What was Aristotles scientific contribution?
Aristotle’s approach to science differed from Plato’s. He agreed that the highest human faculty was reason, and its supreme activity was contemplation. However, in addition to studying what he called “first philosophy” – metaphysics and mathematics, the things Plato had worked on, Aristotle thought it also very important to study “second philosophy”: the world around us, from physics and mechanics to biology. Perhaps being raised in the house of a physician had given him an interest in living things. What he achieved in those years in Athens was to begin a school of organized scientific inquiry on a scale far exceeding anything that had gone before. He first clearly defined what was scientific knowledge, and why it should be sought. In other words, he single-handedly invented science as the collective, organized enterprise it is today. Plato’s Academy had the equivalent of a university mathematics department, Aristotle had the first science department, truly excellent in biology, but,
