Aristotelian World Research Articles

Materials are social constructs, but they also have agency

A puzzling matter about materials, particularly structural materials, is that they exhibit both a rather extraordinary extension in time, bridging over many historical and prehistorical ages, and a dynamic dimension, changing as they are in time to the point that materials may not be easily recognized as similar today as thousands of years ago. To understand this dichotomy, it is necessary to reach beyond materials science and STEM disciplines and to collect concepts and methods from SSH. Materials and energy are at the core of the physical world in which society functions: they provide the structure of the artifacts that we need, along with the ability to make and use them. They do not exist in an absolute, Aristotelian world, but are invented along historical time, by people to meet their needs, hic et nunc. Materials are social constructs, as is the “theory” (technology, science in modern language) that gives us the keys for making them. As society changes historically, people’s needs evolve and “new” materials are created on the shoulders of older ones, in a kind of evolutionary process. This is the view of social constructivism. This evolutionary metaphor is a first explanation of the continuity between, say, iron from a Roman bloomery and steel, as a contemporary commercial product. This has been formulated as the Social Cycle of Materials (SCM) by sociologists of Knowledge and Innovation, as a process of continuous innovation in which materials are socially constructed over and over again, a process often called “progress”. The continuity from old to new materials needs to be explained by some other model, however, to be fully understood: indeed, why is iron enduring so much, when it might have been displaced by another material at each evolutionary step and it didn’t. The explanation we propose is to accept that “materials have agency”, i.e. that they themselves are the actors of their own perenniality. This refers to another model, the Actor Network Theory (ANT) of Latour et al., which analyzes how change is pulled by a combined network of actors, that include people, organizations, non-human living entities and inanimate things as well.

Galileo’s Parabola Observed from Pappus’ Directrix, Apollonius’ Pedal Curve (Line), Galileo’s Empty Focus, Newton’s Evolute, Leibniz’s Subtangent and Subnormal, Ptolemy’s Circle (Hodograph), and Dürer-Simon Parabola (16.03.2019)

Galileo’s Parabola describing the projectile motion passed through hands of all scholars of the classical mechanics. Therefore, it seems to be impossible to bring to this topic anything new. In our approach we will observe the Galileo’s Parabola from Pappus’ Directrix, Apollonius’ Pedal Curve (Line), Galileo’s Empty Focus, Newton’s Evolute, Leibniz’s Subtangent and Subnormal, Ptolemy’s Circle (Hodograph), and Dürer-Simon Parabola. For the description of events on this Galileo’s Parabola (this conic section parabola was discovered by Menaechmus) we will employ the interplay of the directrix of parabola discovered by Pappus of Alexandria, the pedal curve with the pedal point in the focus discovered by Apollonius of Perga (The Great Geometer), and the Galileo’s empty focus that plays an important function, too. We will study properties of this MAG Parabola with the aim to extract some hidden parameters behind that visible parabolic orbit in the Aristotelian World. For the visible Galileo’s Parabola in the Aristotelian World, there might be hidden curves in the Plato’s Realm behind the mechanism of that Parabola. The analysis of these curves could reveal to us hidden properties describing properties of that projectile motion. The parabolic path of the projectile motion can be described by six expressions of projectile speeds. In the Dürer-Simon’s Parabola we have determined tangential and normal accelerations with resulting acceleration g = 9.81 msec-2 directing towards to Galileo’s empty focus for the projectile moving to the vertex of that Parabola. When the projectile moves away from the vertex the resulting acceleration g = 9.81 msec-2 directs to the center of the Earth (the second focus of Galileo’s Parabola in the “infinity”). We have extracted some additional properties of Galileo’s Parabola. E.g., the Newtonian school correctly used the expression for “kinetic energy E = ½ mv2 for parabolic orbits and paths, while the Leibnizian school correctly used the expression for “vis viva” E = mv2 for hyperbolic orbits and paths. If we will insert the “vis viva” expression into the Soldner’s formula (1801) (e.g., Fengyi Huang in 2017), then we will get the right experimental value for the deflection of light on hyperbolic orbits. In the Plato’s Realm some other curves might be hidden and have been waiting for our future research. Have we found the Arriadne’s Thread leading out of the Labyrinth or are we still lost in the Labyrinth?

Newton’s Parabola Observed from Pappus’ Directrix, Apollonius’ Pedal Curve (Line), Newton’s Evolute, Leibniz’s Subtangent and Subnormal, Castillon’s Cardioid, and Ptolemy’s Circle (Hodograph) (09.02.2019)

Johannes Kepler and Isaac Newton inspired generations of researchers to study properties of elliptic, hyperbolic, and parabolic paths of planets and other astronomical objects orbiting around the Sun. The books of these two Old Masters “Astronomia Nova” and “Principia…” were originally written in the geometrical language. However, the following generations of researchers translated the geometrical language of these Old Masters into the infinitesimal calculus independently discovered by Newton and Leibniz. In our attempt we will try to return back to the original geometrical language and to present several figures with possible hidden properties of parabolic orbits. For the description of events on parabolic orbits we will employ the interplay of the directrix of parabola discovered by Pappus of Alexandria, the pedal curve with the pedal point in the focus discovered by Apollonius of Perga (The Great Geometer), and the focus occupied by our Sun discovered in several stages by Aristarchus, Copernicus, Kepler and Isaac Newton (The Great Mathematician). We will study properties of this PAN Parabola with the aim to extract some hidden parameters behind that visible parabolic orbit in the Aristotelian World. In the Plato’s Realm some curves carrying hidden information might be waiting for our research. One such curve - the evolute of parabola - discovered Newton behind his famous gravitational law. We have used the Castillon’s cardioid as the curve describing the tangent velocity of objects on the parabolic orbit. In the PAN Parabola we have newly used six parameters introduced by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz - abscissa, ordinate, length of tangent, subtangent, length of normal, and subnormal. We have obtained formulae both for the tangent and normal velocities for objects on the parabolic orbit. We have also obtained the moment of tangent momentum and the moment of normal momentum. Both moments are constant on the whole parabolic orbit and that is why we should not observe the precession of parabolic orbit. We have discovered the Ptolemy’s Circle with the diameter a (distance between the vertex of parabola and its focus) where we see both the tangent and normal velocities of orbiting objects. In this case the Ptolemy’s Circle plays a role of the hodograph rotating on the parabolic orbit without sliding. In the Plato’s Realm some other curves might be hidden and have been waiting for our future research. Have we found the Arriadne’s Thread leading out of the Labyrinth or are we still lost in the Labyrinth?

Newton’s Hyperbola Observed from Newton’s Evolute (1687), Gudermann’s Circle (1833), the Auxiliary Circle (Pedal Curve and Inversion Curve), the Lemniscate of Bernoulli (1694) (Pedal Curve and Inversion Curve) (09.01.2019)

Johannes Kepler and Isaac Newton inspired generations of researchers to study properties of elliptic, hyperbolic, and parabolic paths of planets orbiting around the Sun. After the intensive study of those conic sections during the last four hundred years it is believed that this topic is practically closed and the 21st Century cannot bring anything new to this subject. Can we add to those visible orbits from the Aristotelian World some curves from the Plato’s Realm that might bring to us new information about those conic sections? Isaac Newton in 1687 discovered one such curve - the evolute of the hyperbola - behind his famous gravitation law. In our model we have been working with Newton’s Hyperbola in a more complex way. We have found that the interplay of the empty focus M (= Menaechmus - the discoverer of hyperbola), the center of the hyperbola A (= Apollonius of Perga - the Great Geometer), and the occupied focus N (= Isaac Newton - the Great Mathematician) together form the MAN Hyperbola with several interesting hidden properties of those hyperbolic paths. We have found that the auxiliary circle of the MAN Hyperbola could be used as a new hodograph and we will get the tangent velocity of planets around the Sun and their moment of tangent momentum. We can use the lemniscate of Bernoulli as the pedal curve of that hyperbola and we will get the normal velocities of those orbiting planets and their moment of normal momentum. The first derivation of this moment of normal momentum will reveal the torque of that hyperbola and we can estimate the precession of hyperbolic paths and to test this model for the case of the flyby anomalies. The auxiliary circle might be used as the inversion curve of that hyperbola and the Lemniscate of Bernoulli could help us to describe the Kepler’s Equation (KE) for the hyperbolic paths. Have we found the Arriadne’s Thread leading out of the Labyrinth or are we still lost in the Labyrinth?

Kepler´s Ellipse Observed from Newton´s Evolute (1687), Horrebow´s Circle (1717), Hamilton´s Pedal Curve (1847), and Two Contrapedal Curves (28.10.2018)

Johannes Kepler discovered the very elegant elliptical path of planets with the Sun in one focus of that ellipse in 1605. Kepler inspired generations of researchers to study properties hidden in those elliptical paths. The visible elliptical paths belong to the Aristotelian World. On the other side there are invisible mathematical objects in the Plato´s Realm that might describe the mechanism behind those elliptical paths. One such curve belonging to the Plato´s Realm discovered Isaac Newton in 1687 - the locus of radii of curvature of that ellipse (the evolute of the ellipse). Are there more curves in the Plato´s Realm that could reveal to us additional information about Kepler´s ellipse? W.R. Hamilton in 1847 discovered the hodograph of the Kepler´s ellipse using the pedal curve with pedal points in both foci (the auxiliary circle of that ellipse). This hodograph depicts the moment of the tangent momentum of orbiting planets. Inspired by the hodograph model we propose newly to use two contrapedal curves of the Kepler´s ellipse with contrapedal points in both the Kepler´s occupied and Ptolemy´s empty foci. Observers travelling along those contrapedal curves might bring new valuable experimental data about the orbital angular velocity of planets and a new version of the Kepler´s area law. Based on these contrapedal curves we have defined the moment of the normal momentum. The first derivation of the moment of the normal momentum reveals the torque of the ellipse. This torque of ellipse should contribute to the precession of the Kepler´s ellipse. In the Library of forgotten works of Old Masters we have re-discovered the Horrebow´s circle (1717) and the Colwell´s anomaly H (1993) that might serve as an intermediate step in the solving of the Kepler´s Equation (KE). Have we found the Arriadne´s Thread leading out of the Labyrinth or are we still lost in the Labyrinth?

Losing Touch with Nature: Literature and the New Science in Sixteenth-Century England. Mary Thomas Crane. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. Pp. ix+227.

<i>Losing Touch with Nature: Literature and the New Science in Sixteenth-Century England</i>. Mary Thomas Crane. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. Pp. ix+227.

The Monstrosity of Matter in Motion

The change-over from a developmental to a static conception of matter was as profound as the change from a geocentric to a heliocentric astronomy, and its effects were as far reaching.-Stephen Toulmin, The Architecture of MatterIntroductionThe seventeenth century, the century of the scientific revolution, was populated by monsters, monsters that the new mechanical science was challenging, and also monsters that it had a part in generating.Descartes's and Hobbes's philosophical systems played a key role in providing a metaphysical foundation for the new science of motion both in the natural and in the political domain. Focusing on the monstrosity of 'matter in motion,' my aim is to suggest that their philosophical efforts, although apparently opposed, shared the same ideological reaction to the monstrous contingency of 'matter' evidenced by the experimental practices carried on during the first half of the century in both natural philosophy and the English Civil War.As the Aristotelian world picture collapsed, the concepts of matter and motion underwent a process of reduction to mathematical description and to physical explanation which eventually resulted in what was later canonised-after Newton-as classical mechanics. In this process 'matter in motion' assumed ambivalent meanings: on the one hand it named extension and body, the abstract object of the new natural philosophy; on the other hand it named what resisted, at different levels and in different domains, this very process of reduction. In natural philosophy Descartes's institution of Reason as a disembodied subject dominated the whole process. In political theory it was Hobbes who opposed the artificial unity of the body politic represented by the sovereign to the material multiplicity of the multitude living in the state of nature. Connecting Descartes's and Hobbes's enterprises will make it possible to explain how the struggle carried on by early modern mechanical philosophy against the monstrosity of matter in motion generated epistemological monsters in the domains of both the natural and the civil sciences.The main 'conceptual characters' of the present narration are Galileo, Descartes and Hobbes. They play the following roles: 1) Galileo poses the problems of the ontological status of matter and of the relativity of motion; 2) Descartes solves both problems with a single metaphysical move; 3) Hobbes transfers both Galileo's problems and Descartes's solution into the domain of political philosophy.1 This path is intended to clarify in which sense Hobbes's peculiar form of radical materialism was in fact a surreptitious reduction of materialism to its ideological counterpart: Cartesian dualism. If his political project developed a disciplinary reduction of human matter to the artificial functioning of a well-ordered body politic, this was not at all peculiar to Hobbes's own materialistic project: it was rather early modern mechanical philosophy itself that entailed such a political-pedagogical project.1. Galileo: The Epistemological ProblemTo begin, I will focus on two crucial aspects of the same problem emerging from Galileo's scientific research, one strictly ontological, the other epistemological. The two aspects concern respectively the object and the subject of the new emerging science.It is commonly assumed that Galileo's overall project was-as he pictured it in Il saggiatore-to read the book of nature, whichis written in mathematical language, and the symbols are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without the help of which it is humanly impossible to comprehend a single word of it, and one wanders in vain through a dark labyrinth. (GG VI, 232)The argument is quite clear: mathematics is the code for understanding nature precisely because nature itself has been created as geometrical. But the project thus displayed remained in Galileo's works scarcely more than a metaphor: although it can be considered a kind of postulate, or at least the horizon of Galileo's research, it was not at all its achievement. …

Sleep, Romance and Human Embodiment Vitality from Spenser to Milton by Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr

Reviewed by: Sleep, Romance and Human Embodiment Vitality from Spenser to Milton by Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr Susan J. Wiseman (bio) keywords sleep, Aristotelianism Descartes, soul, vitalism, Spenser, Milton, romance, Dryden Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr. Sleep, Romance and Human Embodiment Vitality from Spenser to Milton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. ix + 206 pages. $79.00. This study investigates the place of the Aristotelian soul in key literary texts from the 1590s to the 1670s. In exploring texts from Spenser to Dryden, Sleep, Romance and Human Embodiment turns on the question of the survival and change of the Aristotelian human after Descartes’s reconceptualization of the soul. Thus, the central argument traces the Aristotelian tripartite soul beyond a Cartesian denial, into a world where, Sullivan argues, Cartesian thinking may not have triumphed conceptually but nevertheless intervened in Aristotelian assumptions concerning a blurring of the boundaries among human, animal, and what we consider environment. In tracing the place of the tripartite soul and the challenges to it, Sullivan analyzes sleep and what he refers to as “the romance episode,” a moment in texts when the romance mode is foregrounded. In these contexts and others, he finds vegetative moments in texts. Overall, these examples demonstrate the immersion of his chosen texts in an Aristotelian world. Sullivan investigates the importance of all three aspects of the Aristotelian soul—the vegetative, sensitive, and rational—as, crucially, intercommunicative or, in his terms, connected horizontally as well as vertically—that is, by association, episode and accumulation as well as by hierarchy. He tracks the ability of the human actor to be motivated by all three. While acknowledging the importance of hierarchy in the understanding of the soul and therefore the moralised aspect of human sliding to bestial status, Sullivan also indicates the moments in texts which evoke the blending of human into environment through the dominance of the sensitive or vegetative souls. Sleep, though used in multiple ways in relation to the soul, is consistent in showing the intercommunicative aspects of the Aristotelian soul and, at the same time, in mediating the “romance” and “epic” states of a text or a hero. Thus, the “romance episode” within epic is for Sullivan a key generic location making visible this interplay. There is a focus on the vegetative soul—in Aristotle the foundation of connected life, possessing the kind of vitality shared by plants, creatures, and humans, but little studied within either literary studies or ecological thought, though, as Sullivan notes, some contemporary philosophy uses the concept. [End Page 145] Sullivan’s introduction offers a productive discussion of the conceptual implications of the tripartite Aristotelian soul, which deftly explores the importance of the vegetative soul as the source of all life. He discusses the soul in the formation of vegetative, sensitive, and rational; the soul which was refused so significantly by Descartes. This exploration of the vitality of all living things (and many, indeed, that we would not now consider to be exactly living) sets the scene for the place of both hierarchy in life forms and connectedness among plants, animals, and humans. His study explores the tensions amongst these ways of thinking in The Faerie Queene (1590) and Shakespeare’s 1 and 2 Henry IV (1598) and sets these and Sidney’s Old Arcadia against post- (albeit, broadly speaking, anti-) Cartesian understandings of the vital soul in Paradise Lost (1667) and Dryden’s All For Love (1677). He is also concerned with the “play” of sameness and difference between epic and romance, where the two share the aim of heroic conclusion, but romance defers, postpones and diverts the achievement of renewed heroic hierarchy, substituting a continuous wandering. Sullivan identifies both the body and the environment as enacting the competition between the heroic achievement of hierarchy and the romance contiguity, and particularly explores attraction between romance episodes and heroic modes. This gives a significant framing to, for example, Sidney writing as author of the Old Arcadia who both fears and identifies with the sleepy irresolution of his figures in romance as opposed to heroic mode. Discussing the place of Verdant in Book 2 of The Faerie Queene, Sullivan teases out the importance of the vegetative soul in locating the...

Book Review: Comets: Sublunary or Celestial?: The Age of Two-Faced Janus: The Comets of 1577 and 1618 and the Decline of the Aristotelian World View in the Netherlands

Book Review: Comets: Sublunary or Celestial?: The Age of Two-Faced Janus: The Comets of 1577 and 1618 and the Decline of the Aristotelian World View in the Netherlands

:The Age of Two-Faced Janus: The Comets of 1577 and 1618 and the Decline of the Aristotelian World View in the Netherlands

This volume deals with the tracts, Latin and vernacular, published in the Netherlands on the comets of 1577 and 1618. Central to the book is the question how these cometary appearances influenced the Aristotelian world view. Three introductory chapters on the historiography of cometology and the nature of sixteenth-century Aristotelianism are followed by a detailed examination of the Netherlandish authors' views on the nature and constitution of the universe. In the final chapter, their opinions on cometary prognostication are evaluated, and are linked to contemporary political developments. This is the first lengthy examination of the decline of Aristotelian cosmology in the Netherlands. Its demonstration of the connection between cosmological and political views renders the book useful to historians of general Dutch history, as well as historians of science.

The Age of Two-Faced Janus: The Comets of 1577 and 1618 and the Decline of the Aristotelian World View in the Netherlands. Tabitta Van Nouhuys

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsThe Age of Two-Faced Janus: The Comets of 1577 and 1618 and the Decline of the Aristotelian World View in the Netherlands. Tabitta Van NouhuysJane L. JervisJane L. Jervis Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Isis Volume 91, Number 2Jun., 2000 Publication of the History of Science Society Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/384763 Views: 1Total views on this site Copyright 2000 History of Science Society, Inc.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Madness in philosophy

The philosopher thinks about the mystery of the world. According to Descartes the only certainty which human knowledge possesses about this mystery is the certainty that he can think about the world. But what about the world itself? Can thought know it? We do not have the guarantee that the external world, as we know (perceive) it, is, that is, possesses 'being'; but the one who thinks the world does. The thinker is. In using Lacanian terms we could call the Cartesian 'being' a 'Pens-atre', a 'thinking being'.l Descartes establishes the certainty of 'being' in the subject who thinks. Whether what is thought 'is' or 'is not', that is, whether thought and its contents coincide, is a problem of God's good will. Descartes broke with the Aristotelian dichotomy which involved, for example, the relation between matter and form. Aristotle resolved his own dualism with the concept of 'Sunolon': two elements which constitute a whole, a One. The Aristotelian Sunolon was in opposition to the Platonic doctrine where reality is to be attributed only to forms or universals whose existence was considered independent from objects, which represented them only imperfectly. For Aristotle matter is the determined potentiality of objects. They become actual only thanks to the activity of forms, and the form only exists in its objects. Lacan does not believe in this unitary and harmonious Aristotelian world. The Platonic Form lends itself to Lacanian algorithms as it retains the determinant position of a forms signifier above the bar: that is, what is above objects, the bar (the forms) determines what is under it (the objects as signified). The problem of dichotomies as a symptomatic effect in philosophical thought of an irreducible division in the world (between its reality and its representations, or between thought and perception, reason and experience, being and non-being) has gone a long way through centuries of philosophical debate in the attempt to find a solution, a point of repair. And

Aristotelian Rainfall or the Lore of Averages

David Furley has recently argued that regular rainfall in the Aristotelian world is teleological.' Furley demonstrates the failure of all attempts to exclude winter rain from the scope of Aristotle's apparently exclusive disjunction coincidence or for the sake of something (198b34-199a8).2 It is clear that Furley ascribes regular rain to purpose, and that that purpose is crop growth; but his further commitment to cosmic teleology in Aristotle remains obscure.3 David Sedley displays no such reticence.4 Starting from the presumption that Aristotle's teleology is interactive or global,5

Jacob Boehme's Divine Substance Salitter: its Nature, Origin, and Relationship to Seventeenth Century Scientific Theories

The Century between the death of Copernicus (1543) and the birth of Newton (1642) witnessed a major reshaping of traditional ways of viewing the universe. The Ptolemaic system was challenged by Copernican heliocentrism, the Aristotelian world was assailed by Galilean physics and revived atomism, and theology was troubled by the progressive distancing of God from the daily operation of His creation. Besides earning this era the title of ‘the Scientific Revolution’, the intellectual ferment of these times offered many world systems as successors to the throne of crumbling Aristotelianism.