3 - Aristotle

Summary

The philosophical and scientific researches of Aristotle (384–322 b.c.) are of astonishing scope. His work as a scientist touched on almost every aspect of the natural world, though his most important studies were in biology. As a philosopher he made minutely detailed analyses of our ways of thinking and speaking. He made important contributions to most of the sciences that existed in his time, but though he reflected on their methods and conceptual resources, he produced no original work, so far as we know, in either mathematics or harmonics. His significance in the history of Greek musicology lies elsewhere, and rests on four principal grounds.

First, there are his studies of the role of music in a civilised community. These appear mainly in the Politics (excerpts will be found in GMW vol. 1, ch. 11). Secondly, his works contain analyses of various terms used in the description of music, and some brief references to different forms of harmonic science and the concepts they employ, embedded as examples in investigations of much wider scope (see 3.1–3.10). More substantially, among his scientific and conceptual researches in biology and psychology are discussions of the physical nature, the production and the perception of sound (see 3.11–3.17). Here he analyses the processes involved in a sound's creation and transmission, and the physical basis of perceived differences between sounds, with special attention to differences of pitch.