Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyof philosophy.net.

Today's episode, This gland is your gland, Cartesian Science.

The most obvious way to make a huge impact on science is to make discoveries.

This is what we expect from scientists today, honoring their

breakthroughs with Nobel Prizes and the like. But it isn't the only way. Though Aristotle did make

some genuine discoveries, especially concerning animal anatomy, most of his scientific beliefs were

false. He denied that light travels, thought the earth doesn't move, and that flies and worms generate

spontaneously. One especially perplexing case is his claim that women have fewer teeth than men,

which seems like it would have been easy for him to check. In fairness, it's been suggested

that maybe he did check, and that ancient women often had missing teeth due to calcium

deficiencies. Yet, his various misconceptions did not stop him from becoming the most influential

scientist who has ever lived, at least as measured by longevity. Nearly two millennia after Aristotle's

death, his views still held sway, and resistance to them provoked cultural and institutional backlash.

Of course, this long shelf life was not due to individual claims about teeth, light,

worms, or even the motion of the earth. Aristotle's power lay in the paradigm he devised for doing

science. It combined an empirical methodology with broadly applicable

conceptual distinctions, like potentiality versus actuality, matter versus form, and substance

versus accident. What Aristotle provided was not individual discoveries, but a whole way of seeing the

world. Though Descartes would not have appreciated the comparison,

he was much like Aristotle in this respect.

He made genuinely important discoveries in mathematics,

and also had scientific advances to his name.

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