Aristotelian Science Research Articles

Book review: John of Salisbury on Aristotelian Science, written by David Bloch

Book review: John of Salisbury on Aristotelian Science, written by David Bloch

Poliziano and Philosophy: The Birth of the Modern Notion of the Humanities?

This article is focused on Angelo Poliziano’s general attitude to philosophy as a discipline and on his specific accounts of scholastic philosophy, found mainly in his four opening lectures to his courses on Aristotle’s logic and ethics that were held in the Florentine Studium between 1490 and 1494, in the light of his overall exclusive classical approach. It shows, among other things, that philosophy was more important to Poliziano than common expressions such as “the humanist interest in philosophy” may suggest. Poliziano’s important definition of history presented in his Panepistemon, together with other pieces of evidence, can reveal the moment in which disciplines associated with the “humanities” (in the modern sense of this term) began to be separated from the natural sciences — at a point just preceding the massive critique of Aristotelian science during the sixteenth century — through Poliziano’s notion of a philosophical literature to which also the Aristotelian texts belong.

Poliziano and Philosophy: The Birth of the Modern Notion of the Humanities?

This article is focused on Angelo Poliziano's general attitude to philosophy as a discipline and on his specific accounts of scholastic philosophy, found mainly in his four opening lectures to his courses on Aristotle's logic and ethics that were held in the Florentine Studium between 1490 and 1494, in the light of his overall exclusive classical approach. It shows, among other things, that philosophy was more important to Poliziano than common expressions such as “the humanist interest in philosophy” may suggest. Poliziano's important definition of history presented in his Panepistemon, together with other pieces of evidence, can reveal the moment in which disciplines associated with the “humanities” (in the modern sense of this term) began to be separated from the natural sciences — at a point just preceding the massive critique of Aristotelian science during the sixteenth century — through Poliziano's notion of a philosophical literature to which also the Aristotelian texts belong.

The Religion of the Secularists

Both “religion” and “secularism” are constructs distinctive of the West. They both arise from the peculiar history of Christianity. Hence the double face of modern “religion.” It may cover any inherited cultic practice, safeguard ethnic values, and be respected under multiculturalism. But at the same time it may refer to the intellectual and moral commitments which mark us off socially from others, annoying the secularists. Julian, the first modern-type secularist, reacted against the Constantinian establishment of the “new religion” by ordering the priests of the old Hellenic cults to adopt the Christian style of social indoctrination to outclass those vulgar innovators. But the Fall of Rome produced the intellectual masterpiece of Augustine which redefined the saeculum and set the framework of modern secularity. Augustine had perceived reality in three dimensions: cosmic, social, and personal. At each level the rationalising logic of Aristotelian science had fixed the pattern of things, by analogy. The whole must be coherent if it is to be true. But the empiricism of Jerusalem had delivered a universe open to change and likely to end. In society power was no longer the proof of virtue. The heart itself was deceptive. Twenty-first century secularism insists upon such experimental truth, social choice and passionate commitment. This holy trinity is our legacy from the “new” religion.

David Bloch. John of Salisbury on Aristotelian Science. xv + 243 pp., app., bibl., index. Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2012. €75 (cloth).

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsDavid Bloch. John of Salisbury on Aristotelian Science. xv + 243 pp., app., bibl., index. Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2012. €75 (cloth).Ian WilksIan Wilks Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Isis Volume 104, Number 4December 2013 Publication of the History of Science Society Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/676351 Views: 15Total views on this site Citations: 1Citations are reported from Crossref © 2013 by The History of Science Society. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article: Current Bibliography of the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences, 2014, Isis 105, no.S1S1 (Jul 2015): i–301.https://doi.org/10.1086/680345

A dark business, full of shadows: Analogy and theology in William Harvey

In a short work called De conceptione appended to the end of his Exercitationes de generatione animalium (1651), William Harvey developed a rather strange analogy. To explain how such marvelous productions as living beings were generated from the rather inauspicious ingredients of animal reproduction, Harvey argued that conception in the womb was like conception in the brain. It was mostly rejected at the time; it now seems a ludicrous theory based upon homonymy. However, this analogy offers insight into the structure and function of analogies in early modern natural philosophy. In this essay I hope to not only describe the complex nature of Harvey’s analogy, but also offer a novel interpretation of his use of analogical reasoning, substantially revising the account offered by Guido Giglioni (1993). I discuss two points of conceptual change and negotiation in connection with Harvey’s analogy, understanding it as both a confrontation between the border of the natural and the supernatural, as well as a moment in the history of psychology. My interpretation touches upon a number of important aspects, including why the analogy was rejected, how Harvey systematically deployed analogies according to his notions of natural philosophical method, how the analogy fits into contemporary discussions of analogies in science, and finally, how the analogy must be seen in the context of changing Renaissance notions of the science of the soul, ultimately confronting the problem of how to understand final causality in Aristotelian science. In connection with the last, I conclude the essay by turning to how Harvey embeds the analogy within a natural theological cosmology.

Faḫr ad-Dīn ar-Rāzī, Ibn al-Hayṯam and Aristotelian Science: Essentialism versus Phenomenalism in Post-Classical Islamic Thought

This article examines Avicenna’s view of Aristotelian demonstrative science and the emergence of a competing philosophical system in the works of Faḫr al-Dīn ar-Rāzī. The discussion focuses on the structure of Aristotelian science and the influence of metaphysics on the analysis of sensible phenomena. Rāzī assesses the epistemological and ontological principles underlying Avicenna’s interpretation of demonstrative science. Finding knowledge of essences and the necessary relations posited in demonstrative science problematic, Rāzī develops an alternative to Aristotelian science based on a theory of phenomenal knowledge. A preliminary analysis of the reception of Rāzī’s system is also conducted.

John of Salisbury on Aristotelian Science by David Bloch (review)

Review(s) of: John of salisbury on Aristotelian science, by Bloch, David, (Disputatio, 8), Turnhout, Brepols, 2012, hardback, pp. xvi, 246, R.R.P. 75.00, ISBN 9782503540993.

Seventeenth-Century Science and Spinoza’s Break with Judaism

This section of Robert M. Seltzer’s book “Jewish People, Jewish Thought” centers in on a period in history known as “The Enlightenment”. Here it seems that Seltzer’s first goal is to provide a context for which to place this section’s main character, Baruch Spinoza. Thus, with broad strokes Seltzer’s paints a picture of history during it’s a period of religious strife. He points to men like Copernicus's, Isaac Newton and their ideological conflict with Aristotelian science. In other words, Aristotle’s belief that the earth was the center of the universe was being challenged by new mathematical principles combined with modern philosophy, which indicated that the sun was the center of the universe; and also suggested that reason knowledge would offer humanity a more reliable formula for salvation. Hence, a salvation not dependent on God’s actions but simply on mans intellectual progressive procession generally accepted theory of the day. Seltzer writes, “Seventeenth-century science fostered a feeling of liberation from the authority of the past” (548).

Why the Five Ways?

This paper will argue that the order and the unity of St. Thomas Aquinas's five ways can be elucidated through a consideration of St. Thomas's appropria - tion of an Avicennian insight that he used to order and unify the wisdom of the Aristotelian and Abrahamic philosophical traditions towards the existence of God. I will begin with a central aporia from Aristotle's Metaphysics. Aristotle says that the science of first philosophy has three different theoretical vectors: ontology, aitiology, and theology. But how can all three be united into a single Aristotelian science? In his Metaphysics of the Healing, Avicenna resolved the impasse by tak- ing the ontological vector as the subject of metaphysics. He then integrated the question of the four first causes into the penultimate stage of his demonstration for the existence of God, thereby placing aitiological and theological questions among the ultimate concerns of a unified Aristotelian metaphysics. In the five ways, St. Thomas integrated Avicenna's Aristotelian search for the first four causes into the last four of his five ways, by showing that each of the four aitiological orders terminate in an ultimate first cause that we call God. Finally, by appending the proof from the Physics to the beginning of the five ways, St. Thomas was able to show that the ultimate aim of both natural philosophy and metaphysics is the divine first principle, which is the beginning and subject of sacra doctrina.

The Scepticism of Descartes’s Meditations

What I’m suggesting is that the model for Descartes’s defence of Renaissance science would be Aquinas’s own defence of thirteenth-century Aristotelian science, except that the coherence of the will took on the role of the consistency of concepts, as the controlling factor in the analyses of all types of science. As a result, the new science would incorporate the awareness of Platonic ideas and the divisibility of Euclidean space as equally valid input into a dialectical knowledge of sensory experience. You can read the early arguments to doubt the reality of sensory experience and reason as a way of dividing out the experience of the will in affirming or denying an object’s nature, as the subject for subsequent inquiry.

Philoponus and the Rejection of Aristotelian Science. Second edition

Philoponus and the Rejection of Aristotelian Science. Second edition

Francesco Patrizi’s two books on space: geometry, mathematics, and dialectic beyond Aristotelian science

Francesco Patrizi was a competent Greek scholar, a mathematician, and a Neoplatonic thinker, well known for his sharp critique of Aristotle and the Aristotelian tradition. In this article I shall present, in the first part, the importance of the concept of a three-dimensional space which is regarded as a body, as opposed to the Aristotelian two-dimensional space or interval, in Patrizi’s discussion of physical space. This point, I shall argue, is an essential part of Patrizi’s overall critique of Aristotelian science, in which Epicurean, Stoic, and mainly Neoplatonic elements were brought together, in what seems like an original theory of space and a radical revision of Aristotelian physics. Moreover, I shall try to show Patrizi’s dialectical method of definition, his geometrical argumentation, and trace some of the ideas and terms used by him back to Proclus’ Commentary on Euclid. This text of Proclus, as will be shown in the second part of the article, was also important for Patrizi’s discussion of mathematical space, where Patrizi deals with the status of mathematics and redefines some mathematical concepts such as the point and the line according to his new theory of space.

Speculative 'Musica' and the Medieval University of Paris

During the early Middle Ages quadrivial musica (the study of abstract mathematical proportion) was part of the educational programme in the liberal arts; the fundamental text was Boethius’ De institutione musica . With the rise of the universities in the thirteenth century, the goals of education and the content of the curriculum changed dramatically. Aristotelian logic and natural science virtually extinguished interest in the quadrivium—and necessarily music—at the university level. An analysis of the curriculum, teaching methods, questiones disputate (a derivative of the university dispute), and student examination questions at the University of Paris reveals that music had no place in the official instructional programme of the University. A few sources, however, indicate that Boethius’ De institutione musica still commanded interest in some circles, particularly at Oxford and in Central Europe in the fourteenth century.

Encyclopédies et lapidaires médiévaux

It is well known that the Etymologiae of Isidore of Seville were wide spread in the Latin medieval West, but the modalities of this diffusion is worth further investigation. Here, we examine its reception on two kinds of naturalistic works: the encyclopaedies and the lapidaries, until and during the XIIIth C. The period was the richest and the newest for the encyclopaedic production, where we see that the Etymologiae where used as a «tank» of naturalistic information, but was gradually less considered as a paradigm of the encyclopaedic genre by most of the compilers. His etymological approach, when it still appear, is no more as a way of thinking Nature in the XIIIth C. Furthermore, the auctoritas of Isidore as a naturalist – never as a theologian – is increasingly challenged by Aristotelian science, in the works of Thomas de Cantimpré, Bartholomaeus the Englishmann, and Vincent of Beauvais (Isidore is simply no more quoted by Arnoldus Saxo). In the De mineralibus of Albertus Magnus, Isidore subsists only, when his documentation is not available among other and more recent auctoritates. This article provides as well a rich information about lapidaries between the Ist and the XIIIth C., and a comparative chart of the minerals quoted by most lapidarists across this period of time.

Signs and Instruments: The Convergence of Aristotelian and Kantian Intuitions in Biosemiotics

Biosemiotics—a discipline in the process of becoming established as a new research enterprise—faces a double task. On the one hand it must carry out the theoretical and experimental investigation of an enormous range of semiotic phenomena relating organisms to their internal components and to other organisms (e.g., signal transduction, replication, codes, etc.). On the other hand, it must achieve a philosophical re-conceptualization and generalization of theoretical biology in light of the essential role played by semiotic notions in biological explanation and modeling. This paper attempts to contribute to the second task by tracing some aspects of the historical evolution of explanatory models in biology. In so doing, a parallel can be drawn between the present status of biosemiotics and that of physics during the early decades of the last century. By following the career of the concept instrument (organon) in Aristotelian science, we revisit historical stages of the antithetical (but often complementary) roles of mechanical and teleological forms of explanation. The impact of the introduction of the organic codes in biology is seen to be somewhat analogous to that of the introduction of the quantum of action in physics. Faced with intractable empirical facts, physicists combined experimental results and bold philosophical speculation to create quantum physics—a wider, deeper framework that accommodates the new facts through a wholesale reformulation of the classical ideas. Essential to this development was the articulation of the epistemic functions of instruments, which was absent from classical physics. Similarly, the consideration of the role of instruments in biology may lead to a synthesis of Aristotelian and Kantian intuitions within a wider framework capable of joining now separate perspectives, such as Jablonka’s four-fold view of inheritance information, Barbieri’s theory of artifactual copymakers and codemakers, and recently developed models of causation based on the idea of manipulative interventions.

Educational research as a practical science

This article offers a philosophical contribution to recent debates about the assessment of quality in educational research. It shows how criticisms of the quality of educational research—pointing to its failure to meet epistemic criteria of rigour and practical criteria of relevance—are an inevitable manifestation of the flawed assumption that educational research is to be understood as a species of modern social science. It draws on Furlong and Oancea’s study of quality in practice‐based research, Gadamer’s critique of modern social science and Lagemann’s historical account of the origins and evolution of educational research in the USA, to argue for a reconstruction of educational research as a species of Aristotelian practical science.

Metaphysics as an Aristotelian Science

Metaphysics as an Aristotelian Science

Metaphysics as an Aristotelian Science, by Ian Bell

Metaphysics as an Aristotelian Science, by Ian Bell

The mycobacterial mystery

Before the advent of HIV, which led to an increased awareness of Mycobacterium avium complex disease, followed by the first prospective comparison studies on treatment regimens 1, 2, the topic of nontuberculous mycobacterial disease was a true example of Aristotelian science. Previously, only a few experts worldwide had compiled empirical data and disseminated knowledge on the subject, which was based upon meticulous observations in small series or case studies from the 1950s onwards 3. These studies demonstrated the manifold particularities of M. avium complex disease and others as compared with tuberculosis, and also showed how even nontuberculous mycobacterial lung diseases alone, quite apart from manifestations in other organs, appear in widely varying forms. To this day, an ever increasing number of reports on uncommon or recently detected and potentially pathogenic species with strange names deepen the impression that we are dealing with an intricate matter. In 1979, Wolinsky 4 published his legendary review on nontuberculous mycobacteria (NTM) and associated diseases, which is still worth reading and citing: “The pathogenesis of adult pulmonary disease is obscure. Does it represent primary infection after inhalation of aerosolized infected droplet nuclei that then localize and proliferate in specific areas of damaged lung? Or is it a reactivation of dormant bacilli that had been acquired previously?” 4. Meanwhile, the history of HIV especially, and the growing number of patients with transplants, have helped in understanding the role, and some mechanisms, of systemic immunosuppression as an important factor in the development of both disseminated and pulmonary disease. Have we, however, deepened our understanding of the pathophysiology of localised lung disease in non-HIV patients, this being a key issue? Focusing on treatment, in 1985 another pioneer in the field of tuberculosis and nontuberculous mycobacterial diseases, Karl Ludwig Radenbach (1918–1986), wrote: “Clinically, treatment cannot …