The Lagoon: How Aristotle Invented Science

"I just love this book. Leroi’s not a classicist; he’s professor of evolutionary developmental biology at Imperial College London. He discovered early on in his career, as anyone who studies zoology must, that Aristotle is the founding father of zoology. His two great treatises On the Reproduction of Animals and the History of Animals are a great place to start reading Aristotle because they are written in easy, flowing prose. They’ve got plenty of colour in them because they’re all about horses and giraffes and molluscs and other animals. I often recommend them as a good way in to Aristotle for young people. Leroi decided to examine these works of Aristotle in detail. Aristotle often mentions specific places where he has seen creatures—in particular, the island of Lesbos. We know that he spent about 18 months there at a crucial point in his career when he was about 40, with Theophrastus, who was his successor as head of the Lyceum. Theophrastus was 17 years younger, but Aristotle’s most trusted friend, and a Lesbian in that he was from the island of Lesbos. Leroi visited Lesbos. Aristotle drew beautiful pictures of the animals, but these haven’t survived, sadly: Leroi’s book provides reconstructions. Leroi’s book is a panegyric on Aristotle the natural scientist. Aristotle was remarkable: he seems even to have invented the spreadsheet, to be able to compile dozens and dozens of parallel cases, collate them, and then infer the general scientific principles from them. So, this book is a love song to Aristotle by a scientist who writes far better prose than most humanities scholars. Leroi also shows, often, how those ideas cannot be separated from the ethics. Aristotle has the belief that our virtue is grounded in nature, and that if don’t live according to our biologically determined animalness, then we can’t achieve happiness. The physical pleasures that all animals enjoy are not goals in themselves for us. They are not intrinsic goods, but they are guides to the good. Yes, but only because they’re instrumental. Sexual desire will help you make a better relationship, but it’s the better psychological relationship that you’re after. Exactly. It’s the same with eating. He says that delicious food is important because delicious food is usually healthier and better for you and will result in your body being in better condition which is conducive to thinking better and more seriously. So, the science is crucial for Aristotle. There’s an excellent philosopher at Birkbeck College, London, called Sophia Connell , who really gets this. She has already produced wonderful articles explaining why we can’t do the ethics without the biology and Aristotle on Female Animals: A Study of the Generation of Animals came out with CUP in 2016. She is also in the process of editing The Cambridge Companion to Aristotle’s Biology. Absolutely. I would suggest that the complete beginner just goes and reads the History of Animals . It’s full of delightful anecdotes and conveys a strong sense of Aristotle the animal-lover. He’s insightful on horses, as my sister, an equestrian expert, has confirmed to me. I don’t know. Plato called him ‘The Brain.’ They said it was awfully quiet in the Academy when he wasn’t there. But he read and read and read everything: he read physical sciences, which Socrates and Plato didn’t; he respected the study of rhetoric if used for morally correct purposes; he wanted to conduct research in every discipline and was the first to theorise how we argue logically in all of them. He collected a vast library, but he also collaborated with other thinkers. The fact that several of his works are labelled ‘spurious’ is simply because they’re by the equivalent of his PhD students. Yes. At the Lyceum they rotated leadership roles, as proper colleges and universities once used to: the intellectuals when I began my academic career still rotated the deanship rather than importing business managers and accountants to come in and tell us how to do our job. The best answer to that lies in the last chapter of my Aristotle book. I actually couldn’t write that chapter for a long time: I was delayed for a whole year because my mother was dying. I came and went from her bedside, and I found a way to use Aristotelian ideas to help me. His theory of conscious recollection, which only humans can perform, was a support to me. Animals have memory, he argues, but they cannot deliberately recollect. Aristotle says that this is a uniquely human skill. That idea has also influenced me as an academic: I think I’m a custodian of deliberate recollection because I write history books and consciously retrieve memories of our human past, activate our historical consciousness. But the same notion became invaluable to me, personally, as I went through my memory bank and shared with my mother all my happiest memories of childhood with her. I think that helped my mother as well. “Aristotle is quite simply the most important intellectual who ever lived” We know that Aristotle used all sorts of aides-memoires . He had a painting of his mother of whom he had been very fond. He never forgot his wife, who died young. He had a bust of Socrates and a picture of a much-loved former student in the Lyceum too. He wrote a poem in memory of the ruler of Assos who had been a close friend. He used deliberate recollections to keep links with the past, even though he didn’t believe in any life after death. I think that is moving. The man who faced death full in the face, one of the very few people in Antiquity who did that, had this brave awareness that life is not only not a dress rehearsal, but it’s the sole performance and premiere rolled into one. I found him extraordinarily helpful in one of life’s most difficult situations. I think Aristotle is quite simply the most important intellectual who ever lived. He has foundational status in so many academic disciplines, as well as having invented a revolutionary human-centred ethics. Everybody deserves to get access to this marvellous thinker."