{"id":35423,"date":"2026-07-05T12:42:41","date_gmt":"2026-07-05T17:42:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/?p=35423"},"modified":"2026-07-04T18:43:33","modified_gmt":"2026-07-04T23:43:33","slug":"book-report-aristotle-founder-of-scientific-philosophy-by-benjamin-farrington-1965","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2026\/07\/05\/book-report-aristotle-founder-of-scientific-philosophy-by-benjamin-farrington-1965\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Report: <i>Aristotle: Founder of Scientific Philosophy<\/i> by Benjamin Farrington (1965)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/bsgfx\/aristotlefounderofscientificphilosophy.jpg\" width=\"200\" alt=\"Book cover\" align=\"right\" hspace=\"4\">I have no idea where I got this book&#8211;I don&#8217;t see it listed on a Good Book Hunting post, and they date back to <a href=\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2007\/03\/25\/good-book-hunting-march-24-2007\/\" target=\"_new\">March 2007<\/a>.  The library markings indicate it came from the University City Library, so I definitely probably bought it in the St. Louis area before then.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s a book targeted to the youth, or that is the youth of 1965 who read books and might have to do a report or paper on Aristotle.  For school.  Without construction paper, glue sticks, and scissors.  Or, maybe, sometimes those kids were interested in the life of the mind.  The past is a different place, even for those of us who came along not <em>that<\/em> long after.<\/p>\n<p>The book is 109 pages, and it&#8217;s about half biography and then half digging into (as a survey or summary dig, which is not really digging, but let me sum up:) his thought and works&#8211;what we have of them as well as talking about some of the the mentions of other works of his which did not survive.  So, you know, not a bad survey, reminding me that although I listen to audiocourses about him (see <a href=\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2020\/10\/30\/on-the-ethics-of-aristotle-by-father-joseph-koterski-s-j-2001\/\" target=\"_new\"><em>The Ethics of Aristotle<\/em><\/a>, <em><a href=\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2021\/09\/16\/on-aristotle-read-by-charlton-heston-1990\/\" target=\"_new\">Aristotle<\/a><\/em>, and <em><a href=\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2026\/02\/06\/on-great-authors-of-the-western-literary-tradition-2nd-edition-parts-1-and-2-by-professor-elizabeth-vandiver-2004\/\" target=\"_new\">Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition, 2nd Edition<\/a><\/em>), I&#8217;m not sure I have a lot of Aristotle source material available in the Nogglestead stacks.  Certainly not multiple copies like I have of <a href=\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2026\/06\/16\/as-so-often-happens-at-nogglestead-2\/\" target=\"_new\">Alexander Pope<\/a> (believe it or not, I have found <em>another<\/em> collection of Pope in the past two weeks) or Augustine.  I&#8217;ll have to look for them.<\/p>\n<p>Also, given that the other titles in this series deal with Charles Darwin and Mohammed, yeah, the set is probably left in nature.  But you don&#8217;t get the straight-up Marxism of the comic books in the For Beginners series (<em><a href=\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2018\/07\/25\/book-report-einstein-for-beginners-by-joseph-schwartz-and-michael-mcguinness-1979\/\" target=\"_new\">Einstein for Beginners<\/a><\/em>, <em><a href=\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2020\/04\/26\/book-report-sartre-for-beginners-by-donald-d-palmer-1995\/\" target=\"_new\">Sartre for Beginners<\/a><\/em>) or the modern <a href=\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2026\/06\/15\/book-report-everyday-stoicism-by-gareth-southwell-2024\/\" target=\"_new\">Taylor-Swift-Loving British Pseudo-Stoic books<\/a>.  They were more even-handed in those days.  Maybe even interested in knowledge for its own sake instead of as a tool to use to lever themselves to power (or to keep from the young so they, the They, could lever themselves to Marxist power).  <\/p>\n<p>At any rate, it is a decent primer akin to the aforementioned single-tape <em>Aristotle<\/em> (read by Charlton Heston) as an introduction.  And it has a good bibliography for additional reading.  For me, I need to look for anything in the wild, but where I go cheap book hunting these days, Aristotle is not.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I have no idea where I got this book&#8211;I don&#8217;t see it listed on a Good Book Hunting post, and they date back to March 2007. The library markings indicate it came from the University City Library, so I definitely probably bought it in the St. Louis area before then. It&#8217;s a book targeted to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3334,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35423","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report","category-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35423","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3334"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35423"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35423\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35425,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35423\/revisions\/35425"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35423"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35423"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35423"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}