ISIS - A Journal of the History of Science Society
Antiquity
Jean De Groot. Aristotle’s Empiricism: Experience and Mechanics in the Fourth Century B.C.
xxv + 442 pp., illus., fig., tables, bibl., index.
Las Vegas: Parmenides Publishing,
2014.
$127 (paper).
Jean De Groot studies Aristotle’s use of mechanical models in order to draw conclusions about his empiri- cal epistemology. On her account of Aristotle’s empiricism, experience and phenomena are more embed- ded in the everyday reality of mechanical situations and less dependent on the technical and dialectical starting points identified by recent scholars.
This is a very different book from Sylvia Berryman’s The Mechanical Hypothesis in Ancient Greek Natural Philosophy (Cambridge, 2009). Berryman’s book has a wider scope and a longer chronological range; it is more engaged in a variety of traditional questions; it does not descend into the details of math- ematical proofs. De Groot, by contrast, restricts herself mainly to Aristotle and the fourth century and goes into considerable detail about specific proofs, often much more than is necessary for her thesis.
De Groot’s most novel and exciting contribution is her discussion of the “moving radius principle.” She argues that Aristotle and the authors of the Mechanics and Problems XVI (both of these latter works are pseudo-Aristotelian) analyzed many simple mechanisms in terms of the moving radius of a circle. So, for example, the wheelbarrow, a paradigmatic second-class lever, has its wheel at the center of the circle and its handles at the periphery of the radius. De Groot shows through many examples that this moving radius principle was a basic conceptual tool of fourth-century mechanical treatises. Most interestingly, she shows how the moving radius principle is at work both in Aristotle’s celestial and in his terrestrial, specifically biological, mechanics. This is new and important and needs to be acknowledged by scholars of Aristotelian science.
In fact, if De Groot had focused on this thesis alone and had investigated its direct implications for Aristotelian natural philosophy, she would have written an outstanding book. As it is, this promising be- ginning is undercut by a number of serious flaws, flaws that an exacting editor could have mitigated. Most glaring among these is the book’s overreaching ambition and excessive length. At 370 pages of text, Aristotle’s Empiricism is simply too long, and its theses are presented in an unclear order without sufficient signposting. The style too often impedes easy understanding both of the individual sentences and of the argument as a whole.
I have already described the most important of De Groot’s theses. Let me now summarize the others and indicate along the way what I consider to be their respective strengths and weaknesses. As her title indicates, De Groot sees a tight connection between mechanics and empiricism. Her main point is that Greek mechanics in the fourth century grew out of the felt, “kinaesthetic” experience of moving bodies in the environment. These experiences, and neither the individual Baconian facts in their serried ranks nor the dialectical propositions of G. E. L. Owen, are the phainomena proper to Aristotelian natural science. It is these felt experiences that get theorized, and it is these that are eventually given mathematical expres- sion (Chs. 1–4). De Groot’s point may ultimately be true, but she makes mechanics alone bear the full weight of Aristotelian epistemology, and it is doubtful whether facts proper to mechanics can have had such influence over wide epistemological issues. De Groot’s proposal is intriguing but has not convinced me.
Moving further afield, De Groot argues that the Aristotelian concept of dunamis, a high metaphysi- cal abstraction, has its original home in the power that, for example, mechanical devices manifest—the power to act on and effect. Such an account, according to De Groet, is more appropriate to its use in explanations of animal locomotion and reproduction, with their explicit reference to lever action (Chs. 5 and 6). Again, I am not convinced that mechanics can provide the metaphysical pou sto that De Groot is seeking. There follows a lengthy excursus on Mechanics I and Problems XVI (Chs. 7 and 8); then the last three chapters (Chs. 9–11) return to Aristotle with sprawling discussions of proportion and the ontology of mathematics, all aiming at the general thesis that according to Aristotle quantity is embedded in and dependent on experienced material reality.
Though this book has its flaws, let me conclude by saying that De Groot is a highly perceptive and imaginative scholar and that I look forward to a shorter, more tightly argued sequel.
Malcolm Wilson is Professor of Classics at the University of Oregon. He is, most recently, the author of Structure and Method in Aristotle’s “Meteorologica” (Cambridge, 2014).