ABSTRACT
These remarks concerning method in natural philosophy have been extremely influential through the ages, and are famously obscure. Their obscurity has been in a way an asset to the history of philosophy. Later philosophers have been able to read into Aristotle's words whatever precise and elaborate theory of our knowledge of the principles of nature seemed to them best, even when their constructions go far beyond what Aristotle himself had in mind. As with Plato's statements concerning the theory of ideas and Wittgenstein's on language-games, the frustrating inadequacy of what Aristotle says is a source of philosophical fertility, for his remarks are deeply suggestive without being especially constraining.
