Seven Fighters against Thebes
Aristotle, on the other hand, argues that, since to understand a thing means to know its causes, it is clear that in order to understand nature we must discover its causes. And there are four fundamental causes in nature: material cause, formal cause, eff
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1. The Wrath of Aristotle
A
ristotle devoted the last book of his Metaphysics (Book XIV) to a polemic against his master, Plato. Usually, Aristotle’s style is scientifically emotionless, as if on purpose washed clean of any literary ornaments, so as to separate rational argumentation from any rhetoric. But in his polemic with Plato Aristotle allows his emotions to come to the surface. How otherwise is one to explain the following passage directed against Platonic doctrine:
All this is absurd, and conflicts both with itself and with probabilities, and we seem to see in it Simonides’ “long rigmarole”, for the long rigmarole comes into play, like those of slaves, when men have nothing sound to say.1
Aristotle mercilessly ridicules the Pythagorean doctrine on number as an arche of the world:
There are seven vowels, the scale consists of seven strings, the Pleiades are seven, at seven animals lose their teeth (at least some do, though some do not), and the champions who fought against Thebes were seven. It is not because the number is the kind of number it is, that the champions were seven or the Pleiades consists of seven stars? Surely, the champions were seven because there were seven gates or for some other reason, and the Pleiad we
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count as seven, as we count the Bear twelve, while other people count more stars in both.2
It was not difficult for Aristotle to find out weak points in the PythagoreanPlatonic doctrine, naively applied to various situations. The essential difference between Aristotle’s views and those of his former master was hidden in the very different conception of science. For Aristotle it was not important that there were seven champions fighting against Thebes but why there were seven champions. Scientific explanation of a phenomenon does not consist in finding its archetype in the world of ideas, but rather in identifying its cause. There were seven champions fighting against Thebes because this city had seven gates, and each champion was attacking one of them (or, perhaps, there was some other similar reason). We instinctively sympathize with this view of Aristotle and we are inclined to think that it is based on common sense. This is exactly the point. Aristotle’s philosophy of science is based on common sense but, as we shall see in the subsequent chapters, common sense proves often to be misleading as far as the interpretation of science is concerned.
2. Mathematics and Physics Aristotle was too good a thinker not to appreciate mathematics. In his writings one can find many attempts to use mathematics to describe some natural phenomena. The most interesting one is perhaps his attempt to mathematize motion (see the end of Book VII of Physics) and historians of mathematics usually feel obliged to devote a few pages to the mathematical contributions of his school. However, this does not change the fact that in Aristotle’s view the role of mathematics in physics is only subsidiary and, as it were, accidental. Moreover, he thinks that too much of mathematics leads to a deviati
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