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Aristotle drew on a preceding Greek tradition of inquiry which he saw as dating back to Thales of Miletus (circa 620-546 BCE) more than 150 years previously. He distinguished between a group of thinkers which he called 'inquirers into nature' as distinct from poetical 'myth-makers'. The latter, such as the Greek poet Hesiod (circa 750-650 BCE) explained the world primarily by positing divinities who behaved like super-powerful versions of human beings, with human-like genealogies and conflicts. These gods intervened in all aspects of the world, rendering it beyond mere human understanding. By contrast, 'inquirers into nature' or ''physiologoi'' saw the world as an ordered natural arrangement, or '''Kosmos''' potentially comprehensible to the human mind. Plato and Aristotle used the term '''philosophy''' to refer to this latter line of inquiry. Beginning in the eighteenth century this group of thinkers, who were active before, or contemporaneously with Socrates came to be referred to as the '''pre-Socratics'''. [[CiteRef::Curd (2016)]]
The pre-Socratics developed a variety of ideas about the nature of reality and cosmology. The '''Pythagorean tradition''', founded in the sixth century BCE by Phythagoras of Samos, maintained that mathematical order and harmony is the universe was structured and ordered mathematicallyreality that underlies nature. [[CiteRef::Curd (2016)]] [[CiteRef::Losee (2001)p. 14-19]] Leucippus (5th century BCE) and Democritus (460-370 BCE) were pre-Socratic '''atomists''' (although they were actually contemporaneous with Socrates). They maintained that all things are composed of assemblages of invisibly small, solid, indivisible particles called atoms. These atoms exist within a void space and interact mechanically by contact. All things and processes in the world, they supposed, could be explained in terms of the arrangements, movements, and mechanical interactions of the atoms. Although it may seem that there are colours, tastes, and smells, in reality there are only atoms and void. Democritus distinguished two kinds of knowledge, through the senses, and through the understanding. Reason, applied to sensory experience in the proper way, yielded atomistic understanding. [[CiteRef::Curd (2016)]][[CiteRef::Editors of Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy Democritus (2018)]][[CiteRef::Editors of Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy Leucippus (2018)]][[CiteRef::Losee (2001) p. 24-25]]
The ideas about scientific change knowledge which most directly set the context for Aristotle's work where those of his teacher Plato.
As one of the first writers on method, Aristotle’s ideas on method are found mostly in a body of texts known as Organon. The most important of these ideas to philosophy of science come from Analytica Priora and Analytica Posteriora. In the former, Aristotle discusses deduction, while in the latter, he discusses induction. Out of the two, Analytica Priora forms the basis of most systems of logic found up until the late 19th century, while Analytica Posteriora forms the basis of empirical science to around the same date.[[CiteRef::Falcon (2015)]] The philosophies in Analytica Priora worked particularly well in taxonomical frameworks within biology. Beyond mentioned works, the Organon comprises 4 other works, Categoriae, Topica, De Sophisticis Elenchis, and De Interpretatione).
