Tuesday, January 31, 2017

Book- The Lagoon: How Aristotle Invented Science

Currently reading- The Lagoon: How Aristotle Invented Science by Armand Marie Leroi, Professor of Evolutionary Developmental Biology at Imperial College, London. 

"His ideas flow like a subterranean river through the history of our science, surfacing now and then as a spring with ideas that are apparently new but are, in fact, very old. 

This book is an exploration of the source :  the beautiful  scientific works that Aristotle wrote, and taught, at the Lyceum. Beautiful, but enigmatic too, for the very terms of his thoughts are so remote from us that they are hard to understand. He requires translation: not merely into English, but into the language of modern science. That, of course, is a perilous enterprise: the risk of misunderstanding him, of attributing to him ideas that he could not possible have had, is always there.

The perils are particularly great when the translator is a scientist. As a breed we make poor historians. We frankly lack the historical temper, the Rankean imperative to understand the past in its own right. Preoccupied with our own theories, we are inclined to see them in whatever we read" .

Promising start! Will keep you posted...

No comments:

Post a Comment