Aristotle’s universe

Viktoria Noel
October 25, 2017

Aristotle was an ancient Greek scientist and philosopher who lived in the 4th century BC. It would take much
effort to find anyone who has not heard of him, as his ideas and thoughts are relatively well-known, and he has
founded many vital branches of science such as taxonomy and contributed to others such as medicine. As one of
the greatest thinkers in human history, he was a polymath and had writings in nearly all subjects available during
his lifetime, including physics, biology, poetry, rhetoric and politics. He was a tutor to Alexander the Great, one
of the greatest strategic leaders of all time, and he also founded ”The Lyceum”, an institution for scientific and
philosophical inquiries. These demonstrate he did not only do natural philosophy for his own amusement, but also
cared about the perspectives of other people. His philosophy aims to explain an immense amount of concepts, like that
of his master’s, another prominent Greek philosopher, Plato. As opposed to Plato, who believed in a mathematical
universe, Aristotle’s approach was more qualitative and almost dismissive of mathematics. This makes one question
a few things about their own views, but more importantly, how did Aristotle see the world, and why did he see it
that way?
As his philosophy was aimed at the universal, Aristotle built up his thought processes carefully and tried to
address everything that could possibly be questioned. It is no wonder that he also had an explanation (in fact,
accepted a prevalent explanation at that time) about the composition of material objects. He supported the idea
that matter consists of the four basic elements: Fire, Air, Water and Earth. He also added a fifth element; the
Aether, a divine substance that makes up heavenly bodies. It may sound simplistic, but these four elements are not
terribly far from how we think about states of matter today. (Earth would roughly correspond to what we know as
solids, water would correspond to liquid, while air and fire would be the modern gas and plasma.) He argued that
the four earthly elements would inherently tend towards the centre of the Earth, which is their natural place, thus
giving a seemingly appropriate explanation as to why objects fall down when thrown up. He also believed that a
heavier object falls faster than a lighter object, which in a way sounds believable from everyday experience due to air
resistance. (This can be shown to be wrong by simple experiments). Such ideas mislead him into misinterpreting the
natural state of objects, which is in fact that objects in motion continue to move in the same direction, unless acted
upon by a force,[1] and that objects in free fall accelerate at the same rate independent of their mass. Unfortunately,
this is in no way intuitive to someone living on Earth and therefore Aristotle let himself be fooled by his own
principles, which, in this case could be summarised as if something is evident, it is also true.
Aristotle’s science is marked by the importance of qualitative science as opposed to a quantitative one. He believed
in learning about the world through empirically observing it, which we would refer to or think of as conducting an
experiment. However, his way of experimenting was quite different from our way, as Aristotle reduced the importance
of arithmetic and did not have a proper, quantitative understanding of concepts like mass or temperature. Is this
truly striking? Aristotle did not have a stopwatch nor a thermometer, without which it is nearly impossible to
conduct a fair scientific experiment in elementary physics. His thinking was beyond his era, and he could have
achieved more accurate conclusions about the natural world if it had been more technologically advanced. (Contrary
to some beliefs, Aristotle did not have access to the ancient particle accelerator on Mars.)[2] Despite that, he did
provide an account of observations with accuracy: he figured out that the Sun was greater in size than the Earth, and
that the other stars are much further away from the Earth than the Sun.[3] Therefore one can conclude that many
of Aristotle’s failings were due to the lack of experimental devices, resulting in a lack of quantitative understanding,
leading to a lack of accuracy.
Experiencing the world via senses was one of the cornerstones in Aristotle’s way of discovering the world around
himself. There is an element of contradiction here, since in some instances he did not examine his theories with
empirical observations (he noted that males have more teeth than females[4] , which would have been clearly very
easy to check), whereas in general he supported such acts. Hence some kind of a resolution is needed about these

1
slightly paradoxical views. He believed that rational humans experience the world truthfully, and that senses are
adequate for grasping individual facts about nature. This may sound plausible at first, but one must think carefully
since this would also lead to the fact that dissecting plants or examining something via a magnifying lens would not
be a truthful experience of nature. This may sound amusing to someone in the modern world, but can Aristotle be
blamed in any way for these views? He did not have any advanced scientific equipment which could have shown him
the world his eyes could not see (or any basic scientific equipment for that matter). Even the magnifying lens (which
we think of as very basic) was first mentioned in 424 BC[5] (a century before Aristotle’s lifetime), and therefore even
if he had had access to one, he could have easily concluded that lenses are not very useful, since the first versions
of any equipment are usually not of good quality. Therefore, a logical explanation could be that Aristotle had an
enormous faith in human senses and capabilities, downgrading equipment and deeming them to be unnecessary,
placing human judgement above all and making it indispensable.
Aristotle’s faith in his human logic and his habit of declaring seemingly obvious facts true culminated in being
an advocate of the geocentric model of the universe, like many of his contemporaries. He proposed that the uni-
verse consists of perpetually rotating, concentric crystalline spheres, in which the Sun, Moon, planets and stars are
embedded. These spheres are composed of Aether, an all-penetrating, unchanging material. It should not come as
a huge surprise that he held such Earth-centric views, since Aristotle placed an emphasis on experience via human
senses; therefore one can argue that for an observer on Earth, the Sun appears to be moving and not vice-versa.
Hence ”common sense” - one of his vital ”arguments” - dictates that the geocentric model is indeed the correct one.
It is also probable that Aristotle himself and many ancient Greeks felt the need to be at the centre of the universe
as human beings: they were polytheistic, and they equipped many of their Gods with human-like properties. If their
almighty Gods were human-like, living among humans (Mount Olympus), why wouldn’t they be at the centre of
everything? These ideas continued to define human thinking for more than a thousand years, especially during the
Dark Ages, since the crystalline spheres left physical space for Heaven, which the all-powerful Catholic Church could
embrace. (It is worth mentioning that the concept of the aether was widely accepted up until as late as the 19th
century, even though its physical properties are alarming now to people with very little scientific education.)
Even though he had a few shortcomings, Aristotle dared to think and had the ability to do so, which is the
essential part of being a scientist. The desire to discover the unknown and the curiosity to want to understand the
universe made him a great natural philosopher, and ultimately this is why we remember and appreciate him. In spite
of coming up with wrong ideas, his existence was essential in human history, even if it withheld scientific advances
for hundreds of years. Wrong ideas in science are not truly wrong, since they eventually lead us to more correct ideas
(sooner or later). It is worth noting that Aristotle had great advances in numerous scientific fields, his classification
of living things was fundamentally close to our modern taxonomy, and he also founded fields like logic. The ’heroes’
of the scientific revolution were very much like him; they dared to think, devised revolutionary ideas, and defied their
predecessor (Aristotle), in a similar way to how Aristotle did with his own predecessor, Plato.

0.1 References
[1] Newton’s 1st law

[2] Ancient particle accelerator on Mars

[3] Meteorology 1.8, trans. E.W. Webster, rev. J. Barnes.

[4] A history of animals by Aristotle

[5] Magnifying glass on Wikipedia