About
Content
Store
Forum

Rebirth of Reason
War
People
Archives
Objectivism

Post to this threadMark all messages in this thread as readMark all messages in this thread as unreadBack one pagePage 0Page 1


Sanction: 6, No Sanction: 0
Sanction: 6, No Sanction: 0
Post 20

Tuesday, June 8, 2010 - 10:12pmSanction this postReply
Bookmark
Link
Edit

"Under Aristotle’s philosophy of reason, Greece flourished as the cradle of Western Civilization." The only plausible reading of this is the (inaccurate) claim that Aristotle came first and the rise of Greek civilization came later.


Is that really the 'only plausible reading' Perhaps you should read some Aristotle and learn the difference between 'flourishing' and merely existing. Under Aristotle, "the Greek culture flourished as the cradle of Western Civilization" could not be more accurate. Before Aristotle, it was there, but it was not flourishing.

Sanction: 12, No Sanction: 0
Sanction: 12, No Sanction: 0
Sanction: 12, No Sanction: 0
Post 21

Tuesday, June 8, 2010 - 10:42pmSanction this postReply
Bookmark
Link
Edit

What you present here is a testable hypothesis: Hellenistic science and technology descend from Aristotle. I'd have to see your data. The best way to show this would be to show that later Greek scientists explicitly cited him. Second best would be to show that their contemporaries reported this. You might know of others. James Lennox, an Objectivist and an expert on Aristotle's biology, notes that even his biology fell fairly quickly into obscurity after his death. To show that he was influential in fields that he didn't work in (or where he was dead wrong, such as cosmology and mechanics) would be a hard sell, but you're welcome to try.


Eratosthenes, when setting out to measure the size of the Earth in Alexendria around 240 BC cited Aristotle's arguments proving the Earth was indeed a sphere - that constellations appeared lower or higher in the sky as one traveled north or south, and that the shadow of the Earth cast on the moon during a lunar eclipse was always round. Eratosthenes was a librarian of the Library of Alexandria and friend to Archimedes.

Aristotle argument that the Earth did not move based on the observation that the relative position of the stars never changed, though wrong, was completely reasonable given that stellar parrallex is not visible by the naked eye and was not observed until the 1800's, it was never the less cited by Ptolemly when arguing his Geocentric model and was prevalent enough to not only be mentioned by Tycho Brahe, but to in fact SWAY his opinion to reject Heliocentricity in favor of Geocentrciticy (though begrudgingly) Tycho Brahe was the best naked eye astronomical observer to have ever lived, he spent years trying to observe stellar parallelx, and finding none, went against Copernican theory and supported the Ptolemly / Aristotle view.

Daniel N. Robinson Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Georgetown University and a member of the philosophy faculty of Oxford University says of Aristotle in his Teaching Company lecture "Great Ideas of Philosophy"


"I've occasionally said to classes that if I had to single out any event as evidence that some civilization out in the milky way was taking pity on humanity for its slow progress...the evidence might well be Aristotle and his accomplishments. Its almost as if such a distant galactic neighbor said 'Goodness sakes those human beings do not seem to be getting along at all, Aristotle, why don't you go down there and get things going"


He continues


"The sheer intellectual power of this man, expressing itself in biology, natural science, ethics, politics, metaphysics, logic, is simply without parallel in the history of thought. There is almost no academic or scholarly subject taught that does not bare his stamp of influence."


So I'm curious, do you actually have any reason to think that Aristotle did not influence science and civilization for hundreds of years? Or is it that you just don't know anything about Aristotle?


Post to this threadBack one pagePage 0Page 1


User ID Password or create a free account.