element in the composition of any body beyond the Moon. The reason to introduce the ether was Aristotles dogma that nature abhors empty space (vacuum). It is worth mentioning that the lecture notes of most of his courses in the Lyceum were discovered by chance by Roman soldiers about two centuries after the death of Aristotle in a pit on the west coast of Asia Minor. The peripathetic philosopher Andronicus provided a Latin translation and tried without much success to publish a rst edition of Aristotles works; the project remained merely at the level of collection. The publication at a larger scale was achieved by the Arabs much later. The works of Aristotle became known in the early medieval Europe of the XIth-XIIth centuries by translation from the arabic and rapidly became recognized textbooks by the Christian Church despite their laical origin. Having this religious support, Aristotles doctrines dominated scienticly oriented people until the Renascence. As far as Physics is concerned, the rst drawback came with Galilei, when his theory of free fall was rst questioned from the experimental point of view2 . With respect to the nature of time, Aristotle was the proponent of a uniform and continuous ux of time, an idea supported later by Newton. Finally, the ether paradigm was a powerful concept for centuries till the beginning of the XXth century when Einstein formulated the theory of
It is to be noted that within nonrelativistic quantum mechanics free fall could be still considered in a certain sense to be aristotelian, i.e., mass-dependent.
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special relativity. However, one should say that the surprizes of technological progress do not forbid the resurgence of dierent forms of ether-like concepts at least as a convenient explicative necessity3 . Aristotle was an antiatomist. He believed that matter was continuous and could be devided in ever smaller pieces forever! On the other hand, Aristotle was the rst to provide definitions of basic mechanical concepts, such as energy (energeia - activity) and dynamics (dynamis - capacity for action). He also rst dened physics (physis -nature) as the science of the forms of motion.

Biographical Sketch of Aristotle

Period of life: 384 - 322 BC (62 years). Place of birth: Stagira in the ancient Macedon region4 , now in the prefecture of Khalkidhiki in the northeastern part of Greece). Aristotle was born as the son of Nicomachus, chief physician at the court of Amyntas III. Stagira was a port in the three-ngered hand-like peninsula Calcidia and is now a village of only 500 people. At the age of 17 years he went to Athens to study in the Academy, the famous educational institution of Plato (now equivalent to a department of philosophy). For the next 19 years he remained in Platos Academy where he reached the mature status of professor and independent research philosopher. Although many of his ideas were opposed to those of Plato, he was considered as one of the possible successors by Plato himself. In 347 BC, when Plato died, Aristotle could not stay as head of the Academy since Platos last will was that his own nephiew, the much more obscure Speusippus, be in charge of it, but probably also because of the opposition of the other philosophers and his Macedonian origin. Together with
3 As a matter of fact, vacuum quantum uctuations can be considered as a form of quantum ether. In addition, the so-called quintessence, which is in vogue in the cosmology produced by the high redshifted supernovae data and also some of the modern cosmological scalar elds can be viewed as ethereal elds. 4 Ancient Macedon region and people should not be confused with present Macedonia.

Xenocrates, who later became the third head of Platos Academy, Aristotle abandoned Athens spending the following 12 years in various cities of the isles and along the coasts of the Aegean Sea where for a while he engaged in his remarkable studies in biology. Fortunately, during this quite unstable period of his life (although he got married to Pythias, the niece of ruler Hermias) he was asked by Philip II of Macedonia to come back to Stagira as a private mentor of his thirteen-year old son Alexander (later, Alexander the Great). In 335 BC Philip conquered Athens. Aristotle returned to the most important city of that epoch in a position allowing him to found his own school (known as the peripatetic school because of Aristotles habit of walking during his lectures). The place he chose for his school was known as the Lyceum named so after the nearby temple of Apollo Lyceus (Lykaios), i.e., Apollo the Wolf-God. Aristotles school location was discovered only in 1997 by E. Ligouri. It is a quadratic place with a diagonal of about 50 meters. It is considered by many historians as the rst university of the planet5 . Aristotle taught in the Lyceum during the next 12 years of his life. His courses (2000 pages published in Complete Works representing only between a fth and a quarter of his total cultural output) cover knowledge ranging from Ethics to Biology, Physics and Metaphysics. On the personal side, it is known that during his second Athenian period his wife Pythias died and subsequently he lived unmarried with Herpyllis, a woman from Stagira. Also, in 327 BC, his nephiew Callisthenes who went with Alexander in his famous military campaign was executed at the order of Alexander ! In 323 BC, at the death of Alexander, Aristotle prudently abandoned Athens and died a year later in Calchis, hometown of his mother in Euboea island.
I think this is true if one takes into account the encyclopedic range of Aristotles courses and the extended library that was accumulated there through the eorts of Aristotle.
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Extant Aristotelian Treatises

Presented is the list as given by Turner [3] with the titles in Latin as assigned by Andronicus. Logical Treatises (also known as Organon) 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. Categoriae De Interpretatione Analytica Priora Analytica Posteriora Topica De Sophisticis Elenchis

Physical Treatises 7. Physica (or Physica Auscultatio) 8. De Clo 9. Meteorologica Metaphysical Treatises 10. Metaphysica6 Biological and Zoological Treatises 11. Historiae Animalium 12. De Generatione et Corruptione 13. De Generazione Animalium 14. De Partibus Animalium Psychological and Anthropological Treatises 15. De Anima 16. De Sensu et Sensibili
Title given by Andronicus, who placed this treatise after the physical treatises in his collection; Aristotle entitled it First Philosophy (Prote Philosophia).
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17. De Memoria et Reminiscentia 18. De Vita et Morte 19. De Longitudine et Brevitate Vitae Ethical and Political Treatises 20. Ethica Nicomachea 21. Politica Poetical and Rhetorical Treatises 22. De Poetica 23. De Rhetorica

References
[1] M. Rowan-Robinson, Was Aristotle the rst physicist ?, Physics World 15, 15-16 (January 2002), http://physicsweb.org [2] Y. Neeman, Aristotle: top man, Physics World 15, 18-19 (May 2002); D. Sathe, untitled, ibidem, p. 19 [3] W. Turner, Aristotle, in The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume 1 (R. Appleton Company, 1907)

Figure Caption: Map showing the location of Stagira among other ancient Greek cities.

This figure "GRCITIES.gif" is available in "gif" format from: http://arXiv.org/ps/physics/0209063v1