Abstract

Students reading Aristotle for the first time often face significant challenges. To complicate matters, if students who already have the habit of reading at a superficial level are asked to read large portions of Aristotle’s work, instructors may be reinforcing bad reading habits. This paper suggest that it is possible to insure many students learn how to read Aristotle for themselves provided students are assigned small, relatively accessible portions of text and initial discussion of these texts is geared toward empowering students to make sense of Aristotle for themselves. To this end, this paper has developed an exercise using modeling clay that helps students to learn some of the main points in Book I and II of Aristotle’s “Physics.”