Western Philosophy in a Nutshell: Part II

Plato and Aristotle turned philosophy away from science. Plato was explicitly wary of the young science, no doubt because his philosophy rejected the veracity of the senses, while, intuitively, science itself starts with observation. Aristotle tried to be the friend of science, and in some respects, deserves to be called the father of modern science proper. He invented induction, the prima facie logic of science, as well as the notion of a catalog full of taxonomic distinctions. Aristotle himself was a great biologist; no doubt his notion of science as a 'filling-out' of the categories of his catalog came from the idea that all of nature should be understood taxonomically, as a biologist sees it. Unfortunately, though Aristotles heart was in the right place, his mind wasn't. As it will turn out, trying to understand the world in terms of Aristotles sorts of categories will be inimical to modern science (though the notion of a category itself will not be so easily dispelled). One of the greatest struggles of modern science will be to wriggle out of the grip of Aristotelian thought....