This is what I am getting at in my original post. A very quick observation might yield a result of heavier objects falling faster than light ones but it wouldn’t take much to find some exceptions. But then again Aristotle was not an empiricist and the idea of testing ideas didn’t come about until about 1600.
I was really wondering what rational explanation he had for such a claim. He had rational explanations for other things such the perfect circles of orbits of celestial objects. It doesn’t seem enough to say that all things move to their natural place.
Maybe, as has been stated, he just didn’t think it was worth the thought.
The field of “Naive” or “Intuitive Physics” is an interesting one. For instance, the idea of “impetus” makes very good descriptive sense. It “feels” right. Or the idea that the path of an object thrown with a curving motion will be a curve: we know, from Newton (and photography) that it isn’t true, but it feels as if it should be true.
Some advances could only come about with advances in technology. Phlogiston only died when we worked out methods to weigh gases. Aristotle could not possibly have done this.
But some advances only required a bit of serious observation, and it is to Aristotle’s everlasting shame that he refused to do this. Would it actually have harmed him to count men’s and women’s teeth, rather than simply declaring that the numbers were different?
Such an experiment requires somewhat of a high place from which to drop the rocks. Perhaps if he had access to the Leaning Tower of Pisa (height 183 feet), he would have gotten the same result as Galileo. He may have done it from a much lesser height, from which the stones would appear to land at the same time. We don’t know, because he never revealed his methodology. But from a lesser height, “common sense” tells us that heavier objects fall faster . . . especially since Newton’s Law of Gravity wouldn’t have been discovered for over 2,000 years.
Njtt has shown the most knowledge about Aristotle in this thread, so its no surprise his defense of Aristotle is superior to the criticisms.
It makes me grateful Aristotle didn’t spend time counting teeth and the like lest it would have distracted from the really important work he did in helping to lay the foundations of rational thought.
To attempt an answer at the OP:
As the OP alludes to, Aristotle’s explanation of free-fall is tied with his elemental theory. All matter, in his system, was composed of various combinations of the elements of earth, water, air and fire. Each of these elements possess a “natural motion.” Earth’s natural motion is towards the centre of the universe; air, away from it. The direction and speed of an object in motion depends on the weight of that object (related to its proportion of earth) and the viscosity of the surrounding medium – Aristotle rejected the possibility of a vacuum.
The meat of Aristotle’s philosophy lies not in his data, which as was mentioned he usually got from other people, but in his very systematic attempt at organising knowledge in coherent systems. The idea that everything is made up of earth, wind, air and water may seem primitive. It’s easy to laugh at someone getting the numbers of legs on a fly wrong. However, it’s very much missing the forest for the trees. For instance, Aristotle’s notion that animal species can be grouped and classified directly informed the work of Linnaeus 2000 years later. That’s where his wisdom lies.
The details of his elemental theory were wrong, and while they seem consistent with casual, everyday observations they fail to pass more stringent tests. However, matter is made up of elements (just a few more than 4) and the properties of matter derive from the properties of these elements, which in turn derive from the properties of their particles. That is rational, coherent organisation of knowledge and the truth of this organisation derives from its concordance with the observable universe. If this seems obvious, it’s in no small part thanks to Aristotle.
I think I acknowledged that it may have been. I do not think the person who repeated it in this thread thought it was though.
Ok, I will rephrase.
Not only would Darwin not have discovered evolution by natural selection if there had been no Aristotle, nobody would have discovered evolution by natural selection if there had been no Aristotle. Nobody would have come even close. There would probably have been no recognizable science of biology or natural history by now, if ever.
We do not have modern science despite Aristotle, we have modern science, in large part, because of Aristotle. His work, and its availability to European scholars in the middle ages and Renaissance was one of the key necessary conditions that enabled the development of what we call science.
Of course it did not have to be Aristotle specifically. Somebody else might have done the necessary things, but in fact they didn’t and he did, and it is equally possible that nobody might have done them at all, and modern science would not exist. There was no inevitability that science would emerge around when it did (not long ago in the historical sweep of things), or that it, or anything much like it, would emerge anywhere, ever. If you think it was a good thing that it did, Aristotle is one of the first people you should be thanking.
All the historical evidence suggests that we would not have discovered natural selection (not to mention heliocentrism and gravity and quantum mechanics) nearly so soon – almost certainly not yet, and not for a long time to come – if it had not been for Aristotle. Contrary to the self-congratulatory myth that people who like science but know little of its history like to tell themselves, Aristotle’s work and influence did relatively little to retard the development of modern science but did a great deal to accelerate it.
Having an open mind and looking at the world around you is very, very far from being sufficient for the development of science. If you have an open mind, uncontaminated by superstitions or elaborate theories learned from your predecessors, and if you observe the world around you with open eyes, you will come up with the sort of crude and simplistic theories that the earliest Greek philosophers came up with, such that everything is really a form of water, or of air, or that the world floats in the air like a leaf on the wind, or that the land floats upon the ocean like a ship, so that earthquakes are like a ship being tossed about by storms. It took a couple of centuries, in the Greek world, to get from those crude beginnings to the sophisticated theories of Aristotle.
The development of sophisticated theories, of science (or philosophy) requires (amongst other things) a pre-existing theoretical structure to build upon and to advance from by constructive criticism. The more sophisticated that pre-existing theory is, the more sophisticated the new, improved version can be. Aristotle’s work provided that structure to build upon for post-Renaissance Europe, when modern science developed. Other cultures, otherwise more advanced, technologically, intellectually and economically, through most of history, such as those of China and India, never developed anything like modern science. One of the main reasons for that is that, unlike western European Christendom, they had no figure in their intellectual tradition equivalent to Aristotle, no-one who could provide not only the sophisticated theoretical base on which to build, the logical structures of thought with which to build it (Aristotle invented the study of logic, and pioneered the techniques by which fallacies are categorized and overcome), and the ideological belief that a naturalistic, theoretical account of the world was worth building.
The rediscovery of most of Aristotle’s work in Europe in around the 12th century brought the culture from a state where it had almost no clue how the natural world works, and very little interest in the matter, to a state in which it had a good deal of interest and at least some clue. Aristotle’s works had taught them that it was both possible and worthwhile to explain natural phenomena (and other things) rationally, without making constant appeals to the supernatural. By the 17th century, people working in this tradition, based on Aristotle, had gathered enough new information, had sufficiently honed the techniques of logical criticism that he taught (and technologies such as measurement techniques had improved far enough) that the cracks in his theories were starting to show, and some people started trying to develop better alternatives. They would not have been able to do so if they had not had the already highly complex and coherent theories of Aristotle to build upon and react against, and if they had not mastered Aristotelian techniques of logical criticism.
Unfortunately, in order to advance the acceptance of their new ideas), the innovative thinkers of the 17th century found it to their advantage to engage in a sort of propaganda war in which Aristotle’s reputation and influence were thoroughly traduced, and in which he and his influence were made the scapegoats for most of the resistance to the new ideas. Of course there is always resistance to radical new ideas. They would have been resisted anyway. But Aristotle, a long dead, pagan, with his works difficult and often boring (and, for Protestants, far to closely associated with Catholic theology) made a very handy scapegoat. Telling people they only thought the wrong thing because they had been bewitched by Aristotle and his reputation was a very effective way to get them to change their minds. A myth was created about Aristotle’s pernicious influence over the medieval mind, and this helped mightily in getting the new science widely accepted. (The closely related myth of the martyrdom of the saintly Galileo for the cause of science and truth was created in the same era for much the same purposes.)
Before very long, the new “scientific” thinkers had won this propaganda war very thoroughly. Unfortunately, however, what many people today think they know of Aristotle and his influence is largely based upon the myth that was created back then. The battle against “Aristotelianism” that needed to be fought back then was very decisively won some three hundred years ago. It is sad that so many people are still continuing to fight it, spreading ignorance (and misconceptions not only about history, but about the very nature of science) as they go.
What you say is true, but it is perhaps worth pointing out that neither the theory of “impetus” nor the phlogiston theory of combustion are due to Aristotle. They were both proposed as alternatives to his views, the first during the later middle ages and the second in the 17th century. They are intermediate stages between Aristotelian science and recognizably modern science.
Goddamnit, yes! It would have harmed him very much to personally check every trivial detail of the vast range of human knowledge that he wrote about. He would have had no chance of achieving the huge amount of much more important things that he did achieve. When I consider the works of Aristotle, especially with some knowledge of the vicissitudes of his life in unstable historical times, I am frankly flabbergasted, and hugely impressed by the sheer size and sweep of his achievement. I am very grateful that he did not waste his time counting fly’s legs and women’s teeth.
I don’t really disagree with much of what you say. Nevertheless, it was necessary to move past Aristotle. Even Aristotelian logic had to be replaced in the end.
Perhaps a propaganda war was necessary to motivate the new thinkers. Today, we can afford to think highly of Aristotle–though not so much to adopt any of his ideas–but science in the 17th century was in a fragile state. Aristotle may have been necessary to establish the foundation, but so many of his observations were wrong that everything was in doubt, and a clean slate was necessary. If besmirching the legacy of Aristotle accomplished this then so be it.
Aristotle didn’t reject the “four elements”–he added a fifth, as bogus as the rest.
Here’s some information about the theory of impetus, which was the struggling attempt of thinkers in the Middle Ages to move beyond Aristotle’s physics:
Galileo’s work might be thought of as the endpoint of this work.
There’s a book published this year by Mario Livio called Brilliant Blunders. It’s an attempt to correct the common view that major scientists always create theories with correct assumptions and accurate predictions. He shows that in many cases their assumptions aren’t quite correct and their predictions aren’t quite right. Because they have some things in their theories that are better and more useful than previous theories, other scientists are willing to accept the theories tentatively. The bad assumptions are fixed, sometimes by the scientist himself and sometimes by later scientists. The predictions of the theory slowly get more accurate.
Asimov was right.
There’s the story about some 15th century “scientists” engaged in what passed for a scientific debate in their era. They were trying to figure out how many teeth a horse had.
So one of the scientists produced a passage in Aristotle that said a horse has forty teeth. But another scientist countered with a passage from Augustine that said a horse has thirty-eight teeth. And the debate went on with the scientists citing passages from Plato and Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus and Celsus and Anselm and Bonaventure and arguing about which authority was right.
Finally, one young scientist got everyone’s attention and said, “I’ve got an idea. We all rode here. Why don’t we just go outside to where our horses are and count their teeth?”
The other scientists laughed at this suggestion. Clearly this idiot didn’t understand how science worked. Science was all about pure reason. It had nothing to do with sticking your fingers inside a horse’s mouth.
Now I can’t claim this story actually happened (although it’s been floating around for a long time). But it does accurately describe how people used to think about science. They saw it as a purely intellectual pursuit with no connection to experimentation or fact gathering. As far as they were concerned, the more you went grubbing around in the real world, the further you got from the mental plane where science happened.
Aristotle and the other natural philosophers didn’t invent science. They invented something people used in place of science and their work had to be cleared away before real science could get started.
Exactly!
Good thing we all know now that science isn’t about just going with what sounds best, it’s about rigorously making sure of actual facts.
Well, hmm. I guess posting on message boards doesn’t need the same rigor as science?
Here’s a discussion in which people are convinced that the Aristotle-Augustine-horse’s teeth story is false:
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=713157
The only point of contention is who made up the story.
I’m sure you’re joking but the answer is no, it doesn’t. I love history but history (like philosophy) isn’t science.
Just a point on Galileo. The question of objects falling was solved easily by him using rationality - no empiricism whatsoever, on of the vanishingly small principles of science which can be prove a priori.
He reasoned - get two balls of the same weight and size, demonstrate that they fall at the same rate now attached them together with a gossamer thread, increase the strength of the thread gradually until the two objects become one, double it’s weight. Does it suddenly change velocity at this point?
But the point is valid. It’s not so much that “science wasn’t about sticking your fingers in a horse’s mouth”; it was more about the fact that anything like working class “work” was beneath the intellectuals and aristocrats and scholars of the day. Thus, no matter how clever the spinning steam pot looked, in ancient Greece the deep thinkers of the day were not going to tinker with metalwork and fires to reproduce it or analyze it with experiments. Similarly, actually counting teeth, asking someone to open wide so you could poke inside like a common barber/dentist, or gape in the horse’s mouth like a stableboy, was beneath a lot of scholars.
Similarly, the apocryphal story of Semmelweiss and the discovery that doctors should wash their hands before delivering babies was the same prejudice - We are scholars and aristocrats of medicine, we do not have grubby dirt-covered hands like the common working man, don’t tell us we need to wash because we’re dirty. We can’t be, we’re scholars.
A lot of the practical side of chemistry and physics after the middle ages no doubt owed its origins to alchemy and the thought that “if I keep fiddling with this I will be filthy rich”. Money was an even better motivator than status.
The canonization of misconception is even more recent than you think, too. The Wright brothers built their own wind tunnel, only to find that a lot of what they’d read from learned scientists of the late 1800’s about the flight characteristics of wings - was completely wrong. Once they figured that out, they were well on the way to building a flyable glider.
I agree with njtt that criticizing Aristotle for setting science back is like criticizing him for setting logic back with his syllogisms.
Syllogistic logic is deeply, inherently flawed because it doesn’t treat existence as a special thing: it treats it as a property like any other property. But if it weren’t for syllogisms and deep discussions leading to “proofs” of the existence of nonexistent things, we’d have had a very hard time realizing what was missing. Aristotle got the ball rolling by positing a formal system that could study manipulations of propositions independent of the meanings of the propositions. Wow. As mentioned above, he did a similar thing for classification (and showed incredible perspicacity in grouping things together that didn’t seem similar without very careful observation.)
As a scientist, his biggest weakness was lack of empiricism. He was a very keen observer, and incredibly capable of drawing deep insights from his observations. But he did not take the next step, which is the basis of modern science, and say “What does this theory predict, which we wouldn’t otherwise suspect, and which we can test?”
I have an old but good book on the history of engineering, which posits that this was a failing of Greek intellectuals in general: the ideal was more important than the real. Of course, the Greek’s focus on the ideal was a very important step forward, but evidently one they took a bit too far. Even Archimedes considered his engineering work as a sidetrack; something he did for the benefit of the community (and no doubt his standing in it) but not important from a scholarly standpoint.
But it sure would be fun to take a time machine (and a Greek translator) back and have a few discussions with ol’ Ari. I’ve often pondered how many good demonstrations I could make, and whether I could have rallied sufficiently good arguments to get him to reconsider any of his errors. Most likely, he would have handily convinced everyone that I’m wrong. It takes much more than the correct answer to make a good argument.
Well, history can be studied scientifically. One can gather evidence, posit hypotheses, and even test them. Of course, as with historical sciences like paleology, the tests are often predictions of the kinds of things we’ll find if we keep looking in the record, which we wouldn’t expect to find otherwise. So, they take longer to resolve, and are harder to disprove.
That was the point I made above, before seeing your post.
That’s how the Greeks looked at science. The Romans didn’t really look at science much other than to study the Greeks, with a few notable exceptions like Galen. After that, it took quite a while to get back on track.
Yeah, that’s a great story, though the doctors were actually at the other end of the spectrum: they coveted their smocks covered with gore, as badges of experience. They didn’t want to be turned into laughing stocks, looking like newbies in the OR. What a travesty of “medicine”! Sigh. The Wright Bros example is a good one, too.
Again, I think it’s highly amusing that people are criticizing earlier generations for believing ‘what everybody knows’ and being insufficiently grounded in actual evidence, and are making that criticism via a story that they admit is completely apocryphal, while offering no other evidence.
I mean, for instance, anyone who actually looked into the real history of steam engines would notice that they were first used at coal mines, where there was an incredible abundance of fuel, at a time where there were shortages of labor (human and animal), and that they only came into widespread use at a time when steel was considerably more available and of significantly better quality and reliability than even the peak of Ancient Rome; they’d probably also notice that ancient Rome and Greece were not only completely without coal, but were pretty scarce of wood or any other fuel. Someone who thought about the evidence, and wasn’t committed to pointing and laughing at the stupid people back then, might think that it was a pretty rational decision to use very scarce fuel for cooking rather than using it for the very weak and inefficient steam engine that could be built with the metals available at the time.
That is more or less what I was saying. 17th century science was moving beyond (not “past”) aspects of Aristotle’s thought, and they did indeed need a propaganda war to succeed in getting their ideas accepted. We don’t need it now however. Nobody, today, is going to pull out their copy of Aristotle and say “But what you say about falling bodies and the Earth and the Sun is absurd. The Philosopher clearly states that heavier bodies fall faster than lighter ones, and that the Sun revolves round the Earth.” Not even the nuttiest creationist is making that sort of argument today. The need to slander and belittle Aristotle’s achievement and his enormous positive contribution to the development of modern science is long past, and people need to learn better.
And no, there was no clean slate either achieved or desired. The revolt was against some very specific aspects of Aristotle’s account of the physical world. Much of what Aristotle held still looks like common sense to people, including scientists, today, and are probably true. Aristotelian conceptions and ways of thinking still lie at the foundations of modern science, and played a large role in making possible.
And in the case of logic, it is highly misleading to say that Aristotelian logic had to be “replaced” as if it was thrown out wholesale and logicians started again from scratch. It was not replaced, it was refined, improved and (in some fairly minor respects) corrected. Most of Aristotle’s logical principles are still accepted by logicians today, and although there are a few circumstances where his principles and concepts are not entirely adequate, in many cases an argument can be analyzed perfectly adequately using logical principles entirely derived from, or at the very least fully consistent with, those of Aristotle.
The same pattern applies to the sciences. The difference is that logicians did not need to engage in propaganda war and create a false myth to advance their field, and are thus generally under no illusion about the fact that that their field would not exist without Aristotle, who discovered most of its fundamentals millennia ago. Many scientists and science groupies, however, are so deluded, as this thread demonstrates, and believe that Aristotle’s work and influence was antithetical to the development of science, rather than, as is actually the case, an essential foundation for it.
The passage from my post that you are responding to here was not alluding to the theory of the four elements at all, but to the “one element” theories of the earlier Milesian philosophers. The four-element theory, first advanced by Empedocles and adopted and further refined by Aristotle, was a distinct advance on these. Furthermore, although it is certainly one of those aspects of Aristotelian theory that modern science has moved beyond, they were far from being entirely “bogus”. Think of them as early attempts at an account of states of matter (solid, liquid, gas, plasma) rather than an account of chemical elements in the modern sense, and much of what was claimed about them will make a lot more sense. (Of course, the modern notion of chemical elements does ultimately trace back to the four-element theory too, which in fact conflated together issues which properly belong to what we now call chemistry with issues that now belong to the physics of states of matter. Four-element is one of the parts of the Aristotelian synthesis that later ages had to refine, criticize and move beyond, and yes, the fifth element Aristotle introduced didn’t really help, but to say so is just more quibbling at the margins.)
No, history and philosophy are not the same things as science, but they both can be pursued quite as rigorously and with quite as much respect for facts and evidence as science can, and are so pursued by professionals in the respective fields.