ABSTRACT

Aristotle’s successor as head of the Lyceum was his clever pupil, whom Aristotle named Theophrastus from the divine way he argued. But he did not argue in the same way as Aristotle, especially about final causes. Since his enquiry into causes was what Aristotle thought made his own natural philosophy so much better than that of his predecessors, and since it was all closely connected to Aristotle’s notion of nature, we must ask how Theophrastus saw causes, nature and historia.