Was Aristotle right about anything?

[Yora]

When you look into the history of the state of knowledge in fields of physics, chemistry, or biology, it seems like more often than not, one of the earliest sources that is being discussed is Aristotle. Who was the gold standard for science for centuries, but also happened to be laughably wrong about apparently everything because he never bothered to go looking for evidence. Guy was just good at writing down things he assumed and making other people cite him as a source.

Did he actually get anything right? Is there any reason to still consider him an important scholar who made relevant contributions to human knowledge?

Every time I come across one of his bogus claims, I am thinking more and more that he probably might have been the single most responsible person for keeping science back.

Did he have any positive contribution?

[Fyraltari]

Logic. The man formalized logical reasoning.

Edit : also the bit about looking for evidence is kind of unfair. The scientific method hadn’t been properly codified yet so he was actually ahead of his contemporaries. He made some good contributions to zoology by bothering to a actually sit down and list and describe every species he had knowledge of. And he had most of it right.

[Aedilred]

"Looking for evidence" is easier said than done, too. In a period when the fastest mode of travel is by horse, and the limit of perception is pretty much what you can see with your own eyes, the quality of evidence available to you is much lower than we now take for granted. You're going to have to rely heavily on second-hand sources of information, and supposition.

Aristotle did at least try to ground his ideas in observable reality, but he was always going to be limited by the general state of science at the time. The real problem was not that he was wrong, per se, it's that for centuries people just took the truth of what he said for granted rather than treating them as a starting point.

We've improved significantly on the work of Newton, but because work on that began immediately, Newton's work never had the opportunity to sit around for so long that even small updates to it became revolutionary.

And in fields other than pure science, Aristotle's work continues to have relevance.

[NichG]

Arguably, writing down a wrong thing and putting name to it makes it easier to systematically disprove it later. Rather than having to test ten thousand variations on 'common sense', you just have to disprove the representative canonical one and then shift the burden of evidence onto minor variations to show that their differences make a difference. Something like Aristotelian laws of motion are wrong, but introduce the idea that framing things in terms of laws of motion could be a way forward.

There's also the 'all models are wrong, some are useful' side of things to consider.

[Vinyadan]

Stories in general. He wrote the first treaty on how to compose a literary work, and it's still used as reference by professional storytellers.
He also observed some facts concerning biology, like how octopuses use a tentacle during reproduction, and how cetaceans are mammals. You can take a look here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristo...ntury_interest

The reason is that he did look for evidence... in certain cases. His text about biology were based on his observations while he was in Lesbos.

And the "writing down things" part is inaccurate. We don't have anything of what he wrote for publication; it's all lost (and, apparently, he had a very elegant style, according to those who did read them). The texts we have came from within his school and portrayed his ideas, but weren't written by him. They could have been exceptionally well-made notes, or some kind of more complex reworking.

As for him being responsible of keeping science back, there you would be dead wrong, even if he never had written anything right. The problem is with people who stopped doing research after him. They held science back*. It's like accusing Kelvin of holding science back because he didn't know that atomic fusion existed and so completely misstated the age of the sun, or Lamarck because he got evolution wrong, or the many wrong reconstructions of extinct animals or past events.

What is curious is that science started galloping in Europe, which should have been held back by reverence towards Aristotle (the Arab world dropped him around the XIV century, if memory serves). So I wonder if his study actually ended up creating the environment for this acceleration. Or maybe there simply was too much money inflow, and too much international competition to avoid this kind of leap, and universities were more apt than anything else in the world.

*and even about that... yes, it's easy to see that there are formae mentis that make research more difficult, but, at least, these people were still learning stuff and passing it on to others. So they didn't go forward, but they also didn't go backwards.

[Peelee]

Every time I come across one of his bogus claims, I am thinking more and more that he probably might have been the single most responsible person for keeping science back.

One of my favorite things to say is that Aristotle was, in all likelihood, the smartest person who was wrong about absolutely everything.

And it's not really his fault. His observations took a huge amount of time to be debunked not because people just accepted, but because it s really hard to prove him wrong, because he did the best he could with what he had. Everything he said was totally reasonable at the time.

[Aedilred]

What is curious is that science started galloping in Europe, which should have been held back by reverence towards Aristotle (the Arab world dropped him around the XIV century, if memory serves). So I wonder if his study actually ended up creating the environment for this acceleration. Or maybe there simply was too much money inflow, and too much international competition to avoid this kind of leap, and universities were more apt than anything else in the world.

I think that's probably due to <things that can't be talked about on this forum> which culminated in a very long and extraordinarily destructive war - and in some cases series of wars - which meant that by the later 17th century people had lost faith in established ways of doing things, and there was a whole generation of scholars who'd all grown up reading Descartes and wanted to have a go themselves.

Plus the fortuitous circumstances of northern Europe thereafter being mercantilist and competitive enough that experimental science (or natural philosophy, rather) was able to gain official support and funding in order to gain an edge over other powers (as opposed to, say, China), but not so competitive that it erupted into more massively destructive wars that buried another generation of progress (as opposed to the Turks and Persians).

Really, the rise to global domination of Europeis a crazy development in world history, only possible because the right things all happened to fall into place at the right time.

[Tvtyrant]

When you look into the history of the state of knowledge in fields of physics, chemistry, or biology, it seems like more often than not, one of the earliest sources that is being discussed is Aristotle. Who was the gold standard for science for centuries, but also happened to be laughably wrong about apparently everything because he never bothered to go looking for evidence. Guy was just good at writing down things he assumed and making other people cite him as a source.

Did he actually get anything right? Is there any reason to still consider him an important scholar who made relevant contributions to human knowledge?

Every time I come across one of his bogus claims, I am thinking more and more that he probably might have been the single most responsible person for keeping science back.

Did he have any positive contribution?

All of his contributions were positive. That's like saying "Newton set back Science further then anyone as everything he ever said was technically wrong." All scientists are wrong, they just get a little closer to being right the next time around.

The issue wasn't Artistotle, it was later cultures that could see their inferiority technologically to their predecessors and so codified prior works as being definitive. Plenty of Greeks, Macedonians and Romans disagreed with Aristotle at the time but they were lost or of less importance so he got codified. Much worse IMO is Galen, whose humorous ideas were less accurate then blaming little gremlins.

[jayem]

How much of that is enlightenment bad-mouthing. There was a fair bit of that (and of the middle ages by the renaissance, but in this case the renaissance were the Aristotle fans) anyway. Combined with the general fact that once you know which is the data and which the exceptions, it becomes a lot more obvious.

Plus I don't think we haven't changed that much. It's just as preferred to cite than prove recently.

[Strigon]

All of his contributions were positive. That's like saying "Newton set back Science further then anyone as everything he ever said was technically wrong." All scientists are wrong, they just get a little closer to being right the next time around.

The issue wasn't Artistotle, it was later cultures that could see their inferiority technologically to their predecessors and so codified prior works as being definitive. Plenty of Greeks, Macedonians and Romans disagreed with Aristotle at the time but they were lost or of less importance so he got codified. Much worse IMO is Galen, whose humorous ideas were less accurate then blaming little gremlins.

Exactly this. Every scientist who lived more than, say, 50 years ago, we probably know now was mostly wrong. At least, in a technical sense. Today's scientists are also probably mostly wrong.
You want a perfect example? Look at the history of the atom - each step was wrong, but was reasonable given the knowledge they had at the time. Each is also a little bit closer to the truth.

Aristotle was very wrong about a lot of things, but he made reasonable guesses given his information, and the axioms he started with. Unfortunately, those were both deeply flawed, resulting in deeply flawed outcomes.
Science isn't held back by people who are wrong, it's held back by people who don't try to learn. Every science textbook ever written has declared something to be fact, when it simply isn't. If you read modern scientific literature, there's endless hand-wringing and wet noodlism about exactly what their data reveals - the closest you'll usually get to a statement of fact regarding a general principle is "we hypothesize that...", because of how difficult it is to safely declare something to be absolutely true. Aristotle may have written things as objective fact which aren't, but he didn't have the benefit of thousands of years of theories being overturned constantly to humble him. If science was held back by his writings, I place the blame firmly on those who didn't seek to test them.

[ngilop]

Plus I don't think we haven't changed that much. It's just as preferred to cite than prove recently.

Oh man, this so much. I am not going to post actualities because it might get some insanity started on these forums. But lately academics have taken to just citing each other over and over again instead of doing any new work

typical style of how it goes

person a cites person b's article in their new book

person b's article cites person's c book

Person c's book cites person a's article about the same thing that was previously written and has no outside research done for any of it

Now make that be like 10 to maybe a dozen doing circular cites and congrats that is about what it looks like now. There might be people doing actual research and doing forward movement in progression knowledge and understanding of a particular field and/or subject. But, for the most part, its just a circle jerk of cites that if you follow the breadcrumbs literally have nothing to stand on.

The average person don't look at it that way, the just see "oh, x 'experts' all say Y so Y must be true'

[Jay R]

Yes, Aristotle was "wrong about everything".

So are we.

We're just less wrong than before. That's progress. And Aristotle helped make that progress possible.

"The road to wisdom? Well, it's plain
And simple to express:
Err
and err
and err again,
but less
and less
and less."
-- Piet Hein

[MCerberus]

I think Aristotle being right/wrong may actually be focusing on something that really doesn't apply. Aristotle did not have access to our framework for what truth is. The scientific method + applying models to it is preposterously new in terms of humanity, and we're actively trying to find a replacement for its flaws. Our way of thinking would be so alien that, if you'll allow me some sql, we're comparing to a null. Even if he's was correct, he's wrong.

And we are too, as Jay R said, compared to what will come next.
I think the lesson is that Aristotle is what happens in an environment where there is no good way to check your work.

[Sapphire Guard]

What should he have done differently? Where could he go to collect this evidence?

No one makes anyone else cite them as a source. They just write, and people choose to cite them because they like their work.

[TaiLiu]

When you look into the history of the state of knowledge in fields of physics, chemistry, or biology, it seems like more often than not, one of the earliest sources that is being discussed is Aristotle. Who was the gold standard for science for centuries, but also happened to be laughably wrong about apparently everything because he never bothered to go looking for evidence. Guy was just good at writing down things he assumed and making other people cite him as a source.

[...]

Every time I come across one of his bogus claims, I am thinking more and more that he probably might have been the single most responsible person for keeping science back.

I agree with a lot of the responses here.

I'm not, like, necessarily a big Aristotle fan. And I don't think you're wrong to ask what you're asking. But I think you're being a lil unfair to the dude. Like, I'm not sure what historical sources you're using. But compared with his teacher, Plato, Aristotle definitely "bothered to go looking for evidence." I think you're also, like, laser-focused on the wrongness of his "scientific" claims when science didn't exist back when Aristotle was around. Like, dude was a philosopher. Dude was a big name in natural philosophy, and rightfully so.

Also, "wrongness" is a super vague and kinda strange criterion. Like, as I'm sure you know, science isn't just a continuous accumulation of facts. Scientists constantly get things wrong!

Did he actually get anything right? Is there any reason to still consider him an important scholar who made relevant contributions to human knowledge?

[...]

Did he have any positive contribution?

Fyraltari mentioned logic, which is fair, though no one really uses Aristotelian logic anymore. More precisely, philosophers don't formally use Aristotelian logic to do philosophy—people in general arguably do, every day, mostly unconsciously.

Aristotelian virtue ethics continues to be a major branch of ethics, though obviously it has developed beyond him.

And if you're interested specifically in his claims in natural philosophy, Carlo Rovelli argues that Aristotle's physics are "correct" in the same way Newton's are. I personally find it convincing.

[snowblizz]

No one makes anyone else cite them as a source. They just write, and people choose to cite them because they like their work.

Scientific handwringing time. People absolutely do make others cite them, the are called professors on tenure tracks bullying grad students. There is such a thing as "academic corruption", all human systems are susceptible to cycle in on themselves.

"Because they like their work" is not a valid reason to cite someone, it has to be relevant. And even better, actually something provable. That is to say a lot of citing consists of "they also said so" because some of the "rules" for academic writing are a bit off. It's not a perfect system, but it's the best we've managed so far.


As for original topic I tend to agree with the "did more good than harm" myself. It's not exactly Aristotles fault he got elevated to an Authority (big A) like a thousands years later. Nor is he the only case. Stagnation of knowledge is the norm, not the exception, if we look at human history, usually when current understanding supports power somehow (and that's probably all one can say on that).

[Strigon]

As for original topic I tend to agree with the "did more good than harm" myself. It's not exactly Aristotles fault he got elevated to an Authority (big A) like a thousands years later. Nor is he the only case. Stagnation of knowledge is the norm, not the exception, if we look at human history, usually when current understanding supports power somehow (and that's probably all one can say on that).

Then I would argue that, really, Aristotle had nothing to do with it. If the issue is simply that he was elevated to an authority that was never questioned, it's not his work that did harm - it's the people after him.
If he never existed, things wouldn't have been better off. They'd have elevated someone else to a point of authority, or else made up their own ideas that were wrong. For his time, Aristotle was quite sensible, so it's likely whoever else they chose would be even less accurate than Aristotle.

As I see it, the stagnation would have happened with or without Aristotle. So, in a way, he had no effect either positive or negative - by the time people were actually interested in discovering the truth, they were capable of finding out that Aristotle was wrong. I don't see his works as holding back science in any meaningful way.

[Sapphire Guard]

Scientific handwringing time. People absolutely do make others cite them, the are called professors on tenure tracks bullying grad students. There is such a thing as "academic corruption", all human systems are susceptible to cycle in on themselves.

"Because they like their work" is not a valid reason to cite someone, it has to be relevant. And even better, actually something provable. That is to say a lot of citing consists of "they also said so" because some of the "rules" for academic writing are a bit off. It's not a perfect system, but it's the best we've managed so far.


As for original topic I tend to agree with the "did more good than harm" myself. It's not exactly Aristotles fault he got elevated to an Authority (big A) like a thousands years later. Nor is he the only case. Stagnation of knowledge is the norm, not the exception, if we look at human history, usually when current understanding supports power somehow (and that's probably all one can say on that).

I don't particularly disagree, I was just being a bit imprecise with my terms.

[PirateMonk]

Logic. The man formalized logical reasoning.

Except his formalization was flawed/limited, leading to millennia of confusion until Frege and Peirce fixed it in the late 19th century.

(This is not to say that Aristotle's logic was necessarily worse than not having any formalization of logic at all, just that it wasn't an area where he did unusually well, since "wrong, but arguably better than nothing" describes virtually his entire body of work.)

[Tvtyrant]

Except his formalization was flawed/limited, leading to millennia of confusion until Frege and Peirce fixed it in the late 19th century.

(This is not to say that Aristotle's logic was necessarily worse than not having any formalization of logic at all, just that it wasn't an area where he did unusually well, since "wrong, but arguably better than nothing" describes virtually his entire body of work.)

Again though, that defines all individuals bodies of work. His logic system was good enough they didn't figure out what needed correcting for 2,200 years by your own measure, that's a pretty good track record.

[Fyraltari]

In fact I think there's a good chance that had Aristotle still been around by the time people started to refuse data and theories becaause they didn't fit with what he'd said, he would have slapped them in the face.

[Zyzzyva]

Again though, that defines all individuals bodies of work. His logic system was good enough they didn't figure out what needed correcting for 2,200 years by your own measure, that's a pretty good track record.

Yeah, and similarly Euclid never proved that two circles using AB and BA as radii must intersect at a point, which in theory breaks (or at least causes-to-require-shoring-up) his entire geometry... but it was still used for two millennia because it's a pretty damn good geometry. Calling Euclid "wrong" because he didn't adhere to the same standards of rigour as David Hilbert is silly at best, and probably actively misleading.

(Also, as mentioned upthread, there's the cetaceans-are-mammals-not-fish thing, which was definitely correct on Aristotle's part.)

[Mith]

It is a good point that the issue is that Aristotle was held up as an Authority by those that followed him more than he himself imposed a standard on everyone, but it still irks me that there was an Atomic theory (philosophically, couldn't be proven) that lost out to the 4 element theory.

[veti]

As I see it, the stagnation would have happened with or without Aristotle. So, in a way, he had no effect either positive or negative - by the time people were actually interested in discovering the truth, they were capable of finding out that Aristotle was wrong. I don't see his works as holding back science in any meaningful way.

We could have stagnated in a far worse place than Aristotle. We could have stuck with Plato as the Ultimate Authority. Hard to see how we could ever have developed "science" from that starting point. At least Aristotle believed in observation and objective facts.

[Chronos]

Yeah, at least Aristotle accepted that the world exists. That puts him one up over Plato.

But for the rest, yes, he didn't have giants' shoulders to stand on, but on a lot of points, he was wrong even by the standards of his own time, and went against what genuine experts of his time knew. Like, any farmer would have seen cats and dogs and pigs and cows and sheep and horses giving birth, and would have known that Aristotle's accounts of animals giving birth was complete nonsense. It's one thing to try as hard as one can to get solid information, but to unfortunately fail. It's another to not make any effort at all. Aristotle was like the student who starts a big term paper the morning it's due, and doesn't have time to look anything up, so just tries to BS through it all.

As for Europe clinging to him for longer than the rest of the world, but then still exploding into science once they started questioning him, that's true. And the same thing also happened in other parts of the world that rejected Aristotle quicker. The Middle East used to be far ahead of Europe in science. There's a reason why words like "algebra" and "algorithm", and all of the names of the stars, come from Arabic.

[Strigon]

We could have stagnated in a far worse place than Aristotle. We could have stuck with Plato as the Ultimate Authority. Hard to see how we could ever have developed "science" from that starting point. At least Aristotle believed in observation and objective facts.

Oh, yes, I mentioned that briefly in my post.
My point was, though, that where we stagnated (in my opinion) makes little difference to our scientific progress as a whole. Progress couldn't be made until people came along who were willing to make progress, by testing and questioning the old teachings. Once that happened, things progressed very quickly. So, to me, after a couple of centuries of scientific advancement, it becomes much more difficult to say whether Plato really would've been worse than Aristotle. The primary forces for scientific advancement are curiosity, creativity, and rigour. Your current foundational knowledge will be thrown out the window so quickly that it hardly matters where you started.

[Red Fel]

The thing to remember is that a person's methods and conclusions may be wrong, but simultaneously may create a foundation that lasts for centuries or longer. That foundation may, in turn, pave the way for subsequent people whose methods and conclusions may be right - or at least, less wrong. It's what other posters have mentioned about standing on the shoulders of giants - Aristotle may or may not have been huge, but others were able to stand on his shoulders nonetheless.

That, I think, is the more lasting legacy of Aristotle, and others like him. Granted, there's an argument to be made about virtue ethics and literary theory, but whether you agree or disagree with any or all of his work, the fact that he did it allowed others to build on it, better than he did.

I mean, some of the earliest philosophers of what is, essentially, atomic theory, were ancient Greeks who posited that all matter was composed of - for example - water. Everything is water. That has since been profoundly debunked, but the idea that everything is made up of something, some constant thing present in all matter, paved the way for modern atomic theory. And even that is a still-growing field.

[McStabbington]

The view that reason should proceed 1) through a set of rigorously formalized rules and principles so as to avoid error, and 2) be used to collate observable data about the world? I think that's pretty hard to argue with. It's also a view of the world that comes directly from Aristotle.

Look, I was one of those very few weirdos in college who paid attention to the history of ideas, largely because as a philosophy major, I was very keen on knowing who this particular philosopher had read, and who they had been influenced by, as a way of understanding what they were writing, what they were drawing from their contemporaries, and what were their own contributions to the canon. And as such, I can say two things with certainty about Aristotle.

One, Aristotle only became the giant he did largely through accident. Aristotle was writing in the days when Athens was in decline; he actually tutored Alexander the Great. But for the next 1200 years or so, until about the 10th century, he was not influential at all. He was actually a very obscure writer that almost no writers during that period were familiar with. To vastly oversimplify the spread of Aristotelian philosophy in Europe, Aristotle only became popular because copies and translations his works were rediscovered in the Library of Baghdad, and from there swirled through the Islamic world, which underwent a technological and philosophical renaissance of sorts in the 900's-1000's C.E. And from there, he was translated and incorporated into Jewish philosophy by Moses Maimonides, whose works were then incorporated into Christian theology by Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas was so successful and so revolutionary that his thinking on Aristotle then ossified into the formal church doctrine that the Enlightenment philosophers were pushing back on.

But it was not anything more than a historical accident, and Aristotle was not well known for over a millenia. If you had asked the best minds in Constantinople in the 600's C.E. a question about Aristotle, maybe one of them would have known who you were talking about, and would have said that all of his works were lost centuries ago.

Two, Aristotle really does deserve his reputation as a genius. Even here, even today, his works serve as the foundation for philosophy, art, literature, math, logic and science. Sure, he was factually wrong about most of the stuff that he wrote on science. But what's important is that he was the one who proposed the null hypotheses that most of the best scientists of the Enlightenment had to devise incredibly thoughtful experiments in order to refute. The classical example was the Aristotelian hypothesis that like attracted like, and the more earth a thing had in it, the faster it would fall. Well, that's false; it's not exactly in the nature of earth to attract itself towards other earth, and most of what he was describing would today be described by the theory of surface tension. But it was a theory that in order to disconfirm led the very best minds centuries later to the theories of universal gravitation, friction, and aerodynamics in order to test Aristotle's hypothesis by dropping differently-massed objects in a vacuum.

And even then, the basic idea that "like attracts like" is a very primitive and embryonic understanding of what "gravity" is. We don't actually have an explanation for why gravity does what it does, or why the universe has mass with universal gravitational attraction; we just note that yes, one of the basic, intrinsic features of mass in this universe is that it pulls other mass towards it in a uniform and mathematically-quantifiable way. Which is an observation which Aristotle was the first to note, even if he didn't have the math, or theobservational tools, or the theory to grasp why. That was a big leap forward, and he allowed still further, even more massive, leaps to follow from him. In my mind, that makes him a genius.

[Vinyadan]

As you have already said, it's an oversimplification, so I'd like to take a look at what happened before the Medieval translations.
Aristotle founded the Peripatetic school of philosophy, which existed for a few centuries, although it soon lost its productive power and was less attractive than Plato's school, or Stoicism, or Epicureanism.
Aristotle then underwent a first rediscovery during the first century BC, after which he was widely known to philosophers, although in the last centuries of the Western Empire much effort was put into making him fit within a Platonist framework.
Boethius would then translate part of Aristotle's work into Latin. What little survived of his work became the basis for the knowledge of Aristotle before his second rediscovery.
After 1000 AD, translations to Latin were made in Venice from Greek and in Spain from Arabic. The Arabic translations won the upper hand, and enjoyed much greater success, because they came with also a translation of the commentaries by Arab philosophers.
In the Greek tradition, he gained a name as a "grammarian of nature", which may be why one tenth-century emperor had a summary of his works on biology written down in Constantinople.

https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view...199935314-e-54
https://www.rep.routledge.com/articl...m-medieval/v-1

[Kato]

Okay, I don't want to bash on the man too much, I'm not very familiar with his work but I'm sure he did some important things and did them right.
But I really cannot give too much credit to a man who made 'heavy things fall faster' popular when you can disprove it with a simple thought experiment. Or put some actual effort into testing it. Yes, the scientific method wasn't a thing then and I get it, many people for millenia (probably) believed it but it's just hard to take serious if you're famous for the idea...