Volume 24, Issue 47, April 2016
Thinking Nature Today
Gaetano Albergo
Pages 27-42
I Recenti studi sulla biologia di Aristotele come contributo per una critica all’interpretazione dei Naturphilosophen
The work realized by Aristotle in his investigations on the natural world, in particular the biological world, has as backdrop two theoretical assumptions: the ability to organize phainomena in such a dialectically well structured, although at the same time open and flexible way, as the living reality that is studied, and the opportunity to offer to the theoretical knowledge, of axiomatic nature, not only information and tools for the understanding of individual species, but also methods, and its logic, which, if properly pursued, will lead to scientific knowledge. This, understood in the sense of causal knowledge, cannot be pursued in a purely formal way. Our aim is to demonstrate why Naturphilosophen did not get the Aristotelian lesson, up to refuse his teleologism because considered metaphysically regressive.