Three Scientific Revolutions: How They Transformed Our Conceptions of Reality Read Free Page B

the seventeenth century following the syntheses of his philosophy with Christianity by Thomas Aquinas. Rejecting Plato’s methodology that relied on mathematics for attaining knowledge of the Forms because Aristotle thought it only applied to abstract magnitudes, not to the empirical world, he created the formalism of logic for deducing specific physical properties from empirical premises stating their genus and species derived from empirical inductions.
    There were three major factors explaining the greater acceptance of his philosophy. First, that his basis of knowledge relying on ordinary perceptions, as interpreted within his schema of the four causes, made it less abstract and idealistic and more empirically amenable. These included the “material cause” (the physical composition of objects eventuating in “prime matter)”; the “formal cause” delineating the “species, genus, and definitions to which it belonged”; the “efficient cause” that produces the interactions and changes in nature; and the “final cause” or “end of which” an object or process aims. This final cause involving the actualization of an inherent potentiality added to the appeal because it suited the general conception at the time that all events had an innate purpose.
    It was in The Prior Analytics that Aristotle created syllogistic logic as his methodology for proving the existence of specific physical properties and efficient and final causes by deducing them from inductive general premises specifying the particular genus, species, or definition of the object. As illustrated in his classic examples: one can prove that Socrates is mortal in the syllogism “All men are mortal, Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal” or demonstrating why, in contrast to the stars, the planets do not twinkle, from the premise “No proximate celestial body twinkles, the planets are such proximate bodies, therefore the planets do not twinkle.” He concluded that since the middle terms, such as ‘men’ and ‘proximate celestial body’ conjoining the premises provided the proof, they were not merely verbal connections but the actual causes of the conclusion stating that “in all our inquiries we are asking either whether there is a ‘middle’ or what the ‘middle’ is: for the ‘middle’ here is precisely the cause, and it is the cause that we seek in our inquiries.” 7
    Yet it is not just this formal methodology that accounted for Aristotle’s tremendous influence, but also the extraordinary range of his research covering nearly every known area of human experience at the time. This includes, in addition to his writings on ethics, politics, rhetoric, poetics, categories, and logic, works “On the Heavens,” “On the Soul,” “Metaphysics,” “Physics,” “Generation and Corruption,” “Memory, Dreams, and Prophesying,” along with the “History, Parts, and Generation of Animals.” I think it can be said that no other thinker ever matched Aristotle in the range and quality (for the time) of his extensive research. Charles Darwin was so impressed by his biological writings that he wrote: “Linnaeus and Cuvier have been my two gods [. . .] but they were mere school-boys compared to old Aristotle.” 8
    The third factor responsible for his immense influence was his geocentric cosmology that seemed most congruent with our ordinary observations with its distinction between the perfect celestial and imperfect terrestrial worlds involving their contrasting natures and motions: the celestial or heavenly bodies consisting of an aetherial substance and having inherent circular and uniform motions while the terrestrial world consisted of the four Empedoclean elements (earth, air, fire, and water), each with its inherent rectilinear motion upward or downward on the stationary