Aristotle, one of the originals
We place Aristotle here, not because he exactly belongs here, but because he was the foundation of Averroes’ work, and a discussion of one somewhat leads into a discussion of the other. However, Aristotle was a member of a great club of philosophers of which he was neither the founder nor leader. He was a student of Plato, who was in turn a protégé of Socrates, and collectively, these three men represent the acme of ancient Greek philosophy.
It would be pointless to delve into any discussion of the nature of this philosophy here, but of what Aristotle gave to the world, and to where his creativity wandered, Aristotle is best known for his views on virtuousness. This, of course, is what made him popular with the Catholic Church, and when the suppression of knowledge stopped being practical, the Church attempted to own all knowledge by seconding one of its most famous proprietors. Aristotle advocated a strong personal and moral constitution, and the exercise of personal moderation in both thought and action.
In his life, he was offered the opportunity to do a great deal of thinking and writing while he tutored the young Alexander, upon a commission from Philip of Macedonia. One can imagine that his pupil was impatient of study, and subsequently not around much. And then later, during Alexander’s long absence from Macedonia, Aristotle remained at liberty to think more, and to write more, and his output was prodigious.
One of the frustrating things about trying to quantify polymathy is that it contains no single element, but an abundance of just about everything. Aristotle’s writing, however, reveal a man with an insatiable interest in, and a desire to master every discipline that he encountered. Technical treatise on everything from nature to astronomy are punctuated by frequent long and abstract speculations of a very general nature. In fact, if one was to pinpoint one area that commanded his interest most, it would certainly be the natural world. One-quarter of his surviving works, for example, are on the subject of biology.
According to Posterior Analytics, one of the better-known work of Aristotle: ‘A science can be set out as an axiomatic system in which necessary first principles lead by inexorable deductive inferences to all of the truths about the subject matter of the science.’
Logic and deductive reasoning, those two great enablers of scientific knowledge, can be attributed to Aristotle as much as to Plato and Socrates. Once armed with basic those tools of scholarship, the advent of our modern world of liberty and technology was simply a matter of time.