{"id":2968,"date":"2014-09-29T08:00:45","date_gmt":"2014-09-29T13:00:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/crywoof\/?p=2968"},"modified":"2014-09-27T14:53:04","modified_gmt":"2014-09-27T19:53:04","slug":"giving-aristotle-his-due","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/crywoof\/2014\/09\/giving-aristotle-his-due\/","title":{"rendered":"Giving Aristotle His Due"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

My fellow Patheos blogger Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry wrote an excellent article last week entitled \u201cHow our botched understanding of \u2018science\u2019 ruins everything.<\/a>\u201d I liked it very much, and generally agree with what he says; but I thought a little more could be said about Aristotle\u2019s role in the whole thing. PEG says,<\/p>\n

A little history: The first proto-scientist was the Greek intellectual Aristotle, who wrote many manuals of his observations of the natural world and who also was the first person to propose a systematic epistemology, i.e., a philosophy of what science is and how people should go about it. Aristotle\u2019s definition of science became famous in its Latin translation as: rerum cognoscere causas<\/em>, or, \u201cknowledge of the ultimate causes of things.\u201d For this, you can often see in manuals Aristotle described as the Father of Science.<\/p>\n

The problem with that is that it\u2019s absolutely not true. Aristotelian \u201cscience\u201d was a major setback for all of human civilization.<\/strong> For Aristotle, science started with empirical investigation and then used theoretical speculation to decide what things are caused by.<\/p>\n

What we now know as the \u201cscientific revolution\u201d was a repudiation of Aristotle: science, not as knowledge of the ultimate causes of things but as the production of reliable predictive rules through controlled experimentation.<\/p>\n

Galileo disproved Aristotle\u2019s \u201cdemonstration\u201d that heavier objects should fall faster than light ones by creating a subtle controlled experiment (contrary to legend, he did not simply drop two objects from the Tower of Pisa). What was so important about this Galileo Moment was not that Galileo was right and Aristotle wrong; what was so important was how Galileo proved Aristotle wrong: through experiment.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(My emphasis.)<\/p>\n

Now, this strikes me as a little harsh. Let me give some background, and explain why I say that. <\/p>\n

\"Elaborate<\/a> Aristotle was a philosopher; and as such he pursued \u201cscience\u201d, by which he meant \u201cknowledge\u201d, by the means available to him. In his day you had gentlemen who owned property, and artisans who produced furniture and other artifacts, and they were two separate groups; gentlemen didn\u2019t work with their hands. (Archimedes, who designed and built quite a few things quite some time later, was a brilliant outlier in that regard.) <\/p>\n

Like most intellectuals, he pursued the intellectual problems of his day; and one of them was the problem of \u201cchange\u201d: how is change possible. There were some on one side who said, \u201cAll change must be illusion. True change would involve something coming from nothing, and that\u2019s not possible.\u201d And then there were others who said, \u201cThere is only change. Stability is an illusion. You can\u2019t step into the same river twice.\u201d And they both had arguments to support their positions.<\/p>\n

And Aristotle looked around him, at the world of daily experience, and said, \u201cI see a lot of things changing. Change is clearly possible. But I also see things continuing over time. Clearly both change and stability are possible.\u201d And he sat down to work out how that could be. He started with what he saw around him; and then (as PEG notes) he tried to reason from that to the ultimate causes of what he saw around him. He wanted to understand completely.<\/p>\n

This pursuit of ultimate causes is part of what we now call \u201cphilosophy\u201d; and as anyone familiar with the intellectual history of the last two-thousand years can tell you it\u2019s very, very difficult: as witness the commonplace observation that there\u2019s no proposition so weird and so obviously wrong that some philosopher hasn\u2019t affirmed it. Some these days will even announce proudly that ultimate truth is impossible, that the self is an illusion, that all our actions are the deterministic result of physical processes\u2026and then they\u2019ll try to argue logically that this is case, and not see how ludicrous that is. <\/p>\n

But I digress.<\/p>\n

Here are the essential points:<\/p>\n