On 8/30/2015 10:35 AM, John Clark wrote:
On Sat, Aug 29, 2015 at 2:16 AM, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be
<mailto:marc...@ulb.ac.be>> wrote:
>
The dogma did not come from Plato, nor even Aristotle,
All the ancient greeks in your own words "
believe in what they understand, not necessarily in what they observe
" and that was the problem.
Aristotle
believed that heavy objects fell more quickly than light ones, something that could
have been easily disproved even on his own day but he understood it so well, or thought
he did, that he didn't bother to make any observations on the matter.
But he did observe that a rock fell faster than a leaf. He also believed that an active
force was necessary to sustain motion because he observed that if you stopped pulling a
wagon it came to a halt.
In the same way Aristotle "understood" that women had fewer teeth than men so he never
thought it necessary to actually count the teeth in his wife's mouth even though he was
married twice. And that sort of thinking is exactly why science made such little
progress for 2000 years, from
the ancient Greeks to the renaissance
.
There was a Greek school of philosophy that not only made careful observations but also
quantified them. It's generally thought to have been founded by Thales of Miletus who
rejected explanations in terms of gods. It included Pythagoras who observed that the Earth
must be a sphere because only a sphere could cast a circular shadow on the Moon in all
different orientations. Aristarchus of Samos who estimated the size of the Earth, the
distance to the Sun and measured the relative distance of the Sun and Moon. Most of these
Greeks philosophers are only known from commentary on them made later by Aristotle and
Plato. The writings of Aristotle and Plato were preserved by copying because their
physics and meta-physics respectively fit with Christianity. Aristotle held that the
Earth was at the center of the universe and that all things below the Moon were
corruptible while things in the heavens were perfect and eternal. Plato held that
perception was illusory and that only pure thought could recollect the truths which were
perfect and eternal.
Brent
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email
to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
