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GEORGE GAYLORD SIMPSON, One of the great biologists of this century, began his book on The principles of Taxonomy (1961) with the statement that, "Any discussion should start with a clear understanding as to what is to be discussed." What will be discussed here is how the animal kingdom has been classified in the European-speaking world since the time of Aristotle, and how these classifications have affected our attitudes to animals today. I will start with the dominating role that Aristotle played in European civilization for an incredible length of time. Then I will go on to discuss how this dominance began to crack in the eighteenth century, and how it was finally broken apart in the nineteenth century, nearly 2000 years after Aristotle's death. Broken apart it may have been, yet Aristotle's philosophy is still with us today; it is the backcloth to our attitudes to animals, and, in fact, to the whole way we live and think, even if we do not agree with the Encyclopaedia Brittanica, which as late as 1875 claimed that many of Aristotle's works, "make an excellent curriculum for training young men and fitting them for the superior business of life."
Aristotle's Life and His Books on Natural History
Aristotle was born in 384 BC and died, aged 63, in 322 BC. Like Darwin, whose breadth of knowledge on natural history may have been almost comparable, Aristotle was described as always having "weak health."
After the death of his father in 367 BC, Aristotle, who was then 17 years old, went to live in Athens. There he spent the next twenty years studying under Plato. Plato died in 348 BC, aged 81, and then Aristotle went to live in Lesbos, where at the request of King Phillip of Macedon, he became tutor to Phillip's son, the young Alexander, later to become Alexander the Great. In 336 BC, Aristotle returned to Athens where he established his school in the garden Lyceum, teaching as he walked about, from which his school of philosophy came to be known as Peripatetic. Aristotle's books would probably have been written first on papyrus or parchment, and it has been claimed that they were the basis of the famous library in Alexandria which was later to...