Aristotle: Physical Sciences

Abstract

Thus Aristotle; carefully referring back and forth, subdividing knowledge, classifying, placing his proposed discourse in relation to what has gone before and to what has still to come, pointing out connections, putting before his readers the vast interlocking apparatus of his episteme. The ‘original undertaking’ to which he refers is nothing less than an account of the entire phenomenal world: an account, to use the words of a more recent philosopher, of ‘all that is the case’.

We have already discussed the first causes of nature and of all natural motion, also the stars ordered in the motion of the heavens and the physical elements — enumerating and specifying them and showing how they change into one another — and becoming and perishing in general. There remains for consideration a part of this enquiry which all our predecessors called meteorology. It is concerned with events that are natural, though their order is less perfect than that of the first of the elements of bodies. They take place in the region nearest the motion of the stars. Such are the milky way and the comets and the movements of meteors. It studies also all the affections we may call common to air and water, all the kinds and parts of the earth and the affections of its parts … When the enquiry into these matters is concluded let us consider what account we can give, in accordance with the method we have followed, of animals and plants both generally and in detail. When that has been done we may say that the whole of our original undertaking will have been carried out (1).