Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by tokai 561 days ago
On the other hand deification of Aristotle's intellect and thought hampered the development of physics for almost 1500 years.
3 comments

This is not (really) true. Well there's an element of truth in it, but only an element.

European philosophy was not really Aristotelian until the re-arrival of his work in the 12C, so it's hardly fair to 'blame' him for the lack of scientific development that period. When it did arrive, it was extremely controversial, and it took the genius of Aquinas (and even then, only just) for Aristotle to be accepted in Christian thought.

In the 17C, there was a much greater interest in quantitative methods than there had been previously. And some of his physics was obviously found to be wrong. But there was no discovery (and remains no discovery) that falsified broad swathes of his work. The change of interest and focus was far more important in the progress of what we now call science than the supposed rejection of Aristotle.

This is described in E.A. Burtt's Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science.

Pre-modern people were far more interested in living a morally good life (a happy life, in the Aristotelian sense of the word) than they were in controlling nature. That changed in the 17C.

I think Avicenna also deserves a mention as another way educated people would naturally interact with Aristotelian thought.
Oh yeah definitely, and Averroes and the other medieval Islamic scholars as well. Absolute intellectual giants.
You may be interested in:

"Aristotle's Physics: a Physicist's Look"

My take is that it was hard to find a better theory, the usual explanation of scholastical dogmatism is to shallow.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1312.4057

Insofar as that's true, it isn't a fact about Aristotle, it's a fact about the mindset of scholars who came after him.
Well, their mindset evolved at least partly around the question, how far they can go with free thinking, before making the transition to free burning.