Scott Atran” Pre-theoretical Aspects of Aristotelian Definition and Classification of Animals: the Case for Common Sense

HISTORIANS and philosophers of biology are, for the most part, in accord with the view that ‘essentialism’ has been the principal source of sin in systematics, and the cause of centuries of stagnation. In contrast to the ‘scientific revolution’ which began in the natural philosophy of the sixteenth century, natural history supposedly continued to wallow in what Popper has described as ‘the empty verbiage and barren scholasticism’ of ‘the Aristotelian method of definition’.’ Following Popper, for whom essentialism reflects a confusion of word meanings with an explanation of how their denotata actually came to be,’ Hull argues that: