Aristotle and the Science of Nature: Unity without Uniformity by Andrea Falcon

Abstract

478 BOOK REVIEWS Second Vatican Council was an exercise in ecclesial self-consciousness that enabled the Church to relate to every dimension of human experience. The Church as communion rooted in Trinitarian life and made visible in the Eucharist, the Church as a network of relationships that begin with the spousal nature of the human body itself, works always to unite all people to one another in Christ, the redeemer who sacrificed himself for the entire human race. Pope John Paul's thinking strove to move beyond the intellectual and other divisions that can paralyze the Church and cause her death through the abandonment of her universal mission. Academics especially are right to be wary of a unity achieved by running roughshod over those distinctions that are necessary to understand the truth of things and to safeguard freedom. Nonetheless, Pope John Paul's synthetic vision traced the unity of the books of Scripture as a whole, the unity of body and soul in the human person, the unity of Christ and the Church in ecclesial communion, the unity of man and woman in marriage in order to understand the truth of things and to safeguard freedom. This volume is a tribute to him and to Cardinal Dulles as well as to all who contributed to it. Archdiocese ofChicago Chicago, Illinois FRANCIS CARDINAL GEORGE, 0.M.I. Aristotle and the Science of Nature: Unity without Uniformity. By ANDREA FALCON. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. xvii+ 139. $75.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-521-85439-3. The division of the natural world into two radically different kinds of physical substance-one often called "aether" and the other called "ponderable," or sometimes just "ordinary," matter-barely more than a century ago was not uncommon among natural scientists. The rudiments of the idea trace back to Aristotle, although for him these two substances were rigorously localized in the two principal regions of the cosmos, and thereby would acquire appropriate names: the celestial bodies and sublunary bodies. Copernicus and Galileo quickly did away with the isolation of the two substances, so aether's proponents found themselves positing it as much above as below. Yet after the acceptance of the theory of relativity, the idea of aether fell out of style among mainstream natural scientists, and ever since the very notion that nature should be thought to be so "bifurcated" has been considered to be a scandalous weakness in the Aristotelian philosophy of nature. Even among modern-day Thomists this bifurcation has often been held up as an instance of something that Aristotle simply got wrong, and so as a sign that the Stagirite's philosophy of nature is now of only historical BOOK REVIEWS 479 interest; we realistic Thomists (the story goes) should focus our interest on more relevant parts of Aristotle's corpus. Science has shown us that he was on the wrong track, so we must defer to it on these matters. There are, however, at least two problems with this approach: (1) few modern Thomists have tried to keep up with where modern science is going, so we are ignorant of what science thinks on these matters; and (2) even fewer Thomists have made careful study of the more obsolete parts of Aristotle's natural philosophy where he begins to spell out in detail his thoughts on the basic structure of the cosmos, so they do not know what they are dismissing. Andrea Falcon's Aristotle and the Science of Nature addresses the latter problem and is a superb introduction not merely to the text and substance of Aristotle's De Caelo, especially as it bears on this division of nature into the sublunary and the heavenly, but also to the scholarly work on the subject in the last thirty years. Trying to see nature the way Aristotle does, Falcon argues that, although his contemporaries and successors (especiallythe Platonists) rejected his view, Aristotle posits an important discontinuity in nature that may in fact be a philosophical virtue. Aristotle's principled acceptance of the radical diversity of kinds of activities and natures in daily experience leads to an openness to finding still more fundamental divisions in the cosmos; combining this with the equally...