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Books > Humanities > Philosophy > Western philosophy
Aristotle is a rarity in the history of philosophy and science - he
is a towering figure in the history of both disciplines. Moreover,
he devoted a great deal of philosophical attention to the nature of
scientific knowledge. How then do his philosophical reflections on
scientific knowledge impact his actual scientific inquiries? In
this book James Lennox sets out to answer this question. He argues
that Aristotle has a richly normative view of scientific inquiry,
and that those norms are of two kinds: a general, question-guided
framework applicable to all scientific inquiries, and
domain-specific norms reflecting differences in the target of
inquiry and in the means of observation available to researchers.
To see these norms of inquiry in action, the second half of this
book examines Aristotle's investigations of animals, the soul,
material compounds, the motions of heavenly bodies, and
respiration.
Soliloquies is a work from Augustine's early life, shortly after
his conversion, in which are visible all the seeds contained in his
future writings. Here we see Augustine as a philosopher, a thinker
and a budding theologian.
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