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Opposition to Galileo was scientific, not just religious

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Re: Opposition to Galileo was scientific, not just religious

#171

Post by gumby »

olavk wrote: post #161
gumby wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aristotle was always such an obvious idiot ("women have fewer teeth than men" is my favorite nonsense) I have always+ wondered why anyone paid attention to him, ever. + Well since I was a teenager anyway

Have you actually read any Aristotle? I don't think anybody could read Aristotle and come away with the impression he is an idiot. Obviously he is far from modern levels of scientific knowledge, but that doesn't make him an idiot. He invented multiple branches of science.

It's been 35 years but yes I read and studied Aristotle (& Plato, Epictetus, Sophocles, Euripides, Homer..) in school, in Greek. I still find Platonic constructions useful while I consider, for example Aristotle's moral models simplistic at best and much less insightful than those of his predecessors such as Epicetus). I'm well aware that the moral models of different societies rarely translate well into other societies (not just Bronze Age to present day, but also present day to present day) but I remain unimpressed by Aristotle.

I'm not saying I would particularly like Plato as a person, or that I even agree with him on many things, but I find him a wide ranging thinker with much to offer the present.

I think Aristotle got a lot of credibility by being seized upon by some early christian thinkers. The world would be in a much better shape had they leant on some of Sophocles' lost plays instead :-).

Re: Opposition to Galileo was scientific, not just religious

#172

Post by gumby »

thisrod wrote: post #166
gumby wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aristotle was always such an obvious idiot ("women have fewer teeth than men" is my favorite nonsense) I have always+ wondered why anyone paid attention to him, ever. + Well since I was a teenager anyway

Maybe he was an idiot, but everyone who lived in the previous 4 billion years was a worse idiot. In the land of the blind and all that.

He was preceded by giants -- he was at best an ordinary human.

Fortunately Aristotle doesn't care what I think.

Re: Opposition to Galileo was scientific, not just religious

#173

Post by olavk »

gumby wrote: post #171
olavk wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you actually read any Aristotle? I don't think anybody could read Aristotle and come away with the impression he is an idiot. Obviously he is far from modern levels of scientific knowledge, but that doesn't make him an idiot. He invented multiple branches of science.

It's been 35 years but yes I read and studied Aristotle (& Plato, Epictetus, Sophocles, Euripides, Homer..) in school, in Greek. I still find Platonic constructions useful while I consider, for example Aristotle's moral models simplistic at best and much less insightful than those of his predecessors such as Epicetus). I'm well aware that the moral models of different societies rarely translate well into other societ…

So, what makes you consider Aristotle an idiot?

Re: Opposition to Galileo was scientific, not just religious

#175

Post by Bluestrike2 »

gumby wrote: post #160
baldfat wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also worth mentioning: geocentric view was based on Aristotle and not scriptures. My undergraduate was in Theology and graduate degree was Historical Theology. Back then the dominate foundations of Theology in the Church was Plato vs Aristotle and one would consider themselves to be in the camp of one or the other and well Aristotle kind of won the popular vote back in those times. Here is the article on Artistole's…

Aristotle was always such an obvious idiot ("women have fewer teeth than men" is my favorite nonsense) I have always+ wondered why anyone paid attention to him, ever. + Well since I was a teenager anyway

Interestingly enough, while Aristotle's conclusion was in fact wrong, it was rather scientific for its time. That passage in particular gets mocked a lot, but if you look at the source, you'll note that the conclusion was based on physical observation, even though the accounts he relied upon were demonstrably false:

"Males have more teeth than females in the case of men, sheep, goats, and swine; in the case of other animals observations have not yet been made: but the more teeth they have the more long-lived are they, as a rule, while those are short-lived in proportion that have teeth fewer in number and thinly set."[0]

He got it wrong, but the way he went about getting it wrong is significant.

The Aristotelian method might not have been the scientific method as it's understood today, but there's little doubt that it was [i]a[/i] scientific method. Truthfully, it's difficult to overstate just how significant an impact Aristotle's writings, and other Greek philosophy (particularly metaphysics), had on the later development of empiricism and the scientific tradition. I doubt that there was a single early modern philosopher (those who birthed what we'd consider modern science) who wasn't extremely well-read of Aristotle.

Aristotle must be read within his historical context. Both in terms of what he was responding to (Plato, various pre-Socratric philosophers, and his contemporaries), as well as what came after. His shadow is a long one, felt even to this day. Early modern philosophers, medieval Islamic scientists, and the others who helped lay the groundwork for the scientific method were all influenced by the Greeks, even when they disagreed.

0. Aristotle, History of Animals, Bk. II, Pt. 3. http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/history_anim.2.ii.html

Re: Opposition to Galileo was scientific, not just religious

#176

Post by roel_v »

Bluestrike2 wrote: post #175
gumby wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aristotle was always such an obvious idiot ("women have fewer teeth than men" is my favorite nonsense) I have always+ wondered why anyone paid attention to him, ever. + Well since I was a teenager anyway

Interestingly enough, while Aristotle's conclusion was in fact wrong, it was rather scientific for its time. That passage in particular gets mocked a lot, but if you look at the source, you'll note that the conclusion was based on physical observation, even though the accounts he relied upon were demonstrably false: "Males have more teeth than females in the case of men, sheep, goats, and swine; in the case of other…

He got it wrong, but the way he went about getting it wrong is significant.

I'm probably just dense - how did he go about getting it wrong?

Re: Opposition to Galileo was scientific, not just religious

#177

Post by ashirus »

acqq wrote: post #121
c3534l wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one is saying that the bible has a physically accurate account of the world, only that the church at the time based their understanding of the physical universe primarily on Aristotle, and I don't think you'll find many historians arguing otherwise on account of us having writings from them arguing and justifying their positions.

Absolutely not true that "the church at the time based their understanding of the physical universe primarily on Aristotle." We talk about the religious view. For the religious view the Bible was actually relevant for the Church: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firmament " Augustine wrote that too much learning had been expended on the nature of the firmament.[9] "We may understand this name as given to indicate not it…

That section of the Jewish Encyclopaedia is itself unsourced and, to the best of my knowledge in Jewish cosmology, was not actually Jewish view of the cosmos.

Re: Opposition to Galileo was scientific, not just religious

#178

Post by countingteeth »

roel_v wrote: post #176
Bluestrike2 wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interestingly enough, while Aristotle's conclusion was in fact wrong, it was rather scientific for its time. That passage in particular gets mocked a lot, but if you look at the source, you'll note that the conclusion was based on physical observation, even though the accounts he relied upon were demonstrably false: "Males have more teeth than females in the case of men, sheep, goats, and swine; in the case of other…

He got it wrong, but the way he went about getting it wrong is significant. I'm probably just dense - how did he go about getting it wrong?

Observation: counting teeth. This was before modern dentistry.

Re: Opposition to Galileo was scientific, not just religious

#179

Post by caf »

smallnamespace wrote: post #112

Stupid question: given General Relativity, and in particular that all reference frames are equally valid , including rotating and accelerating ones, in what sense is heliocentrism more 'true' than geocentrism? E.g. you can pick a geocentric reference frame and all the math works out (albeit you'd need to define large fictitious forces, etc., but again, they are only 'fictitious' from the perspective of a different re…

When you're dealing with the motion of objects close to the Earth, a geocentric reference frame is entirely appropriate.

However, when examining the motion of the planets a heliocentric reference frame is "more correct" in that the motion of the planets in that reference frame suggests a deeper truth: that the primary influence on the motion of the planets is somehow the Sun.

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