Yes, Aristotle most certainly climbed on the shoulders of countless "giants" before him. The last rung of the ladder, his own teachers at Plato's Academy are ev

Yes, Aristotle most certainly climbed on the shoulders of countless "giants" before him. The last rung of the ladder, his own teachers at Plato's Academy are even known. So, inate talent combined with a ready pool of prior knowledge, basic enabling information technology and favorable economic conditions certainly make all his polymathy and conceptual breakthroughs plausible. But the mystery thickens again if you consider the multiple centuries of the Hellenistic and Roman eras that did not continue the pattern, even though economic conditions and the number of educated individuals kept growing. Let alone the subsequent extremely long "dark ages" where economic conditions did deteriorate but pressumably there were enough courts and monasteries to feed a few pioneering scientists. Today we take the scientific outlook and methodology as sort of de-facto winner, but there seems to be an element of cultural choice and possibly other factors that modulate the mindshare that ends up cultivating it.