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Aristotelian physics is an approximation to Newtonian physics for objects immersed in a fluid. https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/157866135.pdf https://core.ac.uk

• pdonis 6y ago
  This is interesting, but note carefully this statement from the introduction: "I reformulate and derive Aristotle’s physics in modern terms." Not that this is not a useful thing to do, but it means that what the author is calling "Aristotle's physics" is not the same thing as what Aristotle himself would have called "Aristotle's physics". The author is taking a modern viewpoint--develop a model and test its predictions against observation and experiment--that Aristotle simply did not take. That change in viewpoint is a major part of the paradigm shift from Aristotelian to modern physics that I have described elsewhere in this thread. It's also worth noting that Aristotle's explanation of why his physics worked the way it did is completely different from that of the author of this paper. It's not so much that the author treats Aristotle's physics as an approximation whereas Aristotle did not. The author is taking a modern, mechanistic viewpoint in analyzing Aristotle's physics: hey, it turns out that you can derive it as an approximation to Newtonian physics valid under certain conditions! But Aristotle himself would have been shocked by such a claim. He viewed his physics as part of a teleological view of the universe: objects behaved as they did because of their telos. There is no analogue to his concept of "telos" anywhere in modern physics, nor in the author's version of Aristotle's physics.