Aristotle's conception of science: The case of 'On Youth and Old Age, and Life and Death, and Respiration'

For my dissertation, I have concentrated on a lesser known text by Aristotle entitled On Youth and Old Age, and Life and Death, and Respiration (YOLDR) in the Parva Naturalia. The dissertation begins with a discussion of the history of the text, and the meaning of key words such as "breathing." I then present a Greek reference text and a translation with notes. In the remaining sections of the dissertation I provide four interpretive essays and a short conclusion.;In the first essay, "Aristotle and the Possibility of Empirical Science" I situate Aristotle's biological science within its ancient context, and look at YOLDR from the standpoint of Aristotle's logical and metaphysical writings. This forms the conceptual basis for the essays that follow.;In the second essay, "Aristotle on Analogy," I discuss the key word "analogia" in Aristotle and argue that Aristotle uses the word in a genuinely new way, and within scientific contexts it has a technical meaning indicating relationships of sameness across differing genera. This allows Aristotle to admit certain types of analogical reasoning into his scientific works without thereby introducing any lack of precision into those works.;In the third essay, I deal with the role of the theories of Aristotle's predecessors in YOLDR. Rather than taking these discussions as starting points for the evidence upon which Aristotle's system is based, I prefer to see these discussions as representing an attempt to delimit the range of possible explanations for the scientific inquiry.;In the fourth essay, I focus on the subject of life and death in Aristotle. Using the conclusions of the previous essays, I show what types of evidence Aristotle's theory relies on, and discuss how the formal, final, efficient, and material causes explain that evidence.;Finally, in the conclusion I discuss why Aristotle appears to take his explanation in YOLDR to be a model of scientific inquiry. In short, by studying YOLDR we can understand how Aristotle uses empirical evidence to generate genuinely new conclusions, and how this scientific theory allows for the possibility of scientific progress.