Greeks modeled physical motion on biological life rather than mechanical machines

Evidence

To the Greek, attempting to give a scientific account of motion, the purely mechanical view hardly suggested itself, except in the case of a few men of genius such as Democritus and Archimedes. Two sets of phenomena seemed important: the movements of animals, and the movements of the heavenly bodies. … To the Greek, it seemed more natural to assimilate apparently lifeless motions to those of animals. A child still distinguishes live animals from other things by the fact that they can move of themselves; to many Greeks, and especially to Aristotle, this peculiarity suggested itself as the basis of a general theory of physics. — Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy, 866

Categorization

• XREF: XREF traces the historical divergence between ancient teleological physics and modern mechanistic biology/physics. — connects to: Galileos principle of inertia replaced the Aristotelian distinction between natural motions. — Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy, 1961; Contemporary computation’s narrowness stems from its severance from older biological communication systems. — , The Braided Reading EPUB: 5-Year…, 1522; Popular resistance to relativity stems from treating motion as external to being (+1 more)
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy, 866

Broader Connections

• Galileos principle of inertia replaced the Aristotelian distinction between natural motions. #contradicts (0.60) — Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy, 1961