The Review of Metaphysics


DE GROOT, Jean
Aristotle’s Empiricism:
Experience and Mechanics in the 4th Century BC.
Las Vegas: Parmenides Publishing, 2014. xxv + 442 pp.

Jean De Groot has given us a highly original and challenging book, and one needn’t go beyond its subtitle to begin to understand why. First of all, isn’t the work in the Aristotelian corpus that deals with mechanics generally considered to be written after Aristotle’s death? Moreover, isn’t this a branch of mathematical science? If one wanted to make a case for Aristotle’s empiricism, would it not be better to turn to his Meteorology or History of Animals, or to a work that might be thought to be a philosophical defense of empiricism, as some consider the Posterior Analytics to be? Professor De Groot is fully aware that these questions will be on people’s minds as they open her book, and she addresses them from various perspectives throughout. She sets out to question a number of premises that readers bring to the texts of Aristotle—most fundamentally, what does it mean to attribute empiricism to him—or for that matter, to anyone? De Groot is making the case that “[Aristotle’s] philosophy of nature is scientific in its method and its temper, in a sense of ‘scientific’ usually reserved for early modern and later science.” We are reminded that “mechanics,” while in one sense mathematical, is also a science of power, motion, resistance, and weight—that is, of phenomena that every human being, indeed every living thing, experiences, not simply via perception but via proprioception. She rightly notes in her concluding chapter that “it has not been recognized that kinematics plays a large role in Aristotle’s thinking about nature.”

The focal point of her argument, first presented in chapter two, is the moving radius principle, which reappears at pivotal points throughout the book: Points on a moving radius of a circle move at speeds proportional to their distance from the center. De Groot notes that it appears in various guises, at least by implication, in three Aristotelian settings: Aristotle’s own natural philosophical texts (De motu animalium, De generatione animalium, De caelo, Physics); in the Physical Problems; and in the Mechanics. The primary task of chapter three is to clarify Aristotle’s concepts of empeiria (experience) and phainomena, which De Groot stresses must include perceptual awareness that is often rooted in kinesthetic interactions with the world. She stresses the importance of distinguishing the awareness of mechanical forces from observations as the basis for calculation —especially central in putting together the sorts of tables that form the database for astronomy. This theoretical discussion is followed, in chapter four, by a study of the concept of phainomena as Aristotle uses it in discussing astronomy—and opens with a text from the Prior Analytics 1.30 which is often the centerpiece for discussions of Aristotle’s empiricism. De Groot points out that this text stresses that each discipline has its own distinctive experience, a claim exemplified by astronomical experience as providing astronomy’s first principles. Aristotle insists that when an astronomer grasps astronomical phainomena sufficiently, he is prepared to find astronomical demonstrations. The reader is then treated to the range and kind of expertise that is needed to acquire such experience. Empiricism perhaps—naïve empiricism, certainly not.

Chapters five and six follow the moving radius principle into Aristotle’s biological works via the concept of dunamis (power). It is often noted that Aristotle appeals to the behavior of automata both in the Generation of Animals, to understand how the process of generation continues once the moving source is no longer present, and in Movement of Animals, to understand how an origin of locomotion in the heart can lead to the movement of the animal’s limbs. But De Groot is able to inform discussion of these passages with a rich understanding of the mechanical principles in the background, and to give a new dimension to Aristotle’s use of the concept of dunamis in these texts.

There then follows: discussions of book 16 of the Physical (or Natural) Problems, making a plausible case for attributing it, if not to Aristotle, to discussions taking place during his lifetime, to some extent motivated by the work of Archytas (the subject of a lost work of Aristotle’s), along with a fresh analysis of the first chapter of the Mechanical Problems (chapter eight); a reconsideration of the vexed issue of “Aristotelian dynamics” (chapter nine); and a presentation of the problem for Greek science of treating weight mathematically, and Aristotle’s creative way of responding to it, using the concepts and methods of comparing ratios and proportions (chapter ten). In the last chapter (other than the conclusion) De Groot argues for a momentous consequence of this problematic: it “brought a habit of thought typical of mechanics into Aristotle’s natural philosophy, namely the simple inference from action underway, accomplished, or altered . . . to some principle of action, accomplishment or change in action.” That is, a mode of inference every reader of Aristotle is familiar with—actually a form of inductive inference—is rooted in Aristotle’s grappling with how to understand change as a product of such mechanical phenomena as power, force, resistance, action, and reaction.

Aristotle’s Empiricism casts the question of whether, and in what sense, Aristotle is an empiricist in a new light, and in the process provides fresh insight, not only into Aristotle’s natural philosophy, but also into the influence on his thought of the rich mechanical context in which it was developed. Every reader interested in Aristotle’s scientific thought and its philosophical foundations owes it to themselves to study this book carefully.

—James Lennox, University of Pittsburgh