Aristotelian Science Research Articles

The historical Context of John Philoponus' De Opificio Mundi in the Culture of Byzantine-Coptic Egypt

Abstract I. Introduction John Philoponus (ca. 490–575) was the first and probably only universal mind of the culture of Christian Egypt. Since the publication eighteen years ago of a collection of studies entitled Philoponus and the Rejection of Aristotelian Science, this sixth-century Alexandrian philosopher, theologian and polymath has become the focus of increased scholarly interest. As a documentary papyrologist working on the sixth-century Egyptian lawyer-poet Dioscorus of Aphrodito, I had even earlier come to speculate about a possible connection between that writer and Philoponus. However, despite the growth of scholarship on the society of late antique Egypt, studies on Philoponus have until recently continued to be carried on largely within the closed universe of late antique classical philosophy, with little attention paid to the actual social world within which Philoponus lived and worked, and concentrating on only one aspect of his output, the philosophical commentaries, to the comparative neglect of his theological works and his identity as a non-Chalcedonian thinker at the time of the early growth of Egypt's separate church. What I should like to do is try and understand Philoponus better within his social background of sixth-century Egypt, the world of the Greek and Coptic documentary papyri. In his great work, the De Opificio Mundi or “Explanations of Moses' Cosmogony” (CPG 7265), Philoponus produced a Miaphysite commentary on Genesis, the goal of which was to demonstrate to the people of his own place and time that only this correct understanding of Christ, the Miaphysite one, would provide a key to understanding the created universe through correctly reconciling the data of classical science with those of Christian revelation.

Factions and the Paradox of Aristotelian Practical Science

Politics V presents preserving and destroying the constitution as exhaustive alternatives, leaving no apparent room for improving the constitution. Aristotle claims that ‘if we know the causes by which constitutions are destroyed we also know the causes by which they are preserved; for opposites create opposites, and destruction is the opposite of security’ (V.8.1307b26–29). The first seven chapters present the causes by which constitutions are destroyed, and then chapters 8 and 9 show the causes by which they are preserved. Yet in important ways, the dictum is false: knowing the causes of constitutional change is not equivalent to knowing how constitutions are preserved, and, more radically, destruction and security are not the only alternatives facing someone in potentially revolutionary situations. The many ways in which knowledge of the causes of factions and knowledge of the methods of preservation are not equivalent supply the energy and interest that drive Book V’s argument.

:Paracelsian Moments: Science, Medicine, and Astrology in Early Modern Europe

Scientific ideas inspired by religious, magical, and alchemical themes competed alongside traditional Aristotelian science and the emerging mechanical philosophy in the early modern era. At the center of this ferment was a quirky and creative German physician, Paracelsus, whose religious-alchemical worldview served as an inspiration for countless scientific innovators. This collection is about Paracelsus and the wide range of issues he explored, and ones taken up by many who were directly or indirectly affected by the same mental universe that sustained his thought and writings. This volume includes strong contextual studies on Paracelsianism and the larger cultural history of early modern science, including groundbreaking studies on Robert Boyle, Francois Rabelais, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, and Johannes Praetorius.

ECOSYSTEM CONSEQUENCES OF BIODIVERSITY LOSS: THE EVOLUTION OF A PARADIGM

The ecosystem consequences of dramatic declines or changes in biodiversity have spurred considerable research and tremendous debate that has rekindled most of the major conflicts in ecology, creating a sense of dejavu. These conflicts include whether ecosystem or community ecology provides better insights into the workings of nature, the relative importance of biotic vs. abiotic factors in governing community composition and structure, the virtues of phenomenological vs. mechanistic research, the relationship be- tween biodiversity and stability, the relative importance of taxonomic vs. functional di- versity, and the relative strengths of observation vs. experimental approaches. Although the tone of the debate has been regrettable, its magnitude signifies the emer- gence of a new paradigm, one in a series of debates associated with the dialectic that has structured ecological inquiry over two millennia of Western science. This dialectic concerns the tension between those who seek to explain nature by studying its parts and those who seek to explain nature by studying whole-system behavior. Philosophers and historians argue that such a dialectic generates cycles in which a central tenet is challenged by an emerging paradigm, generating new theories and new data to test the emerging paradigm. The scientific community evaluates the accumulating evidence (and it is here that the debates arise), and if subscription to the emerging paradigm increases sufficiently, the emerging paradigm evolves into a new central tenet. Fractionation within the sciences exacerbates this cycle because subdisciplines often focus on either the parts or the whole. Such splin- tering can be traced to the abandonment of the holistic approach of Aristotelian science during the Scientific Revolution. While such holism may have lessened debate, some have argued that it stagnated Western science. The dialectic, the cycles of emerging paradigms it generates, and the debates that surround each emergence represent the vehicle by which ecology moves forward. Emerging paradigms force scientists to revisit central tenets, pitting old ideas against new theories and new data, and this revisiting is what generates the sense of dejavu and the cycles of vigorous debate, but ultimately each cycle leads to synthesis and progress. The emerging paradigm that biodiversity governs ecosystem function is rapidly evolving. In the words of Thomas Kuhn, its controversial experiments have successfully articulated the paradigm. It has successfully challenged ecology's central tenet that biodiversity is pri- marily an epiphenomenon of ecosystem function secondarily structured by community pro- cesses. In its most extreme form, it claims that the reverse is true. Of course, neither the central tenet of ecology nor the emerging paradigm is correct in an absolute sense, but the dialectic that promoted the emergence of biodiversity and ecosystem function as a paradigm redirected ecology to focus on the feedback between ecosystem function and biodiversity rather than studying them independently. The final stage in the evolution of this emerging paradigm will be explicit tests of synthetic mechanisms that have been proposed. Familiarity with the ecological dialectic provides a framework by which ecologists can understand the origin and utility of paradigms in ecology, provides a proper context for the debate that surrounds paradigms as they emerge, promotes synthesis, and deters intellectual chauvinism that may inadvertently accompany specialization within ecology.

Thomas Reid and the problem of induction: from common experience to common sense

By the middle of the eighteenth century the new science had challenged the intellectual primacy of common experience in favor of recondite, expert and even counter-intuitive knowledge increasingly mediated by specialized instruments. Meanwhile modern philosophy had also problematized the perceptions of common experience — in the case of David Hume this included our perception of causal relations in nature, a fundamental precondition of scientific endeavor.In this article I argue that, in responding to the ‘problem of induction’ as advanced by Hume, Reid reformulated Aristotelian foundationalism in distinctly modern terms. An educator and mathematician self-consciously working within the framework of the new science, Reid articulated a philosophical foundation for natural knowledge anchored in the human constitution and in processes of adjudication in an emerging modern public sphere of enlightened discourse. Reid thereby transformed one of the bases of Aristotelian science — common experience — into a philosophically and socially justified notion of ‘common sense’. Reid's intellectual concerns had as much to do with the philosophy of science as they did with moral philosophy or epistemology proper, and were bound up with wider social and scientific changes taking place in the early modern period.

The Intelligibility of the Universe

Hume famously warned us that the ‘[The] ultimate springs and principles are totally shut up from human curiosity and enquiry’. Or, again, Newton: ‘Hitherto I have not been able to discover the cause of these properties of gravity … and I frame no hypotheses.’ Aristotelian science was concerned with just such questions, the specification of occult qualities, the real essences that answer the question What is matter, etc?, the preoccupation with circular definitions such as dormative virtues, and so on. The rise of modern science is usually seen as a break with the sterility of Aristotelianism, so what exactly is it that modern science does discover, if it is not the essential nature of matter, of force, of energy, of space and time? A famous answer was provided by Poincaré: ‘The true relations between these real objects are the only reality we can attain.’ This is often regarded as the manifesto of so-called structural realism, as espoused in recent years by John Worrall, for example (cp. his (1989)). In response to the arguments of Larry Laudan (1982) against convergent realism, Worrall points to the continuity in the formal relations between elements of reality expressed by mathematical equations, while the intrinsic nature of these elements of reality gets constantly revised.

Richard Lavenham's De causis naturalibus: A Critical Edition

A work of natural science dating from the second half of the fourteenth century, Richard Lavenham's De causis naturalibus (henceforth DCN) is a theoretically simple, brief, and sometimes fanciful compendium of lore, Aristotelian science, and Christian authority on a variety of meteorological topics. A fair range of authorities and subjects is discussed in this relatively short work, from Augustine to Aristotle and from the cause of rainbows to the source of the tides. Neither an in-depth treatise nor a focused commentary, DCN is rather a summary of the mechanics of sun-caused exhalations in the sublunar region and of the various phenomena these exhalations produce.

Nursing as a practical science: some insights from classical Aristotelian science *

Abstract This paper discusses a classic Aristotelian understanding of science, nature, and methods of inquiry and proof. It then discusses nursing as a practical science and provides some demonstrations through the application of classical methods. In the Aristotelian tradition an individual substance is a unity of form and matter: form being the intelligible universal that becomes the concept, while matter is the principle of individuation. Science is mediate intellectual causal knowledge. Inquiry uses hypothetical argument, and proof that is from valid syllogistic reasoning with true premises provides necessity and certitude. This proof requires knowledge of the natural kind that gives origin to the attributes under investigation. The variability of nature is overcome by reasoning on the supposition of the end.Within the classical understanding of speculative and practical science, nursing is a practical science. As a science, nursing investigates the principles and causes of its subject, be that human beings, health or nursing behaviours as knowable nursing operations. The goal is knowledge of practice for the sake of practice, but nursing as a science is not operable. Nursing practice, that is nursing art or technologies, must complete the science. Reasoning on the supposition of the end, for example of cardiac compensation, allows one to identify necessary activities and physical states. Three causal demonstrations about decubiti show that demonstrations are possible. Classical science would teach us that the practical science of nursing studies human nature in order to identify principles and causes of health and principles and causes of nursing operations themselves. It also requires that the science ends in practical operation. Thus, proper decisions and individual actions in particular patient situations must complete nursing science.

Aristotelian explanations

By the middle of the eighteenth century the new science had challenged the intellectual primacy of common experience in favor of recondite, expert and even counter-intuitive knowledge increasingly mediated by specialized instruments. Meanwhile modern philosophy had also problematized the perceptions of common experience — in the case of David Hume this included our perception of causal relations in nature, a fundamental precondition of scientific endeavor.In this article I argue that, in responding to the ‘problem of induction’ as advanced by Hume, Reid reformulated Aristotelian foundationalism in distinctly modern terms. An educator and mathematician self-consciously working within the framework of the new science, Reid articulated a philosophical foundation for natural knowledge anchored in the human constitution and in processes of adjudication in an emerging modern public sphere of enlightened discourse. Reid thereby transformed one of the bases of Aristotelian science — common experience — into a philosophically and socially justified notion of ‘common sense’. Reid's intellectual concerns had as much to do with the philosophy of science as they did with moral philosophy or epistemology proper, and were bound up with wider social and scientific changes taking place in the early modern period.

Levels of explanation in Galen

Galen's æuvre presents a remarkably varied body of texts–varied in subject matter, style, and didactic purpose. Logical tracts sit alongside tomes of drug–lore; handbooks of dietetics alongside anatomical investigations; treatises of physiology alongside ethicalopuscula. These differences in type have received some, though as yet insufficient, scholarly attention. Mario Vegetti demonstrated the coexistence of two ‘profili’ or images of the art of medicine: Galen presents the art as an Aristotelian deductive science, on the one hand, and as a technician's craft, on the other. The former image, offering an ambitious elevation of the doctor's cultural status, has medicine as a philosophicalepistemeanalogous to the mathematical sciences, exercised above all to provide causal accounts and logical demonstrations, and centred on the knowledge of anatomy. The second image is that of the clinician, concerned with the body in its pathological manifestations and using as its prime model the ‘pre-anatomical’ theory of the humours. And the content of the treatises shifts in relation to this dual image: ‘profilo alto’ and ‘profilo basso’ are reflected in different types of work. Polemical writings such as the Protrepticus, as well as the great treatises of anatomy and physiology,De usu partiumandDe naturalibus facultatibus, present medicine in the former light, while works like DetemperamentisorQuod animi moresbase themselves on humoral pathology and accord with the earlier, artisan-like image.

A Portrait of Master Eckhart

1. Brother Eckhart, Reader of the Sentences in Paris On Apri118th 1294, during the Easter Festival, a young academic got up to preach in the Church of 51. Jacques in Paris. The sennon which he gave was taken down in writing by a scribe in the congregation, and a copy made its way-a few years later-to the monastery of Kremsmiinster, where it is still to be found today. This text is exceptional for the piety, scholarship and rhetorical skills which it displays. The original color rhetoricus can be heard in many places and the author shows an impressive command of his sources in the many citations h~ gives from the Bible and the works of the Fathers, particularly Augustine. Nowadays, of course, a talk would be structured on very different rhetorical principles; but by the standards of the medieval art of preaching this short sermon is a masterpiece. Despite its grounding in the rhetorical tradition of the time, more personal features emerge. What strikes the reader in particular is the emphasis placed on the teachings of philosophers and scientists. The author was preaching on a purely theological theme, but he nevertheless quoted as his authorities Avicenna, Hermes Trismegitus, Ptolemy, the philosophers and Albertus Magnus. In Paris in the last decade of the thirteenth century, citations such as these would give a clear indication of the preacher's intention he wished to distance himself from the increasing~y hostile anti-philosophical movement within the Paris Faculty of Theology. At the same time, however, he was not a supporter of the singlemindedly philosophical opposition party, known as the 'radical Aristotelians', who had attempted, on the basis of Aristotelian ethics, to resurrect the old pagan morality of magnanimitas. In contrast to their teaching, the preacher emphasised humility as the archetypal Christian virtue. The young scholar who preached this sermon was to devote his whole life to such issues. He was 'Brother Eckhardus, Reader of the Sentences'. In retrospect, the Easter sermon of 1294 is very important for the reconstruction of Eckhart's life, as it allows us to make several biographical deductions. Only a baccalaureus of the Faculty of Theology (lecturer) could be a Reader and lecture on the Sentences of Peter Lombard. As the minimum age required by the Paris statutes for such a position was 33, Eckhart must have been born before 1260. His family belonged to the lower aristocracy and lived in Tambach near Gotha. Mter his basic education, he had joined the Dominican Order at the age of 18 and before being sent to study at the University of Paris, he had successfully completed the academic training of a Dominican student-this consisted of three years of aries libera/es, two years of natural philosophy (with emphasis on Aristotelian science) and three years theology as a studium

Epistemic obstacles and the marriage of fantasy to rigor: A response to suchting

Reality is difficult to know because the projection of reality onto experience creates misleading similarities and differences. Also, the projection is one-to-many in the appearance-to-reality direction, a fact that prevents us from reasoning from appearance to reality. The mode of thought that is associated with the Galilean revolution in science is a response to these epistemic obstacles. Its main characteristic is a marriage between imagination and formalization. This mode of thinking is as universal within post-Galilean science as the epistemic obstacles it is designed to overcome, but it is not salient in either common sense or Aristotelian science.

The Practices of Reason: Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics.

Practices of Reason is an exploration of the epistemological, metaphysical, and psychological foundations of the Nicomachean Ethics. In a striking reversal of current orthodoxy, Professor Reeve argues that scientific-knowledge (episteme) is possible in ethics, that dialectic and understanding (nous) play essentially the same role in ethics as in an Aristotelian science, and that the distinctive role of practical wisdom (phronesis) is to use the knowledge of universals provided by science, dialectic, and understanding so as best to promote happiness (eudaimonia) in particular circumstances and to ensure a happy life. Turning to happiness itself, the author develops a new account of Aristotle's views on ends and functions, exposing their twofold nature. He argues that the activation of theoretical wisdom is primary happiness, and that the activation of practical wisdom - when it is for the sake of primary happiness - is happiness of a second kind. He concludes with an account of the virtues of character, external goods, and friends, and their place in the happy life. The book will be of interest to all those who have unanswered questions about the central arguments, concepts, and presuppositions of the Nicomachean Ethics.

Herbert the Hermetist: Vaughan's Reading of The Temple

Herbert the Hermetist: Vaughan's Reading of The Temple by Jonathan Nauman Like their counterparts in the nineteenth century, twentiethcentury critics with sympathies for Romanticism have placed great emphasis on the strangely specific and personal observations of nature which appear in Henry Vaughan's sacred poems. Joseph Summers considers Vaughan's demonstrative indication of "those faint beams in which this hill is drest" in "They are all gone into the world of light!" an anticipation of the Romantic movement;1 and E.C. Pettet speaks of how "a surprisingly close and convincing parallel can be drawn" between Vaughan's and Wordsworth's recourses to nature for poetic inspiration.2 F.E. Hutchinson and Alan Rudrum reinforce such observations by contending that Vaughan's view of nature differed considerablyfrom that of mainstreamseventeenth-centurythought — a mainstream which included his master George Herbert. "There was indeed [in Silex Scintillans] a new and closer discipleship of George Herbert, but Vaughan's best and most distinctive achievements will be on themes of his own choice and treated in his own way," says Hutchinson; and, quoting lines from Herbert's "Providence" about how "Man is the worlds high Priest" when the creation praises God, suggests that "Vaughan carries this thought farther than Herbert, for whom it was perhaps little more than a pious fancy. This 'obedience' of the creatures is for Vaughan almost a conscious adoration of the Creator."3 Rudrum, citing Vaughan's "Rules and Lessons" and "The Morning-Watch," distinguishes even more sharply between the two poets: We see that . . . Vaughan understands the "creatures" themselves to be praising God. Donne and Herbert had both considered this notion and rejected it in favor of the idea that it is man, as high-priest of the creation, who offers up praise to God on behalf of a universe which, being inarticulate, cannot offer its own praises. This acceptance of an animistic or vitalisticinterpretation of things is typical of Vaughan.4 26Jonathan Nauman Although any reader of Vaughan and Herbert is likely to admit that Vaughan poetically appropriates the natural world in a way very different from his master, such sharp differentiation between the two poets' attitudes in an area quite central to Vaughan's poetic vision ought to raise more critical questions than it generally has. Vaughan's exalted opinion of Herbert — the rhetoric he consistently uses whenever referring, either in verse or in prose, to the earlier poet — seems incompatible with any perception on his part of Herbert's endorsing a non-hermetic, Aristotelian description of the universe. Vaughan agreed with his brother's opinion that traditional, Aristotelian science unbiblically reduced the creation to inanimate matter; indeed, there is some evidence that he shared even his brother's tendency to polemicize against Aristotle. If Vaughan perceived as clearly as modern readers do that Herbert sided against him on the issue of God's mode of relating to the natural world, it would be worth asking how he was able to submit to Herbert reverently and without qualification in The Life ofPaulinus and the 1654 Preface to Silex Scintillant while simultaneously writing the emphatically partisan preface to his Hermetical Physick: If any will be offended with this Hermeticall Theorie, I shall but smile at his frettings, and pitty his ignorance. Those are bad Spirits, that have the light; and such are all malicious despisers of true knowledge, who out of meere envie, scribble and rail at all endeavors; but such as submit to, and Déifie their rigid superstition, and twice sodden Colworts. For my owne part, I honour the truth where ever I find it, whether in an old, or a new Booke, in Galen, or in Paracelsus; and Antiquity, (where I find it gray with errors) shall have as little reverence from me, as Novelisme. (p. 548)6 It would be tempting to evade this difficulty by assuming that Vaughan maintained separate allegiances in his scientific and religious opinions. However, certain dynamics of hermetical thinking — its tendency to distinguish itself from Aristotelian science as a more seamless union of religious and scientific truth, its tendency to attribute the deficiencies of non-hermetic thinking to religious error7 — make such a solution problematic. I would suggest...

The Origins of Aristotelian Science.

The Origins of Aristotelian Science.

Constructivism and empiricism: An incomplete divorce

The paper outlines the significant influence of constructivism in contemporary science and mathematics education, and emphasises the central role that epistemology plays in constructivist theory and practice. It is claimed that despite the anti-empiricism of much constructivist writing, in most forms its epistemology is nevertheless firmly empiricist. In particular it is subject-centered and experience-based. It is argued that its relativist, if not skeptical conclusions, only follow given these empiricist assumptions. Further it is suggested that such assumptions belong to Aristotelian science, and were effectively overthrown with the modern science of Galileo and Newton. Thus constructivism cannot provide understanding of post-Aristotelian science.

Expectation, modelling and assent in the history of optics—II. Kepler and descartes

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.

BOOK REVIEWS

Journal Article BOOK REVIEWS Get access Philoponus and the Rejection of Aristotelian Science. Edited by Richard Sorabji. Cornell University Press, 1987. 253 pages. $42.50. Robert L. Wilken Robert L. Wilken The University of Virginia Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Volume LIX, Issue 3, Fall 1991, Pages 624–625, https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/LIX.3.624 Published: 01 October 1991

Philoponus and the Rejection of Aristotelian Science.Richard SorabjiPhiloponus: Against Aristotle, on the Eternity of the World.Philoponus, Christian Wildberg

Previous articleNext article No AccessReviews Richard Sorabji Philoponus and the Rejection of Aristotelian Science. Richard Sorabji Philoponus: Against Aristotle, on the Eternity of the World. Philoponus, Christian Wildberg William A. WallaceWilliam A. Wallace Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Speculum Volume 65, Number 4Oct., 1990 The journal of the Medieval Academy of America Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.2307/2863631 Citations: 1Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1990 Medieval Academy of AmericaPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article: John Neu Current Bibliography of the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences, 1991, Isis 82 (Oct 2015): 1–271.https://doi.org/10.1086/356021

Philoponus and the Rejection of Aristotelian Science.

Philoponus and the Rejection of Aristotelian Science.