Aristotle’s Empiricism: Experience and Mechanics in the 4th Century BC

Jean De Groot is Associate Professor in the School of Philosophy at The Catholic University of America. She received her Ph.D. in the History of Science from Harvard University, where she studied early mechanics and ancient optics. She studied Neo-Platonism at the University of Paris, attending the seminar of Pierre Hadot, and Aristotelian natural philosophy at the Warburg Institute and the Institute for Classical Studies in London. At Catholic University, she teaches the logic and natural philosophy of Aristotle and twentieth century philosophy.

Although Aristotle's philosophy is generally considered "empiricist" (in the sense that he believes the ultimate source of knowledge is perception), a number of contemporary scholars have denied that he held perception to be the ultimate source of knowledge or have claimed that his empiricism is at best naïve. In this highly original and important work, Jean De Groot defends Aristotle the empiricist, and she does so by examining the nature of his empiricism, and its connection to mathematics, through a detailed study and evaluation of his work on mechanics and its role in his natural philosophy (in the context of fourth century philosophy and science). Aristotle's Empiricism includes a fresh reading of many texts, from the Physics, De Caelo, De Motu Animalium, Metaphysics, Generation of Animals, Categories, and Posterior Analytics, and its author is to be applauded for enriching our understanding of Aristotle's thought through the careful use and analysis of two likely inauthentic works in the corpus Aristotelicum: the Mechanics, and Problemata XVI. New light is shed on such important Aristotelian concepts as dunamis, eidos, phainomena, empeiria, and automata, and on issues that have not received much attention (for example, Aristotle's conception of weight). This book should be of great interest to anyone working on Aristotle's natural philosophy. --Robert Mayhew Professor of Philosophy Seton Hall University