ABSTRACT
One of the striking features in the history of the Peripatetic school is the decline in interest in natural philosophy after Theophrastus and Strato. That decline may not in itself be as puzzling as it seems at first sight; as John Glucker has argued, Aristotle’s school was the odd one out among Athenian philosophical schools in the early Hellenistic period, in concerning itself with natural philosophy as a subject of interest in its own right. For the Epicureans physics was explicitly a means to an ethical end; 2 for the Stoics the claim that nothing happens without a cause (SVF 2.973) was not so much a principle of scientific enquiry as a theological statement. When it lost its interest in natural philosophy and reverted to a more standard philosophical type, Aristotle’s school lost much of its distinctive raison d’être. 3
