John Freely quotes

The dominant concept in Aristotle's philosophy of nature is his notion of causation. ...The final cause states that each substance has an inherent purpose. Thus there must be a purpose or design in the acorn such that it always grows into an oak tree. This aspect of existence is indicated by the word entelechy; this means the purpose that guides things to develop in one way rather than another. (John Freely)

Anaxagoras of Clazomenae (0. 500-428 BC) postulated another element called the aether, which was in constant rotation and carried with it the celestial bodies. He also believed that there was a directing intelligence in nature that he called Nous which gives order to what otherwise would be a chaotic universe. By Nous he meant literally "the Mind of the Cosmos"... Anaxagoras was the last of the Ionian physicists.

John Freely

The atomic theory was not generally accepted in the time of Democritus, largely because of its deterministic character, for it allows no chance, choice, or free will.

John Freely

Parmenides believed that all Being is what he called the One, and denied absolutely the possibility of change. He believed that the cosmos is full (i. e., no void), uncreated, eternal, indestructible, unchangeable, immobile sphere of being, and all sensory evidence to the contrary is illusory. One Parmenidean fragment stated, "Either a thing is or it is not," meaning that creation and destruction is impossible.

John Freely

Empedocles tried to address the problem of change by saying that there is not one fundamental arche but four-earth, water, air, and fire-which generate all the material substances in nature by mixing together in various ways under the influence of forces he called Love and Strife.

John Freely

Newton's proof of the law of refraction is based on an erroneous notion that light travels faster in glass than in air, the same error that Descartes had made. This error stems from the fact that both of them thought that light was corpuscular in nature.

John Freely

Although many historians of the new millennium now take issue with the notion of a Scientific Revolution, it is generally agreed that Newton's work culminated the long development of European science, creating a synthesis that opened the way for the scientific culture of the modern age.

John Freely