It is not an exaggeration to say that there has never been an individual as influential on human civilization as Aristotle. To detail the impact of his thought would be to detail the history of European thought since his time. By the Renaissance, Aristotle's ideas had been considered received truth for some time; in Europe, there was no other authority, other than the Church, that received such unquestioning acceptance. The ideas and terminology used by him and his students at the Lyceum would become the framework for all further philosophic and scientific work.

The very idea of a scientific method is thoroughly Aristotelian. Before his work, science as it is known today did not exist. No one was collecting empirical data and reasoning about it. He introduced the idea that data is primary and theory must come afterward and developed the framework for theorizing and categorizing data. The biological work he did in the fourth century BC was to remain precisely how biology was conceived up until the nineteenth century AD.

Philosophically, Aristotle was even more influential. His development of categorical logic as a tool for scientific reasoning and a method of scientific taxonomy worked so well that it was thought complete until the nineteenth century AD He introduced the very ideas of genus and species, matter and form, essence and accident, energy and potentiality, final causes, virtue ethics, and the first scientifically justified monotheism. Without these ideas, the Church would not have developed as it did, nor would have science or philosophy or Western culture. . .

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