ABSTRACT
Thought experiment depends on some ideas of empirical experimentation. According to Aristotle's conception, empirical science divides labour between the collection of the relevant facts, on the one hand, and the scientific explanation of the facts, on the other. The notion of thought experiments seems to preserve what is basic for the early modern idea of empirical experimentation. The absence of a conception of thought experimentation in Aristotle's works is not a matter of mere contingency. Aristotle, unlike early modern experimenters, does not attach much methodological weight to empirical experimentation as a means to the discovery of facts. Notoriously, his natural science relies on the observation of what is there and plain to see for the philosophically acute, yet instrumentally unaided, observer rather than on artificial extraction of hidden facts. Indeed, his views on the status of scientific data in empirical sciences seem to be at odds with our more engineer-like attitude towards nature.
