Strato of Lampsacus

Strato of Lampsacus (Greek Στράτων; * to 340 BC; † around 268 BC) was a Greek philosopher.

Life

Straton initiated after the death of his predecessor Theophrastus from 288/287 which established by Aristotle Athens Lyceum ( Peripatetic ) and was tutor to the future King Ptolemy II Philadelphon in Alexandria. In contrast to most contemporary philosophers, in which the ethics in the center of interest was, he dealt mainly with physical issues, earning him the nickname " the physicist " earned. From him more than 40 writings have survived, but only a few fragments or reports are received. Among his pupils was, inter alia, Aristarchus of Samos.

Work

Straton strove to improve and extend the works of Aristotle and Theophrastus on various topics. His most significant contributions made ​​Straton for movement theory and the question of the basic physical structure of the world. So he realized that accelerate falling body while Aristotle was still assumed to be unaccelerated motion; so that Straton approached already the recognized of Galileo and Newton laws of free fall, without being able to prevail with his views against the authority of the master Aristotle. Straton led - probably under the influence of Epicurus - the particle theory of matter in the natural philosophy of the Peripatetics, and represented a particle theory of light. Straton also taught that all bodies contain a different depending on the material level of emptiness (vacuum), from which would result in the respective weight differences. As a demonstration of the existence of the vacuum - that he represented against Aristotle - he carried out experiments.

He is also rumored to have represented an atheistic philosophy of nature, the conceptual nature as a mechanism in the transcendent influences such deities played no role. Therefore, he rejected philosophical guidelines for the science and metaphysical and theological explanations of natural phenomena. Methodologically, he represented a strict empiricism, ie observation, experiment, and simplicity of the theory, which refers only to the "how" of natural processes and not on a hidden behind things "why." Straton thus performs central characteristics of modern scientific understanding in advance. The naturalists of the 17th and 18th centuries, representing a liberated from metaphysics science, were therefore called " Stratoniker ".

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