On Generation and Corruption , , also known as
On Coming to Be and Passing Away) is a treatise by
AristotleAristotle was a Greek philosopher, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. He wrote on many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology.Together with Plato and Socrates , Aristotle is one of...
. Like many of his texts, it is both scientific and philosophic (although not necessarily scientific in the modern sense). The philosophy, though, is essentially
empiricalIn philosophy, empiricism is a theory of knowledge which asserts that knowledge arises from sense experience. Empiricism is one of several competing views about how we know "things," part of the branch of philosophy called epistemology, or "the Theory of Knowledge"...
; as in
allThe Corpus Aristotelicum is the collection of Aristotle's works that have survived from antiquity through Medieval manuscript transmission. These texts, as opposed to Aristotle's lost works, are technical philosophical treatises from within Aristotle's school...
Aristotle's works, the deductions made about the unexperienced and unobservable are based on observations and real experiences.
The question raised at the beginning of the text builds on an idea from Aristotle's earlier work
The PhysicsPhysics is an important work by Aristotle. It is a collection of treatises or lessons that deal with the most general principles of moving things, both living and non-living, rather than physical theories or investigations of the particular contents of the universe...
.
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On Generation and Corruption , , also known as
On Coming to Be and Passing Away) is a treatise by
AristotleAristotle was a Greek philosopher, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. He wrote on many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology.Together with Plato and Socrates , Aristotle is one of...
. Like many of his texts, it is both scientific and philosophic (although not necessarily scientific in the modern sense). The philosophy, though, is essentially
empiricalIn philosophy, empiricism is a theory of knowledge which asserts that knowledge arises from sense experience. Empiricism is one of several competing views about how we know "things," part of the branch of philosophy called epistemology, or "the Theory of Knowledge"...
; as in
allThe Corpus Aristotelicum is the collection of Aristotle's works that have survived from antiquity through Medieval manuscript transmission. These texts, as opposed to Aristotle's lost works, are technical philosophical treatises from within Aristotle's school...
Aristotle's works, the deductions made about the unexperienced and unobservable are based on observations and real experiences.
The question raised at the beginning of the text builds on an idea from Aristotle's earlier work
The PhysicsPhysics is an important work by Aristotle. It is a collection of treatises or lessons that deal with the most general principles of moving things, both living and non-living, rather than physical theories or investigations of the particular contents of the universe...
. Namely, whether things come into being through causes, through some prime material, or whether everything is generated purely through "alteration."
From this important work Aristotle gives us two of his most remembered contributions. First, the
Four CausesIn Aristotle's Metaphysics, there are four main causes of change in nature: the material cause, the formal cause, the efficient cause, and the final cause....
and also the
Four ElementsFour elements may refer to:* Classical elements, such as air, fire, earth and water* 4 Elements, an album by Chronic Future* Group 4 element, one of the chemical elements in Group 4 of the periodic table...
(earth, wind, fire and water). He uses these four elements to provide an explanation for the theories of other Greeks concerning
atomsAtomism is a natural philosophy developed by Leucippus and his student Democritus in the fifth century BC. These atomists theorized that the natural world consists of two fundamental and opposite, indivisible bodies - atoms and void...
, an idea Aristotle considered absurd.