One of the many challenges facing those taking up Aristotle’s zoological writings, or more generally even such works as his “Physics,” is that of understanding the very different scope of his explorations and explanations from what such would be were they to have been undertaken by a modern writer. Indeed, even the very word “physics” (from the Greek φύσις) itself had a very different meaning to Aristotle and his contemporaries than how we use the word today.
It was Aristotle, in the first book of his “Nichomachean Ethics,” who wrote, “For one swallow does not make a summer, nor does one day; and so too one day, or a short time, does not make a man blessed and happy” to conclude his point that the cultivation of virtue takes prolonged effort and a great amount of time.
Aristotle. The very name itself conjures images of the prototype for all philosophers. Yet was he really the philosopher he is so commonly thought to have been or was he, in fact, the first systematic scientist?