Review of Aristotle and Contemporary Science

Review of Aristotle and Contemporary Science
by Fred Seddon

Sfendoni-Mentzou, Senior Editor, with an Introduction by Hillary Putnam
Peter Lang
(Two volumes, 301 and 312 pp. Respectively)

Reviewed by Fred Seddon

If Ayn Rand were stuck on a desert island and she could only have the works of one philosopher as company, there is no doubt in this reviewer’s mind that she would choose Aristotle. His achievements are so great that Rand was willing to forgive any and all errors that he committed.

These two volumes contain writings by individuals who, for the most part, share Rand’s positive assessment of Aristotle. The occasional cause of these essays was an eponymous international conference held in Greece in 1997. The essays collected in Volume One are from the plenary session, while those in Volume Two derive from papers presented at the conference.

There are 15 papers in Volume One, and 21 in its companion. Unlike Volume One, Two is organized by content, as follows: I: Matter; II: Space-Time-Causality; III: Logic-Mathematics-Methodology; IV: Biology; V: Psychology; VI: Ethics-Politics.

36 papers are obviously too much intellectual ground to cover in a review, but I would like to “hit a few highlights,” so to speak.

Hilary Putnam is the lead essayist of Volume One and his topic is “Aristotle’s Mind and the Contemporary Mind.” He covers some of the same ground Kelley covers in The Evidence of the Senses, for the position he defends is that while the Democriteans and the Stoics held what he and Kelley call a ‘representational’ theory of perception, Aristotle was a ‘direct realist.’ Putnam thinks, qualifications in place, that Aristotle was correct and the representational theory should be abandoned.

Bas van Fraassen, in “The Theory of Tragedy and of Science: Does Nature Have Narrative Structure?” answers yes to the question posed in his title. Yet his approach tends to make science so constructive that it would make most Objectivists uncomfortable.

Kelley devotes chapter 18 of his Art of Reasoning to the topic of explanation. Ernan McMullin plows this same field in “Truth and Explanation in Aristotle,” and Objectivists would no doubt benefit from reading both. Kelley provides an excellent introduction to the issue and should be read before attempting McMullin’s more advanced treatment.

So much for the first three chapters of Volume One. Let’s jump to Chapter Seven for the most edifying essay in both volumes, a treatment of Aristotle that is guaranteed to warm the heart of any lover of this great thinker.    David Martel Johnson, in “Aristotle’s Curse of Non-Existence against ‘Barbarians’,” tells the “story” of two curses, and in doing so defends Aristotle’s seemingly xenophobic claim that all foreigners were little better “than farm animals or domesticated plants.” (126)

The first curse formula is the one written on “a particular Ptolemaic … grave headstone” and it says “the violator of this tomb will not exist.” (130) The problem is that the curse is written inside the tomb so that any tomb raider, even Lara Croft, would die before she got to read the curse. But this implies that any archeologist who reads the curse knows it to be false and hence of little consequence to the investigator’s life. It is a curse which, when read, shows itself to be impotent.

But what about Aristotle’s curse and the “barbarians.” The short story is that “barbarians” are people who do not accept the law of contradiction. Aristotle had such contempt for these folks that he curses them in effect by saying ‘let those refuse to accept this law cease to exist.’ Then Johnson writes this optimistic and edifying conclusion, which I will quote in full.

Now at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, because of a great rise in the prestige of modern science, it has become impossible for the first time in history to find any human on earth who qualifies as a ‘barbarian’ in Aristotle’s special sense of the word. Not just the ancient Egyptians, but all such people have ceased to exist. (133)

This would seem to imply that we live in Aristotle’s world and that is damn lucky for us.

Chapters 12 through 14 of Volume One and the first two chapters of Volume Two concern the Aristotelian conception of matter. I want to focus on Chapters 12 and 14. While reading these chapters, one is driven to Galt’s speech and Rand’s tantalizingly brief remarks about matter. She writes, “Matter is indestructible, it changes its forms, but it cannot cease to exist.”   (1012) If the two “it”s are read as referring back to matter, this would seem to suggest a matter-ontology, which is the view of Aristotle defended by Sfendoni-Mentzou in her essay “What is Matter for Aristotle: ‘A Clothes-Horse’ or a Dynamic Element in Nature?” But such a matter- ontology seems to contradict the primacy of the entity, a view many Objectivists defend.

On the other hand, Olshewsky defends an entity-ontology in his “The Matter with Matter,” a view that Rand seems to endorse when she writes, “To exist . . . is to be an entity.” (1016) There seems to be a tension here. If Objectivism is an entity-ontology, the sentence quoted above from Atlas needs revision if not a radical reinterpretation. But if one opts for a matter- ontology, it would seem that we must say goodbye to the primacy of the entity. Peikoff expressed concern about a matter-ontology as early as his unpublished doctoral dissertation due to the fact that matter (at least in the sense of prime matter) is in principle unknowable.

Whether one regards Aristotle as a tutor in reading Rand on matter or as one thinker providing suggestive avenues of approach to another, these essays provide plenty to chew on. Bon appétit.

But all is not well in the state of Denmark. Essay number 10, “Hylemorphism, Quantum Physics and Levels of Reality” by Nicolescu is written against the law of excluded middle. Not only does his interpretation of the quantum revolution lead to a replacement of the law of excluded middle with a law of included middle, he would also have us jettison the law of causality, embrace a two world metaphysics, (which “does not prevent the two worlds from co-existing”) (174) say goodbye to hylemorphism, embrace a Gödelian structure of nature, and give up all hope for a unified theory of everything or TOE. But be of good cheer. In the last paragraph we are offered some good news - that is, Nicolescu thinks all of this will enable us to understand the “mere fact of the verticality of the human being in the world.” (183) Which world he doesn’t say, but I’m hoping it’s this one!

Any Objectivist interested in the history of ideas, especially the ideas of Aristotle, and modern science is going to find these two volumes an irresistible addition to their libraries.

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