Aristotelian Physics

1. Introduction No other philosopher had such a deep and long-standing impact on Western science as Aristotle. In the fourth century BC he developed a fully comprehensive worldview that would with only few modifications stand for about two thousand years. Rather than just collecting isolated facts, he posed fundamental questions about nature and about the methods to study nature. Physics in the Aristotelian sense included the fundamental understanding of matter, change, causality, time, and space, which needed to be consistent with logic and experience. From that he derived a cosmology that allowed him to explain all phenomena, from everyday life to astronomy including both natural phenomena and technology. Aristotle (384-322) lived in a time period of extreme political turbulences that deeply shaped his biography. When the 17-year old Macedonian moved to Athens to enroll at the famous Academy of Plato, the state of Athens had lost its former political hegemony, but still had an international reputation in education. Ten years later the King of Macedonia, Philip, began to conquer the Greek states, which resulted in growing anti-Macedonian sentiments in Athens. When his patron Plato died in 347 and Athens declared war against Macedonia, there was no way for Aristotle to stay longer in Athens. He escaped to Asia Minor before Philip employed him to tutor his aspiring son Alexander. This Alexander would soon conquer the by then largest empire, ranging from Greece eastwards to India and southwards to Egypt. Under the hegemony of Alexander the Great, Aristotle could peacefully return to Athens at the age of 49 to found a new school, called the Lyceum. Yet, when Alexander died only 13 years later and his huge empire immediately fell apart, it was again for Aristotle to hastily leave Athens, shortly after which he died. One would perhaps not expect from somebody who lived on the move throughout his life that he developed a systematic, fully comprehensive worldview. However, Aristotle intellectual work was truly encyclopedic and covered fields as diverse as logic, epistemology, literature studies; and many of these disciplines, most notably logic and biology, can point to Aristotle as their founding figure. Even in mathematics, which Aristotle conspicuously neglected although it was then a major topic at Plato's Academy, he essentially influenced Euclid's (325-265) geometry through his axiomatic approach in logic. Moreover, Aristotle's general approach to scientific topics became the standard scientific method for about two thousand years. Whereas former …