Abstract
Science had its origin, if not in opposition to Aristotle, at least in opposition to Aristotelianism. But science in its most authoritative form was what came to be called physics, not biology. Faced with the recent crisis in biology, in which the life sciences have been threatened with reduction to microversions of themselves and ultimately to chemistry and physics, one wonders if the besieged biologists, or at any rate their philosophical defenders, might not after all learn something to their advantage by reflecting on the one great philosopher who was also a great biologist. And we can learn from Aristotle; not, however, in a simple or straightforward fashion. There is no use just contrasting, as some have been tempted to do, Democritean with Aristotelian science and putting physicists in the former class, biologists in the latter. Even if we reject Simpson’s alleged reaffirmation of Roger Bacon and stoutly deny that ‘the study of Aristotle increases ignorance’,1 we must nevertheless admit that in some important respects biology, like all modern science, really is, and must be, un-Aristotelian. This thesis could be defended in a number of ways; let me select four.2
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G. G. Simpson, Principles of Animal Taxonomy, New York and London, 1961, 36n:’I tend to agree with Roger Bacon that the study of Aristotle increases ignorance.’ In fact Bacon was objecting to the current translations of Aristotle, not to Aristotle’s teachings themselves. His statement reads as follows: ‘Si enim haberem potestatem super libros Aristotelis ego facerem omnes cremari qui non est nisi temporis amissio studere in illis et causa erroris et multiplicatio ignorantiae ultra id quod valeat explicari. Et quoniam labores Aristotelis sunt fundamenta totius sapientiae, ideo nemo potest aestimare quantum dispendium accidit Latinis quia malas translationes receperunt philosophi.’ (‘Compendium Studii Philosophiae’, Bacon Opera Inedita, Rolls Series number 15, 469). I am grateful to my colleague, Professor John Malcolm, for finding this passage.
See my Portrait of Aristotle, Chicago and London, 1964, esp. Ch. VII.
Wolfgang Wieland (Die Aristotelische Physik, Göttingen, 1962, 95n.) argues that the fashion in which modern physicists take a given experiment as general is still Aristotelian: ‘Auch die neuzeitliche Physik liest an einem speziellen experimentellen Fall eine allgemeine Regel ab und prilft dann, ob es sich um die wahre Allgemeinheit handelt. Erst dann namlich kann sie sehen, ob sie von einem speziellen Fall ausgegangen ist oder nicht; d. h. ob sie diesen Fall von seinen besonderen oder von seinen all-gemeinen Merkmalen her gedeutet hat.’ It is, in his view, modern theories of induction that mislead us here. But those theories have recognized a logical gap which Aristotle failed, and for his purposes did not need, to recognize.
Norman Campbell, What is Science?, New York and London, 1921, Ch. II.
De generatione et corruptione, II, 11, 338b7ff.
See the exposition of Wieland in the work referred to, note 3, above. For a close study of Aristotle’s use of telos in the explanation of generation, as well as, and in relation to, eidos and hyle, see the excellent paper by Anthony Preus, ‘Science and Philosophy in Aristotle’s Generation of Animals’, J. Hist. Biol. 3 (1970), 1–52; see also his Science and Philosophy in Aristotle’s Biology, Darmstadt, in press.
Cf. M. Grene, The Knower and the Known, New York and London 1966, p. 237.
Quoted Cf. M. Grene, The Knower and the Known, New York and London 1966, pp. 235–236,
A. F. Baker, ‘Purpose and Natural Selection: A Defense of Teleology’, Scientific Journal of the Royal Coll. of Science 4 (1934), 106–19, 107–108.
A. F. Baker, ‘Purpose and Natural Selection: A Defense of Teleology’, Scientific Journal of the Royal Coll. of Science 4 (1934), 108–10.
Wolfgang Wieland (Die Aristotelische Physik, Göttingen, 1962, 95n.) 254–77.
C. H. Waddington, The Strategy of the Genes, London 1957, p. 190.
See the (by now classic) interpretation of organicism in Ernest Nagel, The Structure of Science, New York 1961, pp. 428–46.
Jean Piaget, Biologie et connaissance, Paris, 1967, pp. 225–226. Piaget refers here to an argument by J.–B. Grize: ‘J.–B. Grize, qui a etudie ces trois relations au point de vue du calcul logistique, montre de meme que la relation de ‘cause finale’ est mal formée logiquement, du fait qu’elle mele les relations reelles de la ‘langue’ (instrumentality et causalite) avec les relations d’isomorphisme appartenant a la ‘metalangue’ et utilisees pour mettre en correspondance cette causalite a—>b et l’instrumentalité B—>A(ibid., 226n.)
The Knower and the Known, Ch. IX, 238.
F. Ayala, ‘Biology as an Autonomous Science’, Amer. Scientist 56 (1968), 207–21.
De Gen. Anim. 741b 21ff.
H. B. D. Kettlewell, ‘Selection experiments on Industrial Melanism in the Lepidop– tera’, Heredity 9 (1955), 323fF. ‘A resume of investigations on the evolution of Melanism in the Lepidoptera’, Proc. Roy. Soc. Lond. B. 145 (1956), 297ff.
George Williams, Adaptation and Natural Selection, Princeton, 1966, p. 10.
George Williams, Adaptation and Natural Selection, Princeton, 1966, 10–11.
Among biologists critical of the neo–Darwinian synthesis, see for example E. S. Russell, ‘The Diversity of Animals’, Acta Biotheor. 13 (Suppl. 1) (1962), 1–151. Cf. A. Yandel, VHomme et VEvolution, Paris, 1949. Among recent philosophers, see M. Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, Chicago and London, 1958 (Torchbook edition: New York, 1962), Ch. 13.
A. Yandel, op. cit.
Cf. my analysis of R. A. Fisher’s ‘Genetical Theoretical Theory of Natural Selection’, in The Knower and the Known, pp. 253–66; Chapter VIII of this volume.
Cf. T. Dobzhansky, ‘On Some Fundamental Concepts of Darwinian Biology’, Evol. Biol. 2 (1968), 1–33, where efforts are made, not wholly successfully, to disentangle some of these concepts.
See my account in Approaches to a Philosophical Biology, New York 1969, Ch. 2, pp. 74–75, and this volume, Ch. XVIII.
R. R. Sokal, ‘Typology and Empiricism in Taxonomy’, J. Theoret. Biol., 3 (1962), 230–67.
For a detailed account of Aristotle’s usage in his own biological writings the reader should consult Professor David Balme’s definitive treatment, as well as A. L. Peck’s notes in the Introduction to his edition of the Hist. Anim. D M. Balme, TENOL and EIAOS in Aristotle’s Biology’, Class. Quart. 12 (1962), 81–98; A. L. Peck, Introduction, in Aristotle, Hist. Anim., volume I, Cambridge, Mass., 1965, esp. notes 5–11. Cf. also D. M. Balme, ‘Aristotle’s Use of Differentiae in Zoology’, in Aristote et les Problemes de Methode, Louvain 1960, pp. 195–212.
The two aspects I am separating are, admittedly, brought very close together by Aristotle himself, not only in Post Anal. (94 a 20ff.), where genos is given a place corresponding to that of ‘material cause’ in the Physics, but also in Metaphysics Δ 1024b 8, Z 1038 a 6, H 1045a 23 f. and 1 1058 a 23, where genos is identified with hyle. I am grateful to Professor Balme for calling my attention to the latter passages, and confess that I might not have made the distinction between the two pairs of terms as flatly as I tried to do, had I read his papers (just referred to) before writing this essay. No one interested in Aristotle’s biology and its relation to his philosophy of science can afford to neglect Professor Balme’s careful and illuminating work.
G. L. Stebbins, Basis of Progressive Evolution, Chapel Hill, N.C., 1969, pp., 5–6.
The locus classicus for the application of information theory in science is Science and Information Theory, Leon Brillouin, New York, 1956. The application of information theory to biology has been discussed in a number of places, notably by Henry Quastler, see The Emergence of Biological Organization, New Haven, 1964. The point that the distinction between living and non-living systems with respect to information is quantitative–though great enough to appear qualitative-I owe to Dr. Thomas Ragland of the University of California, Davis, who has lectured on this subject to my class in the philosophy of biology. Michael Polanyi, in ‘Life’s Irreducible Structure’ (in Knowing and Being, Chicago and London, 1969, pp. 225–39), argues, on the contrary, that the distinction between the two kinds of systems is logical and qualitative; yet he admits, in terms of evolution, a continuous transition from one to the other.
The Knower and the Known, p. 233.
Hilary Putnam, ‘The Mental Life of Some Machines’, Intentionality, Minds and Perception, Detroit, 1967, pp. 177–200; Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind, London 1949; Michael Polanyi, op. cit.
M. Polanyi, ‘Logic and Psychology’, Amer. Psychologist, 23 (1968), 39–40.
Hilary Putnam, ‘The Mental Life of Some Machines’, Intentionality, Minds and Perception, Detroit, 1967, pp. 177–200; Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind, London 1949; Michael Polanyi, op. cit.
Cf. for example, the obscure but thought–provoking argument of David Hawkins in The Language of Nature, New York, 1967.
G. G. Simpson, op. cit., 114.
Darwin, Origin of Species, Ch. XV (‘species are only well–marked varieties’); Paul R. Ehrlich and Richard W. Holm, ‘Patterns & Populations’, Science 137 (1962), 652–57.
See Ernst Mayr, Animal Species and Evolution, Cambridge, Mass., 1969, pp. 18–20.
See e. g., Simpson, op. cit.
See Portrait of Aristotle, esp. Ch. Ill, and Wieland, op. cit.
Post. Anal II, 13, 96a33ff. and Part. Anim. 634b 29ff.
Part. Anim., loc. cit.
For the complexities, e. g., of bacterial taxonomy, see Mortimer P. Starr and Helen Heise, ‘Discussion’, Systematic Biology, Nat. Acad. Sci. publication 1962 (1969), 92–99.
Professor Dennis Barrett of the University of California, Davis Zoology department, while denying that he is a ‘zoologist’, admits sadly that he has to know ‘his’ organism, the sea urchin, in order to study in it the development of the fertilization membrane.
Such founders of modern science as Harvey and Newton, indeed, thought they derived their great discoveries very directly from experience; we, with three centuries of hindsight, know they were more daringly imaginative than they believed.
C. F. A. Pantin, The Recognition of Species’, Science Progress 42 (1954), 587–98; cf. his posthumous Tarner lectures, The Relations between the Sciences, Cambridge 1965.
The Recognition of Species’, p. 587.
D. Hull, ‘Contemporary Systematic Philosophies’. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, 1 (1970), pp. 19–54 and M. Starr and H. Heise, op. cit.
J. S. L. Gilmour, ‘Taxonomy’, Modern Botanical Thinking, Edinburgh 1961, pp. 27–45.
N. R. Hanson, Patterns of Discovery, Cambridge, 1965. Cf. also his posthumously published Perception and Discovery, San Francisco, 1969.
M. Merleau-Ponty, La Phenomenologie de la Perception, Paris 1945; The Phenomenology of Perception (transl. by Colin Smith), New York and London, 1962.
See E. W. Straus, The Primary World of Senses (trans, by J. Needleman), New York 1963 and Phenomenological Psychology (trans, in part by Erling Eng), New York 1966, and this volume, Ch. 17.
M. Polanyi, op. cit., also The Tacit Dimension, New York, 1966. Cf. William T. Scott. Polanyi, op. cit., also The Tacit Dimension, New York, 1966. Cf. William T. Scott, ‘Tacit Knowing and The Concept of Mind’, Phil. Quart. 21 (1971), 22–35.
Cf. ‘What-is-being’, the rendering of Joseph Owens in his Doctrine of Being in the Aristotelian Metaphysics, Toronto, 1957.
The ’logical’ is one of the aspects of the rCvslvai distinguished by C. Arpe in his dissertation, Das ri 7jv slvai bei Aristoteles (Hamburg 1937). Cf. E. Tugendhat, TI KATA TINOS (Freiburg/München 1958), 18, n. 18: ‘Erst Arpe hat, ankniipfend an Natorp (Platons Ideenlehre, S.2) gezeigt, dass die Form des Ausdrucks nur aus der Definitionssituation verstanden werden kann und sich, wie am besten aus der Topik zu ersehen ist, auf jede beliebige Kategorie bezieht’. But cf. also Wieland, op. cit., 174; the ‘logical’ here is perhaps closer to what I am calling the ‘methodological’ interpretation. It is closer to heuristics-the search for principles - than to demonstration from them. The deductive aspect is stressed by Prof. Moravcsik in his reading of the tne (oral communication).
Wieland, op. cit., pp. 174–75. Wieland emphasizes the methodological function of the tηε (which he identifies, by implication, with Arpe’s ‘logical’ function) to the exclusion of its other aspects, esp. what Arpe calls the ‘physical’ or ‘teleological’ and the ‘ontological’.
See Arpe, op. cit. For a clear summary of the traditional view, see Bernard J. Lonergan, S. J., Verbum - World and Idea in Aquinas, Notre Dame 1967, pp. 16–25.
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© 1974 D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland
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Grene, M. (1974). Aristotle and Modern Biology. In: The Understanding of Nature. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 23. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-2224-8_5
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