In “Notes on Recent Work,”Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 36.1 (2015): 253.

Jean De Groot, Aristotle’s Empiricism: Experience and Mechanics in the 4th Century BC (Las Vegas: Parmenides Press, 2014).

De Groot’s central task in this new work is to inquire into the relation between empiricism and mathematics in Aristotle’s philosophy of nature. Along the way, she calls into question some of the dominant interpretations that have shaped our contemporary understanding of this topic. Breaking with the line of thinking that seeks to position Aristotle’s natural philosophy as a dialectical enterprise, De Groot attempts to situate Aristotelian natural investigation as thoroughly grounded in the mechanical principles of its ancient context. By providing original readings of passages from the Movement of Animals, Physics, and Physical Problems, De Groot offers evidence that the Aristotelian investigation into natural phenomena has an empirical basis in, for instance, what she refers to as the moving radius principle (i.e., the mathematical principle that explains the lever). What arises in her account is that signal Aristotelian notions such as δύναμις and  ρχή take on a “physicalist” rather than metaphysical sense. This work is a significant contribution to the understanding of Aristotle’s concept of experience and its role in his philosophy of nature.