6 ideas and puzzles from Aristotle, each explained in a minute and credited to the original work. Free on Savvy.
Imagine a hungry donkey placed exactly midway between two identical piles of hay, with no reason to prefer one over the other. If choice must be driven by a reason, the donkey can …
— Aristotle, On the Heavens (De Caelo)
In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle argued moral virtue sits as a mean between excess and deficiency — courage, for instance, is the midpoint between cowardice and recklessness. W…
— Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
Zeno imagined three equal rows of bodies: one stationary, and two others moving past it and each other at equal speed in opposite directions. In the time it takes a moving row to p…
— Aristotle (describing Zeno of Elea), Physics, Book VI
In the Physics, Aristotle argued that truly understanding why something exists requires four separate answers: what it's made of (material cause), what form or design it takes (for…
— Aristotle, Physics
Around 600 BCE, Thales of Miletus broke from myth and proposed the first purely naturalistic theory of the cosmos: that a single material principle, water, underlies and generates …
— Aristotle, Metaphysics (testimony on Thales)
Aristotle noticed a trap: if 'there will be a sea battle tomorrow' is already true or false today, then the battle's happening or not seems fixed in advance, making every future ev…
— Aristotle, De Interpretatione