Aristotelian Science, Part 1

I'm a student of history, and I'm posting this primarily to help me sort some thoughts out about some things that I've wondered about for many years. I've had questions nagging just beneath the surface, because of things I've heard regarding Aristotle. I would read a book, and somewhere in there it would say that Galileo or Kepler or Copernicus had broken free of Aristotelian science, and in so doing defied the church authoriites and risked imprisonment or death.

You invariably read things like this when you pick up a magazine article or watch a History channel program about the middle ages. The Church was this monolithic, anti-scientific, dogmatic beast that was ready to pounce on anyone who would challenge the Bible. Well, being the skeptic that I am, I gradually came to wonder just how much the church actually persecuted scientists. I would read Christian apologetic literature that would seem to suggest otherwise, that the church actually promoted science. But then, if that were the case, why did they try Galileo? And if it was an issue of church vs. science, how did Aristotle fit into all this? I mean, Aristotle was a Greek. What did he have to do with the Bible? He certainly wasn't a Christian--he lived before Christ. So while it's one thing to say the church gave scientists trouble for defying the Bible, how did Aristotelian philosophy enter into the picture?

I found out that that these are very complicated questions. And, I only have part of the answers, and I'm still digging for more information on the whole story. So, I'll start tonight by telling you a few things that I know so far, and a few areas in which I hope to explore along the way. I expect that this will take several weeks if not months to do, and it will probably benefit me more than it will you, but then, if you find it interesting to watch a fellow struggle and squirm and dig for answers, then maybe this will be your cup of tea. Anyway, enough said, let me begin by telling you what I know about Aristotle.

Aristotle was, as you probably have heard, a student of Plato, who was a student of Socrates. Now Plato is regarded by many as the greatest philosopher of them all, the person who established philosophy as a rigorous discipline. One guy, whose name I'll fill in when I can, said that all of western philosophy is really only a series of footnotes to Plato. That's high praise there. And Aristotle? Those great experts who don't think Plato was the best generally think that Aristotle was the greatest of all philosophers. And of course Plato was an enormous influence on Aristotle, although Aristotle broke away from Plato in many ways. If it seems right, I'll include a comparison of the two great thinkers some other evening.

Aristotle was a naturalist of sorts. It turns out he was the son of a physician, and some think this is how he got his fascination for the human body as well as plant and animal life. So, his writings are filled with information and thoughts on living things. Aristotle also taught about physics and astronomy, and he developed a cosmology that was relied on throughout ancient times and the middle ages until around the seventeenth century.

Aristotle's cosmology was based on his physics, which relied on a few basic ideas. First, there were four elements; earth, air, fire and water (actually five, but we'll get to that). Second, these elements had natural motions, and they moved in accordance with those natural tendencies, or potentialities. That is to say that earth, the heaviest, fell downward toward the center of the universe. Water, being heavy but lighter than earth, fell down and settled in low spots in the earth. Air, of course, settled above the earth, and fire, being the lightest, would rise up through the air. These elements were "seeking" their place in the universe, so to speak.

Now like I said, the universe had a single point as its center, and because all the earth moved toward that, the earth formed a sphere around that center. In other words, Aristotle thought the world was a sphere. In addition the entire universe was spherical, and that's where the heavenly bodies come in. Aristotle taught that there were a large number of glass-like transparent spheres above the earth, surrounding the earth. On these spheres were the planets, the sun, and the stars, all of which moved in spherical orbits around the earth.

This is where that fifth element, called the "quintessence," comes in. Whatever this is, it's very light, lighter than the fire, because it's way up there. And, whatever it is, it's solid enough that it formed regular planets and stars. The quintessance is found only in the "superlunar" spheres, from the moon on out, and there are different laws of motion in play out there than on earth. In the superlunar, bodies moved in spherical motions. That was the motion of the heavens, spherical. And, the quintessence was the only substance out there--there was no earth, air, fire or water above the earth's atmosphere.

On earth, motion took several forms. There was the natural motion of things. Earth things moved toward the center, as did water. Aristotle spoke of actualities and potentialities in motion. Thus, as something falls, it is seeking its potential of being at the center of the universe. And there are things that Aristotle thought of as motion that we might not think, such as the growth of a plant or animal. A child, for instance, moves toward adulthood. It is seeking its potential.

It's important to state somewhere along the way here that Aristotle didn't "discover" this stuff in the way a modern scientist would discover, say, a new star. Instead, Aristotle simply made things up that matched what he observed, using pure reason and logic. Aristotle was a philosopher and not a scientist, and when philosophers mused about things in nature, it was referred to as natural philosophy. In fact the word "scientist" wasn't actually coined until the 19th century--people who did science were essentially known as natural philosophers up to that time. This is important in undestanding Aristotle, because all these things he taught were based on his own observations of nature. He watched the sky, the plants and animals, and he just kind of figured things out.

Amazingly he was able to construct a system of thought that held up for centuries, primarily because it adequately explained nature and because it was a complete and interlocking system of thought. In fact, Aristotle was one of the few people, perhaps the only person, who wrote on practically every single subject that was studied in his time. Aristotle was a very astute observer and empirical thinker who was able to arrive at some pretty reliable teachings, even though he turned out to be wrong when his ideas were compared with what we know now.

This is getting long, so I'm going to break it off, and finish this off on my next post. I think I'm about halfway through what I want to say about Aristotle. Essentially this post is just to lay some groundwork. In future posts I'll explore ways in which Aristotle influenced future generations, which will lead to an exploration of the church and it's view of science, and then move on toward some of the events that led to the eventual rejection of the teachings of Aristotle in the seventeent century, which is where we're headed on a very slow cruise.

Bear with me. If you're bored to tears, don't fret. There's plenty of other things to read on the Internet.

-Jay-

---

All-new Yahoo! Mail - Fire up a more powerful email and get things done faster.