CHAPTER 4: RECASTING THE TRADITION: ARISTOTLE TO THE COPERNICANS
European Science and Learning to the Thirteenth Century
At the beginning of the XVI century men still believed in the ancient description of the universe, but they evaluated differently.
How did the West’s loss of science occurred?
- In two stages: 1. A slow decline in the quality and quantity of scientific activity; 2. A genuine disappearance of traditional learning.
- Ptolemy and Galen were the last great figures in ancient science.
- Documents of ancient science (or at least fragments) were often inaccurate, intellectually debased, and heavily interlarded with fable.
- The Catholic Church played an important role opposing science.
Why did the Moslem world expanded rapidly after the middle of the seventh century?
- Moslem scholars reconstituted ancient science by translating Syriac versions of original Greek texts into Arabic, and then adding their contributions.
- They also made advances in other sciences, like mathematics, chemistry, and optics.
- “Islamic civilization is important primarily because it preserved and proliferated the records of ancient Greek science for later European scholars.”
When and how were universities created?
- During the XII and XIII centuries, due to informal gatherings becoming too large and requiring regulations and charters.
What were the causes and role of the inconsistencies in the ancient texts?
- To the medieval scholars, these inconsistencies appeared as internal contradictions in a single body of knowledge. These scholars worked on the comparison and reconciliation of conflicting authorities.
- Inconsistencies: 1. Spheres of the Aristotelian cosmology and the epicycles and deferents of Ptolemaic astronomy.
What is the difference between the Hellenic and the Hellenistic civilization?
- Hellenic: Predominantly qualitative in method and cosmological orientation. Aristotle was its greatest representative.
- Hellenistic: Centered in commercial and cosmopolitan metropolises. A science that was less philosophical, more mathematical and numerical. Hipparchus and Ptolemy.
What helped to cast doubt upon the entire tradition?
- The difficulty and inconclusiveness in reconciliation of the apparent contradictions in ancient texts, as well as other conflicts in medieval thought.
Astronomy and the Church
“Before the tenth century and again after the sixteenth the Church’s influence was, on balance, antiscientific. The Copernican theory evolved within a learned tradition sponsored and supported by the Church.”
St. Augustine: “It is enough for the Christian to believe that the only cause of all created things, whether heavenly or earthly, whether visible or invisible, is the goodness of the Creator, the on true god; and that nothing exists but Himself that does not derive its existence from Him.”
- The Church fathers believed science to be a secular learning. It was not necessary except for the daily life.
The Church was able to keep the monopoly of learning by broadening the range of knowledge acceptable for Christian scholarship. The setting of Christian life was a fully Aristotelian universe. They modified and fabric modifications of ancient texts in order to be compatible with a coherent Christian doctrine.
“The physical and cosmological structure of the new Christian universe was predominantly Aristotelian.” The Bible gave way to metaphorical interpretations.
“In the process the Bible becomes, in some sense, a propaganda instrument, composed for an ignorant audience. The device is typical, the scholastics employed it again and again.”
Christian thinkers
- St. Augustine
- St. Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologica; compendium of Christian knowledge)
- Dante (Divine Comedy; “it’s a literal Aristotelian universe adapted to the epicycles of Hipparchus and the God of the Holy Church. The universe of spheres mirrors both man’s hope and his fate.” The intermediate/central position of man, both physical and spiritual are crucial in this work.)
Angels were important in bonding astronomy and theology since they were the forces of epicycles and deferents, therefore the more complex the astronomical theory; the greater was God’s legion.
Aristotle’s Scholastic Critics
Nicole Oresme (member of the Parisian nominalist school)
- He destroyed many of Aristotle’s proofs and suggested alternatives.
- Critical of Aristotle’s principal argument for the earth’s uniqueness.
- He criticized Aristotle’s refutation of Heraclides about the earth rotation. He provides an argument for optical relativity, which was very important for Copernicus and Galileo.
- Demolition of Aristotle’s argument for the immobility because an object thrown vertically upward always returns to the point on earth from which it departed.
Other scholars provided doctrinal modifications of the Aristotelian scientific tradition as well as introducing new areas of study. Among these fields are the kinematics and dynamics (motion of heavy bodies on the earth and in the heavens). Some of the insights include the important impetus theory.
The impetus theory was erected in opposition of Aristotle’s explanation of projectile motion. “In one way or another the impetus theory is implicated in most of the arguments, both medieval and Renaissance, that make it possible to move the earth without leaving terrestrial bodies behind.”
Jean Buridan
- He was Oresme’s teacher. He was one of the first ones to suggest that earth was subjected to a set of laws (God as the creator but not intervening, like a clock).
What were the impetus theory’s two most direct contributions to the Copernican Revolution?
1. The possibility of the earth’s motion.
2. The partial unification of terrestrial and celestial law.
Professor Whitehead remarked, “Faith in the possibility of science, generated antecedently to the development of modern scientific theory, is an unconscious derivate from medieval theology.”
XVI and XVII century great new scientific theories were derived from the scholastic’s criticism of Aristotelian thought.
Astronomy in the Age of Copernicus
“Until two decades before Copernicus’ birth in 1473 there was little concrete evidence of technically proficient planetary astronomy. Then it appeared in works like those of the German Georg Peuerbach (1423 – 1461) and his pupil Johannes Müller (1436 – 1476).”
Reasons for innovation in planetary astronomy
- Improved maps and navigation techniques due to the current successful voyages.
- Calendar reform.
“During the fifteenth century, Europe experienced a second great intellectual revival associated with a second rediscovery of classical models.” The discovery included works of Hellenistic mathematics and authentic Greek versions of scientific classics.
Role of Humanism
- Facilitate for others a break with the root concepts of Aristotle’s science.
- Fertilization of science by the strong otherworldly strain that characterized human thought.
Two un-Aristotelian ideas by Renaissance scientists (Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler):
1. A new belief in the possibility and importance of discovering simple arithmetic and geometric regularities in nature.
2. New view of the sun as the source of all vital principles and forces in the universe.
Neoplatonists
- They found in mathematics the key to the essential nature of God, the soul, and the world soul which was the universe (TFITE)
- Domenico Maria de Novara was among the first to criticize the Ptolemaic planetary theory.
- “The Neoplatonist’s God was a self-duplicating procreative principle whose immense potency was demonstrated by the very multiplicity of the forms that emanated from Him. In the material universe this fecund Deity was suitable represented by the sun whose visible and invisible emanations gave light, warmth, and fertility to the universe.”
- They put the sun in the position of God. The sun becomes the central position. Also there is no room for a finite universe since God’s goodness is infinite, therefore this could only be satisfied by an infinite act of creation.
It is said that Kepler was the man who made the Copernican system work.
“Innovations in a science need not be responses to novelties within that science at all. No fundamental astronomical discovery, no new sort of astronomical observation, persuades Copernicus of ancient astronomy’s inadequacy or of the necessity of change.”
Between Aristotle and Ptolemy, and Copernicus (almost two millenniums)… “In the interim the very process of rediscovery, the medieval integration of science and theology, the centuries of scholastic criticism, and the new currents of Renaissance life and thought, all had combined to change men’s attitude towards the scientific heritage that they learned in school.”