A Mouse in Wolf's Clothing (Part III)
Before the Christian conquest of Moorish Cordova in 1236 AD, the European world had been essentially ignorant of Aristotle and his logic. Men were no doubt logical before 1236, in that they always seemed to know the difference between “is” and “is not.” We might reasonably conclude, though, that Christian theologians before the liberation of Cordova felt no compulsion to take seriously any “pagan” arguments related to the nature of God.
We may also conclude that the theologians were not the only class of people awakened by Aristotle’s insights. We are forced to observe – because it’s true – that some of the awakened souls took up a different aspect of Aristotle than Aquinas did. The free thinkers – if we may call them that – were not so much in thrall to Aristotle’s philosophy – deduction from first principles – as they were to Aristotle’s other calling. Aristotle was not only a great philosopher; he was also a great scientist. He was the first man to group organic things by types. He did that by looking at them, describing them in detail, and taking note of their similarities. Of course, he made mistakes, but when you consider the superstitions and wild-ass schemes he had to overcome in order to think as clearly as he did, he stands out like a star in the east.
But as great as he was as both scientist and philosopher, Aristotle never made a consistently logical connection between his purely metaphysical studies and his work in science. He must occasionally have imagined that the objects he studied as a scientist (by looking at them) and the Prime Mover he studied as a metaphysician (purely by thinking) were connected by a chain of causes and effects, but he apparently never made a serious effort to spell out that connection. Reasoning metaphysically from the top down, he had compartmentalized his studies, giving everything a place in an ordained and unchanging hierarchy, a sort of divine ladder. He placed the human world higher than the world of the lower animals, the animals higher than plants, and plants higher than earth. He similarly located the four elements, earth, air, fire, and water, with fire being “up” and earth being “down.” If Aristotle had looked carefully (or seen better) he might have attributed the “upness” of fire and the “downness” of earth to physical causes. Instead, he placed them in an imaginary structure. Given his metaphysics, it would have been difficult for Aristotle to learn that objects in motion tend to remain in motion.
The awakened scientific minds of the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries began to suspect that meaningful relationships between air, earth, fire, and water could be learned by Aristotle’s “scientific method,” that is, by taking a look. The scientists of the Renaissance were not seeking merely to place things in a proper taxonomy. The “modern” lookers were seeking to understand the behavior of things. Why does smoke rise? Why do falling objects accelerate? And because mathematics had also been discovered almost whole in Cordova, the lookers began to wonder if the certainties of that science could be used to express and predict the behaviors they were seeing. They also began to think the unthinkable, that in places, the holy books might be wrong.
Some of Aquinas’s own religionists contributed to the scientific movement. The Bishop of Ockham, no stranger to “scholastic stink,” declared that, among alternative theories, the better is the one that explains observed data in the simplest way. The Bishop was actually trying to defend traditional faith against the Aristotelian “paganism” introduced by Aquinas, but Ockham’s Razor – as his ideas came to be called – served doubt just as easily as it served belief. The Ptolemaic theory – that the earth was at the center of the cosmos – had been accepted for 1600 years. Like most false theories, it started out simple, but became more and more complicated as new facts about the movements of heavenly bodies came to light. If Ptolemy’s theory had remained simple, Copernicus may never have been urged to seek and discover the truth.
But sometimes simplicity also delays discoveries. Two-thousand years before Copernicus, a Greek by the name of Aristarchus had come up with the right idea, that the sun, not the earth, was the center of the solar system. Another Greek had calculated the distance between the earth and the sun, making it out to be 83 million miles (only 10 million miles short of the truth.) That calculation proved to be the downfall of Aristarchus’s theory. If it were true that the sun was at the center, and the earth a mere orbiter, and if it were true that the earth was 83 million miles from the sun, then the diameter of the earth’s orbit around the sun would be 166 million miles. If those premises were all true, then “how come” all during the year the fixed stars always seemed in the same relationship to the earth? It would seem that if the same star were viewed from two different places 166 million miles apart, the stars should appear to have moved a great distance across the field of view. Greeks abandoned Aristarchus’s theory when they could not conceive that the stars were so far away from the earth that 166 million miles would be less than a fly speck. Copernicus simply accepted Aristarchus’s premises and concluded that the stars are vast distances away from us.Perhaps fearing for his immortal soul, Copernicus permitted his theory to be published only after his death (or shortly before if some stories can be trusted). Considering the vastness of the universe implied by his calculations, Copernicus must surely have wondered with the Psalmist, “What is man that Thou art mindful of him?”
[To be continued]
We may also conclude that the theologians were not the only class of people awakened by Aristotle’s insights. We are forced to observe – because it’s true – that some of the awakened souls took up a different aspect of Aristotle than Aquinas did. The free thinkers – if we may call them that – were not so much in thrall to Aristotle’s philosophy – deduction from first principles – as they were to Aristotle’s other calling. Aristotle was not only a great philosopher; he was also a great scientist. He was the first man to group organic things by types. He did that by looking at them, describing them in detail, and taking note of their similarities. Of course, he made mistakes, but when you consider the superstitions and wild-ass schemes he had to overcome in order to think as clearly as he did, he stands out like a star in the east.
But as great as he was as both scientist and philosopher, Aristotle never made a consistently logical connection between his purely metaphysical studies and his work in science. He must occasionally have imagined that the objects he studied as a scientist (by looking at them) and the Prime Mover he studied as a metaphysician (purely by thinking) were connected by a chain of causes and effects, but he apparently never made a serious effort to spell out that connection. Reasoning metaphysically from the top down, he had compartmentalized his studies, giving everything a place in an ordained and unchanging hierarchy, a sort of divine ladder. He placed the human world higher than the world of the lower animals, the animals higher than plants, and plants higher than earth. He similarly located the four elements, earth, air, fire, and water, with fire being “up” and earth being “down.” If Aristotle had looked carefully (or seen better) he might have attributed the “upness” of fire and the “downness” of earth to physical causes. Instead, he placed them in an imaginary structure. Given his metaphysics, it would have been difficult for Aristotle to learn that objects in motion tend to remain in motion.
The awakened scientific minds of the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries began to suspect that meaningful relationships between air, earth, fire, and water could be learned by Aristotle’s “scientific method,” that is, by taking a look. The scientists of the Renaissance were not seeking merely to place things in a proper taxonomy. The “modern” lookers were seeking to understand the behavior of things. Why does smoke rise? Why do falling objects accelerate? And because mathematics had also been discovered almost whole in Cordova, the lookers began to wonder if the certainties of that science could be used to express and predict the behaviors they were seeing. They also began to think the unthinkable, that in places, the holy books might be wrong.
Some of Aquinas’s own religionists contributed to the scientific movement. The Bishop of Ockham, no stranger to “scholastic stink,” declared that, among alternative theories, the better is the one that explains observed data in the simplest way. The Bishop was actually trying to defend traditional faith against the Aristotelian “paganism” introduced by Aquinas, but Ockham’s Razor – as his ideas came to be called – served doubt just as easily as it served belief. The Ptolemaic theory – that the earth was at the center of the cosmos – had been accepted for 1600 years. Like most false theories, it started out simple, but became more and more complicated as new facts about the movements of heavenly bodies came to light. If Ptolemy’s theory had remained simple, Copernicus may never have been urged to seek and discover the truth.
But sometimes simplicity also delays discoveries. Two-thousand years before Copernicus, a Greek by the name of Aristarchus had come up with the right idea, that the sun, not the earth, was the center of the solar system. Another Greek had calculated the distance between the earth and the sun, making it out to be 83 million miles (only 10 million miles short of the truth.) That calculation proved to be the downfall of Aristarchus’s theory. If it were true that the sun was at the center, and the earth a mere orbiter, and if it were true that the earth was 83 million miles from the sun, then the diameter of the earth’s orbit around the sun would be 166 million miles. If those premises were all true, then “how come” all during the year the fixed stars always seemed in the same relationship to the earth? It would seem that if the same star were viewed from two different places 166 million miles apart, the stars should appear to have moved a great distance across the field of view. Greeks abandoned Aristarchus’s theory when they could not conceive that the stars were so far away from the earth that 166 million miles would be less than a fly speck. Copernicus simply accepted Aristarchus’s premises and concluded that the stars are vast distances away from us.Perhaps fearing for his immortal soul, Copernicus permitted his theory to be published only after his death (or shortly before if some stories can be trusted). Considering the vastness of the universe implied by his calculations, Copernicus must surely have wondered with the Psalmist, “What is man that Thou art mindful of him?”
[To be continued]
posted by Benedict S. at 10:18 AM
2 Comments:
Anon Two: I clicked on your email addy and nothing popped up.I am using a shared computer,my addy is
robin@collegestudentmail.com
My name is Robin.
Sent you an email. That ought to establish the connection. I look forward to hearing from you, and learning from you.
F
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