The Lagoon
How Aristotle Invented Science
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- 12,99 €
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- 12,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
In the Eastern Aegean lies an island of forested hills and olive groves, with streams, marshes and a lagoon that nearly cuts the land in two. It was here, over two thousand years ago, that Aristotle came to work.
Aristotle was the greatest philosopher of all time. Author of the Poetics, Politics and Metaphysics, his work looms over the history of Western thought. But he was also a biologist – the first.
Aristotle explored the mysteries of the natural world. With the help of fishermen, hunters and farmers, he catalogued the animals in his world, dissected them, observed their behaviours and recorded how they lived, fed, and bred. In his great zoological treatise, Historia animalium, he described the mating habits of herons, the sexual incontinence of girls, the stomachs of snails, the sensitivity of sponges, the flippers of seals, the sounds of cicadas, the destructiveness of starfish, the dumbness of the deaf, the flatulence of elephants and the structure of the human heart. And then, in another dozen books, he explained it all.
In The Lagoon, acclaimed biologist Armand Marie Leroi recovers Aristotle's science. He goes to Lesbos to see the creatures that Aristotle saw, where he saw them, and explores the Philosopher's deep ideas and inspired guesses – as well as the things that he got wildly wrong. Leroi shows how Aristotle's science is deeply intertwined with his philosophical system and how modern science even now bears the imprint of its inventor.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Leroi (Mutants) lovingly rescues the reputation of Aristotle's alternately meticulous and bizarre studies of animal behavior from the ruins left in the wake of derision during the Scientific Revolution. Leroi brings a modern sensibility to, yet evokes an air of timelessness with, his gorgeous descriptions of the ecology of the fishing villages of Lesbos where Aristotle both carefully dissected fishes and gave credence to the most fantastic of animal folk stories. His Aristotle creates systems of categories in a determined search for the reasons behind the existence of living things in their myriad forms. Leroi smoothly drops readers into Aristotle's world of concocting elements and vital heat, of formal causes and nutritive, sensitive, and rational souls. He muses on how close Aristotle came to the ideas of Linnaeus and Darwin, having collected so much of the kinds of data they would eventually need despite being constrained by core axioms that saw animal types as diverse but essentially static. Leroi credits Aristotle with the most basic tenet of empirical science to understand the world, look first and then try to explain what you see but resists crediting him with textually unsupported prescience, which highlights beautifully the fact that ideas can be self-consistent, elegant, yet entirely wrong. Illus.
