Armand Lerio gave a fascinating talk on Edge. According to him, it's not Darwin but I disagree. Like the premise of Steven Johnson's book Where do good ideas come from?, knowledge is cumulative and yes, Aristotle was the pioneer. I believe being a pioneer doesn't make one the greatest. Darwin's genius was in the world of abstract biology, he quantified biology with a greatest abstractions of all.
"So what do I find when I look at Aristotle? Well, for me the thing that fascinates me about Aristotle is his discussion of the soul. Now, I know that's a strange thing to say because when we talk about souls, we immediately think of the Judeo-Christian conception of the soul which is some strange non-physical entity that hangs above your head, or something, and survives you after death. That's not what Aristotle meant, not at all.
Aristotle thought that soul was central to life. And there's nothing vitalist about it, there is nothing metaphysical about it. It's hard to get a grip on what he meant, but it's a resolutely empirical kind of concept. What he meant was something like this: he says all living things have a soul, and when they die, the soul disappears. So none of that nonsense about the immortality of the soul. Plato thought souls were immortal, many people believed that souls were immortal, but Aristotle is clearly using soul in a very special, and technical, and new sense. It's the moving principle of life."
Armand Lerio's BBC documentary Aristotle Lagoon
"So what do I find when I look at Aristotle? Well, for me the thing that fascinates me about Aristotle is his discussion of the soul. Now, I know that's a strange thing to say because when we talk about souls, we immediately think of the Judeo-Christian conception of the soul which is some strange non-physical entity that hangs above your head, or something, and survives you after death. That's not what Aristotle meant, not at all.
Aristotle thought that soul was central to life. And there's nothing vitalist about it, there is nothing metaphysical about it. It's hard to get a grip on what he meant, but it's a resolutely empirical kind of concept. What he meant was something like this: he says all living things have a soul, and when they die, the soul disappears. So none of that nonsense about the immortality of the soul. Plato thought souls were immortal, many people believed that souls were immortal, but Aristotle is clearly using soul in a very special, and technical, and new sense. It's the moving principle of life."
Armand Lerio's BBC documentary Aristotle Lagoon
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