The Philosophy of

Aristotle
BY NASRULLAH MAMBROL ON APRIL
25, 2019 • ( 1 )

Aristotle (384–322 bce) was born in Stagira. His father, Nicomachus, was a doctor at the court of
Macedonia. The profession of medicine may well have influenced Aristotle’s interests, and his
association with Macedon was lifelong: in 343 he became tutor to Alexander the Great. After
Alexander’s death in 323, the political climate in Athens turned anti-Macedonian, and Aristotle
went into voluntary exile. He died shortly thereafter, in 322. At the age of 17, Aristotle went to
Athens and studied at Plato’s Academy for twenty years, until the death of Plato in 348/7. Plato
was succeeded as head of the Academy by his nephew Speusippus (c.407–339). Aristotle left
Athens, traveling with another Academic, Xenocrates (c.396–314), who later succeeded
Speusippus. There is no solid reason for supposing that Aristotle was disaffected with the
Academy, or ever expected to become its head; both Speusippus and Xenocrates were senior to
him. It was during this period that Aristotle acted as tutor to Alexander; he also married Pythias,
adopted daughter of one of Aristotle’s fellow students at the Academy, Hermeias of Atarneus.
Aristotle returned to Athens in 335 and founded his own “school,” the Lyceum or the
“peripatetic school” (either because Aristotle and others lectured while walking or because the
grounds had noted walkways).
 Francesco Redi (Italian Physician, Poet)
1626-1697
Francesco Redi Demographics:
 Name - Francesco Redi (see image)
 Born - February 18, 1626 (Arezzo)
 Died - March 1, 1697 (Pisa)
 Occupation - Physician
Nationality - Italian
Important Facts:
 Initially took a degree in medicine.
 He then served as a tutor of the Colonna family in Rome for ~ 5
years.
 Following this he moved to Florence, in 1654, to act as personal
physician to the Grand dukes Ferdinand II & Cosimo III.
 He was one of the first members of the Arcadia.
 In 1666 he taught in the Studio at Florence, as lettore publico di
lingua toscana.
 His experiments, published in 1668 as Esperienze Intorno alla
Generazione degl'Insetti (Experiments on the Generation of
Insects) were some of the first evidence refuting "spontaneous
generation" (Aristotelian abiogenesis).
 Prior to these experiments it was thought that maggots formed
naturally from rotting meat.
 Redi, in 1676, wrote about important documents in his
possession which pertained to the origins of eye glass invention and use.
 A Mars crater is named after him.
Experiments on the Generation of Insects:
 6 jars were divided in 2 groups of 3.
 The 1st jar of each group contained an unknown object.
 The 2nd jar of each group contained a dead fish.
 The 3rd jar of each group contained a raw chunk of veal.
 The 1st group of three jars had the tops covered with fine gauze, allowing only air in.
 The other 3 of jars were left open.
 Maggots appeared in the open jars, which flies had been able to land on.
 The gauze-covered jars had no maggots.
 When dead flies were put in sealed jars with dead animals or veal, no maggots appeared.
 When living flies were put in similar sealed jars, maggots appeared.
Other Skills:
 Poet - renowned for writing Bacchus in Tuscany.
Works:
 "Consulti medici"
 "Esperienze intorno alla generazione degl' insetti"
 "Osservazioni intorno alle vipere"
 "Arianna Inferma"
 "Bacco in Toscana"
 "Lettere"
 John Needham
John Turberville Needham, more commonly known as John Needham, was an English
naturalist and Roman Catholic cleric. He was the first clergyman to be elected to the Royal
Society of London.

He is also noted for his theory of spontaneous generation and the scientific evidence he had
presented to support it.
Early Life:
Born in London on 10 September in 1713, John Turbeville Needham was a Roman Catholic
priest. He was one of four children to John Needham, a barrister and Martha Lucas. His
father died when John was a child and young John became a Franciscan. John studied at the
English College at Douai in northern France from 1722 to 1736. He was ordained in 1738,
however he preferred to spend his time as a teacher and tutor.

Career Path:
From 1736 Needham taught at a college in Cambrai, France and in 1740 he moved to
England as an assistant master to a Catholic school near at Twyford, Winchester. He spent a
short time teaching in Lisbon in 1744, returning to England in 1745 for health reasons. His
microscopic observations of blighted wheat while he was in Twyford and his investigations into the organs of the squid while in
Lisbon, were the subjects of his first works.
In 1747 he was elected to the Royal Society of London.
Needham became a tutor to several young catholic men on their “grand tours” from 1751 to 1767 and his travels included
France, Switzerland and Italy.
In 1767 he retired to St Gregory’s College in Paris and became director of the Brussels Academy (Académie impériale et royale
des Sciences et Belles-Lettres de Bruxelles) in 1773, a position he held until 1780.

Contributions and Achievements:

Needham’s microscopic observations were published in “An Account of some New Microscopical Discoveries” in 1745 and
further studies were recorded in detail his work “Observations upon the generation, composition and decomposition of animal
and vegetable substances” in 1749. Needham established from his observations that micro-organisms do not grow from eggs
and proposed a theory of spontaneous generation whereby living organisms develop from non-living matter at the microscopic
level. He carried out microscopic observations with the comte de Buffon in 1748. Needham later conducted a learned
correspondence with naturalist Charles Bonnet and biologist Lazzaro Spallanzani on the issue of generation.

He faced harsh criticism from Voltaire, because he had tried to establish that tiny microscopic animals, or “anguilles” in his own
words, can be developed spontaneously by natural forces in a sealed container. Voltaire, who firmly believed in pre-existing
germs, thought that Needham’s ideas could possibly create much controversy as they appeared to endorse materialism and
atheism.

Needham also made important contributions to botany and explained the mechanics of pollen.

Later Life and Death:

John Needham died on December 30, 1781. He was 68 years old.
 Lazzaro Spallanzani biography
Date of birth : 1729-01-12
Date of death : 1799-02-11
Birthplace : Scandiano, Italy
Nationality : Italian
Category : Arhitecture and Engineering
Last modified : 2011-09-19
Credited as : naturalist, biology, author

The Italian naturalist Lazzaro Spallanzani was one of the

founders of modern experimental biology.

Lazzaro Spallanzani was born in Scandiano on Jan. 12, 1729. He entered a Jesuit college at the age of 15 and later studied law at
Bologna, but very early he became interested in physics and developed an overall knowledge of nature. He took orders in 1755
and is therefore often referred to as the Abbe Spallanzani. That year he began to teach logic, metaphysics, and classics at
Reggio. In 1757 he was appointed to the chair of mathematics and physics at the university there; later he taught at the
University of Modena.

In 1765 Spallanzani began publishing his numerous scientific works. Most of them are motivated by a philosophy of science
which nowadays could be called reductionist, namely, a belief that most phenomena are reducible to physical and chemical
explanation. In 1769 he accepted the chair of natural history at the University of Pavia, remaining at this post until his death on
Feb. 11, 1799.

Spallanzani is well known for one of his major works on microscopical observation that concerned the systems of spontaneous
generation, and was an attempt to disprove J.T. Needham's and the Comte de Buffon's theory in support of spontaneous
generation. Although his experimentation was exact, and he did prove that some organisms can live in a vacuum for many days
(anaerobiosis), his theory was not comprehensive enough. Thus Spallanzani did not succeed in establishing in a final way that
the theory of spontaneous generation was wrong. He also did important work in embryology. He was an ovarian
preformationist, and through his experiments with artificial fertilization using filtered semen he pointed out the need for the
physical contact between the spermatozoa and the ovule. He thus disproved the fertilizing power of the seminal fluid. Yet he
did not fully understand the process, and in plants he described fertilization as being effected by the spermatic vapor of the
pollen and not by any of the visible parts of it. In his studies on regeneration of animals he practically established the modern
lines of animal morphology.
 Today’s Hero of Progress is Louis
Pasteur, a 19th century French scientist,
who is commonly dubbed the “father of
microbiology.” Pasteur is renowned for
developing the germ theory of disease,
creating the process of pasteurization
(which prevents the spoiling of many
food products), and for changing the
way that scientists create vaccines.

His Path to Science

Louis Pasteur was born to a poor
Catholic family in Jura, France, on
December 27, 1827. In 1839, Pasteur enrolled at the Royal College of Besançon, the same city in
which he had attended secondary school. Within a year, Pasteur had earned his Bachelor of Letters.
In 1842, he graduated with a degree in science. A year later, he started studying at the École Normale
Supérieure, a graduate school in Paris. In 1848, Pasteur was appointed professor of chemistry at the
University of Strasbourg
In Strasbourg, Pasteur met his wife Marie. The pair married in 1849 and had five children. However,
only two of those children survived to adulthood, while the rest died of typhoid. It is said that the
death of his three children motivated Pasteur to study infections and vaccinations.

Making History
In 1856, when he was the dean of the faculty of sciences at the University of Lille, Pasteur started to
study fermentation to help a local wine manufacturer overcome the problem of alcohol souring.
Before Pasteur, people believed in a doctrine of “spontaneous generation,” which held that life
spontaneously appeared from non-living matter. That faulty reasoning was used to explain why food
spoiled and how infections developed.
 To disprove the theory of spontaneous generation, Pasteur “exposed freshly boiled broth to air in
vessels that contained a filter to stop all particles passing through to the growth medium, and even
with no filter at all, with air being admitted via a long tortuous tube that would not pass dust
particles. Nothing grew in the broths: therefore the living organisms that grew in such broths came
from outside, as spores on dust, rather than being generated within the broth.”
Furthermore, Pasteur found that heating of beverages to a temperature ranging from 140F to 212F
(60°C-100°C) killed the bacteria in those liquids. His first successful test was completed on April 20,
1862, and the process he developed came to be known as pasteurization. Pasteur patented his
discovery in 1865.
Pasteur then turned his attention to the development of vaccines. He and his colleagues injected
chickens with cultured cholera microbes. After many experiments, the team discovered that if the
birds were injected with live cholera microbes after they had already been injected with a weaker
strain of cholera, the chickens would remain healthy.
 Pasteur thus became the first scientist to use artificially weakened viruses as vaccines. Pasteur then
went on to develop a vaccine for anthrax in 1881. In 1885, Pasteur successfully developed a rabies
vaccine.