Letters | 31 May 2008

Seek the reason why

Sir: I greatly enjoyed Peter Jones’s excellent article on Ancient Roman globalisation (‘For real globalisation, look at Ancient Rome’, 24 May). I respectfully disagree with one paragraph, however, in which he describes Greek philosophers as having ‘proceeded from hypotheses, which they never tested’. It is true, of course, that the Greeks were incapable of testing certain things, such as the nature of the elemental constituents of matter. Nevertheless, in what was within their power to observe, they often proceeded, not from hypotheses, but from the empirical study of natures. The pre-eminent example of this approach is the extant work of Aristotle. About 25 per cent of his work consists of zoological writings for which he is honoured, along with his colleague Theophrastus, as the inventor of biology. Furthermore, Aristotle explicitly establishes as a general principle of scientific inquiry that first we must seek the fact, then we seek the reason why (Posterior Analytics, II, 1, 89b 29-31).