On 6/14/2014 11:42 PM, LizR wrote:
On 15 June 2014 01:54, <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:I have not attempted to correlate my theory with the thinking of Plato and Aristotle. I would be happy to discuss this with you (my cell phone number is 858-353-0997 <tel:858-353-0997>) or to consider your specific thoughts as to how my theory relates to the thinking of these fellows."Aristotelianism" is philosophical shorthand (so to speak) for theories which assume that matter/energy and space/time are "primitive", which means they cannot be explained by anything simpler. Aristotle thought that all that existed were "atoms and the void"
No, although that's what Bruno implies. Aristotle believed in substances which had inherent properties including teleological propensities (air rises, stone fall). He denied that a vacuum was possible. It was Democritus and Epicurus that hypothesized atoms and void.
which is still roughly what "materialist" scientists think (Brent may disagree with this, but from what I've read this appears to be the tacit assumption of the majority of physicists).
I'd say "working hypothesis" - but why not? They're doing physics.
The evidence for this view is mainly that it appears self-evidently true!
I think that's a very limited view. It has only been "self-evident" for few hundred years - and only among a small segment of the world's population. Even on this list some argue that there must be some extra magic in humans and they can't be *just* matter.
"Platonism" is shorthand for theories which assume that the universe is in some sense a reflection of some hidden underlying 'perfect forms" - the modern take on this, due to Max Tegmark and others, is that these perfect forms are mathematical structures. I don't pretend to know what this would mean in practice, although A. Garret Lisi <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antony_Garrett_Lisi> attempted to produce aTOE <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Exceptionally_Simple_Theory_of_Everything>based on this idea (however, this hasn't stood up to scrutiny). Tegmark has suggested that the evidence for this view is that over the last 500 or so years, maths has been the "royal road to physical explanations" - there is nothing in physics which isn't maths plus what he calls "surplus baggage" - an interpretation of some underlying maths. Whether this has ontological significance is still unknown.
And it depends a lot on what you think about mathematics; whether it's just a precise and and strictly logical subset of language or whether it's really real ur-stuff.
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