4 ms·

Rescuing Aristotle

49 points by ivank 12y ago

tjradcliffe 12y ago
It is worth remembering that many of Aristotle's works begin by covering the whole field as it existed in his time, and it is often difficult to untangle what Aristotle himself thought vs what he reported others thinking. The "standard" translations of Aristotle's major works--particularly Metaphysics--by Sir David Ross are also heavily influenced by Ross' neo-Platonism, so they can be quite misleading given the number of gaps and ambiguities that need to be filled. It is also worth remembering that we know today that Aristotle's physics accurately describes human experience. If you inquire into the physical beliefs of non-physicist college students you will find they give accounts that are Aristotelian to the core. The degree to which Newtonian physics is bizarre, abstract and counter-intuitive is often forgotten by people who bash Aristotle. He was often wrong, but the problems he was working on were fiercely difficult, and the tools he had to bring to bear on them incredibly crude by modern standards.
- dgfv1 12y ago
  One of the things that was emphasized to me when I was studying the ancient greeks was that I should try to step outside my own mindset and try to read the text as it is, rather than to try to interpret it from my own cultural or modern perspective. I think this is an important step to take when you study these kinds of texts.
zenogais 12y ago
Thank you for this post! Loved it. I feel like this is part of a larger bias among scientists to view the history of science as a clear progression from worse methods of explanation to better. This pernicious misreading of history seems to lead many scientists to view philosophers as proto-scientists rather than the more complex thought pioneers and concept creators that they are. Notable exceptions to this would include Albert Einstein who cited inspiration from and exhibited a competent understanding of Spinoza.
- jeangenie 12y ago
  Crockford articulates this point quite well https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxAXlJEmNMg#t=260 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxAXlJEmNMg#t=260, specifically the myth of inevitability.
- tjradcliffe 12y ago
  Philosophers are proto-scientists in the same way that alchemists are proto-scientists. They were both pursuing a goal that we now know is both impossible and uninteresting: turning base metals into gold in the case of alchemists, and certain propositions in the case of philosophers. As a scientist who has studied philosophy seriously, I am comfortable saying this is generally true of everything philosophers do: it is based on a fundamentally mistaken approach to understanding the world that vastly over-states the role of introspection, the fidelity of the senses, common-sense, memory, and the human perspective. The arts are an appropriate place for such explorations, and they should be understood as what they are: studies of human experience, and nothing else. They can't teach us anything about the way the world actually is, or what are the optimal principles to govern our behaviour, or any of the other things that philosophers claim to this day is their unique subject of study. There is a role for natural philosophy as the foundations of science, but the rest? Un-natural philosophy has neither place nor use, and Einstein's modest affection for Spinoza was almost completely irrelevant to this actual science. Philosophers have been trying to claim "inspiration" for the work of scientists for centuries (there used to be a significant contingent of Aristotelians who claimed Newton was inspired by Aristotle, which is almost completely without empirical basis.) It's kind of sad, seeing a several thousand year exercise in wrong-headedness finally meet its inevitable end, and of course there will be a few who insist on soldiering blindly on, arbitrarily privileging the human scale and human senses, blissfully unaware they are spouting gibberish, while the rest of us feel rather sad for them, and try to keep them away from sharp objects and the reins of power.
  - calibraxis 12y ago
    Philosophers like Lakatos offer a lot to scientists. Because science is a human endeavor, and its participants may reflect on why they do what they do. It can go well if the philosopher tries to understand science, speaks with scientists, etc. (Maybe mainstream philosophy is full of decadent garbage, but so is lots of mainstream programming, in my view.) Also, science has limits. (Which is fine because that's how it derives strengths.) Chomsky-as-philospher discusses them. To the extent that they act like martial arts schools, where each tries to prove the superiority of their own school... well we can all reflect on whether that's how we want to spend our one life.
jeangenie 12y ago
I think people commit a grave error when they try to pick out absurd-sounding beliefs that ancient people may or may not have held. The larger point is that Aristotle and Plato gave us ideas and concepts that we still think with. To give some perspective, at the time these guys lived they were still inventing alphabets and didn't put spaces between words. Reading was still a crude and unpolished form of communication, most people (Plato included) were illiterate. Their ideas are rudimentary but fundamental so it's easy to nitpick technicalities but completely ignores their most important contributions. /rant
- abecedarius 12y ago
  Can you back up this claim of an illiterate Plato? That sounds like the sort of assertion this post complains about. Plato's dialogs do have Socrates complaining about book-learning. AFAICT literacy rates in classical Athens are uncertain. I recently read http://www.amazon.com/Intimate-Lives-Ancient-Greeks-Peoples/dp/0313385718 http://www.amazon.com/Intimate-Lives-Ancient-Greeks-Peoples/... which left me with an impression of relatively high rates for male citizens, but I don't remember anything concrete. Searching turns up http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/classical-studies/ancient-history/literacy-and-democracy-fifth-century-athens http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/classical-stud... which says the orthodoxy is for low rates, but argues against it.
  - jeangenie 12y ago
    In my hasty reply I wrote Plato but meant Socrates. In fact Plato was most definitely literate. In fairness this was also only unsubstantiated rumor. Socrates upbringing was supposedly poor so it's possible he could have been. However my overall point was that this isn't important in light of his larger contributions.
- abecedarius 12y ago
  On the general point that the European literate culture pretty much starts with classical Greece: yeah. OTOH if you look just a little later at people like Euclid, Archimedes, Eratosthenes, ... you see work that's both correct and of the highest quality. I wish there was much more left from that era to give us a better idea how that happened. Later antiquity had terrible taste in what to preserve.
atmosx 12y ago
I don't think that any of the scientists/philosophers/mathematicians mentioned (not even Hawkings) can damage Aristotle that much. Aristotle is kind of far and away in terms of perceived importance. Perceived because I don't know the body of work of all the people mentioned in the article. IMHO these ancient scholars from whom western civilisation started, will be read and re-read from the original text, studied and re-studied much more thoroughly and many more times in the years to come than Russel of Hawkings. Maybe unfortunately so, maybe not. I'm not able to judge any of the names mentioned in the article. That's just a feeling, only time will tell. As other posters already pointed out, when science comes at play, we have to understand the dynamics of ancient Greece at 400 BC, with their lifestyle, beliefs and lack of knowledge (in any science: physics, chemistry, etc.). However the most important body of Greek philosophy is the questions/answers surrounding men, existence, purpose (in life), knowledge (inherited or learned?), etc. Because these are universal questions that any human being with acceptable intellect will have to confront in his lifetime. Off-topic: I've read an essay some time ago - can't find the link :-( - saying that especially today the difference between the body of knowledge of a top notch scientist and average peasant Joe is chaotic. Might be, but thinking how Aristotle, Euclid, Newton or Gauss would have felt in their era when talking to a peasant is a lot more scary to me.
runarberg 12y ago
So people misquote Aristoteles, so what? His philosophy is over 2000 years old, and severely outdated. Even if he didn't say a bunch of the non sense that is often attributed to him, he still said a lot of non sense. Perhaps not his fault (I'm sure in the year 4000 Bertrand Russel and Ludwig Wittgenstein will be considered obsolete gibberish). The point is that attributing truth value to authority is bad. Western science halted for many centuries because truth value was given to what Aristoteles said (or didn't say). I suppose that the OP has learned her/his lesson by not trusting Bertrand Russel on the claims. But he/she is then just re-iterating Russel's point. Don't base truth on authority.

49 points by ivank 12y ago

It is worth remembering that many of Aristotle's works begin by covering the whole field as it existed in his time, and it is often difficult to untangle what Aristotle himself thought vs what he reported others thinking. The "standard" translations of Aristotle's major works--particularly Metaphysics--by Sir David Ross are also heavily influenced by Ross' neo-Platonism, so they can be quite misleading given the number of gaps and ambiguities that need to be filled. It is also worth remembering that we know today that Aristotle's physics accurately describes human experience. If you inquire into the physical beliefs of non-physicist college students you will find they give accounts that are Aristotelian to the core. The degree to which Newtonian physics is bizarre, abstract and counter-intuitive is often forgotten by people who bash Aristotle. He was often wrong, but the problems he was working on were fiercely difficult, and the tools he had to bring to bear on them incredibly crude by modern standards.

dgfv1 12y ago
One of the things that was emphasized to me when I was studying the ancient greeks was that I should try to step outside my own mindset and try to read the text as it is, rather than to try to interpret it from my own cultural or modern perspective. I think this is an important step to take when you study these kinds of texts.

zenogais 12y ago

Thank you for this post! Loved it. I feel like this is part of a larger bias among scientists to view the history of science as a clear progression from worse methods of explanation to better. This pernicious misreading of history seems to lead many scientists to view philosophers as proto-scientists rather than the more complex thought pioneers and concept creators that they are. Notable exceptions to this would include Albert Einstein who cited inspiration from and exhibited a competent understanding of Spinoza.

jeangenie 12y ago
Crockford articulates this point quite well https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxAXlJEmNMg#t=260 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxAXlJEmNMg#t=260, specifically the myth of inevitability.
tjradcliffe 12y ago
Philosophers are proto-scientists in the same way that alchemists are proto-scientists. They were both pursuing a goal that we now know is both impossible and uninteresting: turning base metals into gold in the case of alchemists, and certain propositions in the case of philosophers. As a scientist who has studied philosophy seriously, I am comfortable saying this is generally true of everything philosophers do: it is based on a fundamentally mistaken approach to understanding the world that vastly over-states the role of introspection, the fidelity of the senses, common-sense, memory, and the human perspective. The arts are an appropriate place for such explorations, and they should be understood as what they are: studies of human experience, and nothing else. They can't teach us anything about the way the world actually is, or what are the optimal principles to govern our behaviour, or any of the other things that philosophers claim to this day is their unique subject of study. There is a role for natural philosophy as the foundations of science, but the rest? Un-natural philosophy has neither place nor use, and Einstein's modest affection for Spinoza was almost completely irrelevant to this actual science. Philosophers have been trying to claim "inspiration" for the work of scientists for centuries (there used to be a significant contingent of Aristotelians who claimed Newton was inspired by Aristotle, which is almost completely without empirical basis.) It's kind of sad, seeing a several thousand year exercise in wrong-headedness finally meet its inevitable end, and of course there will be a few who insist on soldiering blindly on, arbitrarily privileging the human scale and human senses, blissfully unaware they are spouting gibberish, while the rest of us feel rather sad for them, and try to keep them away from sharp objects and the reins of power.
- calibraxis 12y ago
  Philosophers like Lakatos offer a lot to scientists. Because science is a human endeavor, and its participants may reflect on why they do what they do. It can go well if the philosopher tries to understand science, speaks with scientists, etc. (Maybe mainstream philosophy is full of decadent garbage, but so is lots of mainstream programming, in my view.) Also, science has limits. (Which is fine because that's how it derives strengths.) Chomsky-as-philospher discusses them. To the extent that they act like martial arts schools, where each tries to prove the superiority of their own school... well we can all reflect on whether that's how we want to spend our one life.

jeangenie 12y ago

I think people commit a grave error when they try to pick out absurd-sounding beliefs that ancient people may or may not have held. The larger point is that Aristotle and Plato gave us ideas and concepts that we still think with. To give some perspective, at the time these guys lived they were still inventing alphabets and didn't put spaces between words. Reading was still a crude and unpolished form of communication, most people (Plato included) were illiterate. Their ideas are rudimentary but fundamental so it's easy to nitpick technicalities but completely ignores their most important contributions. /rant

abecedarius 12y ago
Can you back up this claim of an illiterate Plato? That sounds like the sort of assertion this post complains about. Plato's dialogs do have Socrates complaining about book-learning. AFAICT literacy rates in classical Athens are uncertain. I recently read http://www.amazon.com/Intimate-Lives-Ancient-Greeks-Peoples/dp/0313385718 http://www.amazon.com/Intimate-Lives-Ancient-Greeks-Peoples/... which left me with an impression of relatively high rates for male citizens, but I don't remember anything concrete. Searching turns up http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/classical-studies/ancient-history/literacy-and-democracy-fifth-century-athens http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/classical-stud... which says the orthodoxy is for low rates, but argues against it.
- jeangenie 12y ago
  In my hasty reply I wrote Plato but meant Socrates. In fact Plato was most definitely literate. In fairness this was also only unsubstantiated rumor. Socrates upbringing was supposedly poor so it's possible he could have been. However my overall point was that this isn't important in light of his larger contributions.
abecedarius 12y ago
On the general point that the European literate culture pretty much starts with classical Greece: yeah. OTOH if you look just a little later at people like Euclid, Archimedes, Eratosthenes, ... you see work that's both correct and of the highest quality. I wish there was much more left from that era to give us a better idea how that happened. Later antiquity had terrible taste in what to preserve.

atmosx 12y ago

I don't think that any of the scientists/philosophers/mathematicians mentioned (not even Hawkings) can damage Aristotle that much. Aristotle is kind of far and away in terms of perceived importance. Perceived because I don't know the body of work of all the people mentioned in the article. IMHO these ancient scholars from whom western civilisation started, will be read and re-read from the original text, studied and re-studied much more thoroughly and many more times in the years to come than Russel of Hawkings. Maybe unfortunately so, maybe not. I'm not able to judge any of the names mentioned in the article. That's just a feeling, only time will tell. As other posters already pointed out, when science comes at play, we have to understand the dynamics of ancient Greece at 400 BC, with their lifestyle, beliefs and lack of knowledge (in any science: physics, chemistry, etc.). However the most important body of Greek philosophy is the questions/answers surrounding men, existence, purpose (in life), knowledge (inherited or learned?), etc. Because these are universal questions that any human being with acceptable intellect will have to confront in his lifetime. Off-topic: I've read an essay some time ago - can't find the link :-( - saying that especially today the difference between the body of knowledge of a top notch scientist and average peasant Joe is chaotic. Might be, but thinking how Aristotle, Euclid, Newton or Gauss would have felt in their era when talking to a peasant is a lot more scary to me.

runarberg 12y ago

So people misquote Aristoteles, so what? His philosophy is over 2000 years old, and severely outdated. Even if he didn't say a bunch of the non sense that is often attributed to him, he still said a lot of non sense. Perhaps not his fault (I'm sure in the year 4000 Bertrand Russel and Ludwig Wittgenstein will be considered obsolete gibberish). The point is that attributing truth value to authority is bad. Western science halted for many centuries because truth value was given to what Aristoteles said (or didn't say). I suppose that the OP has learned her/his lesson by not trusting Bertrand Russel on the claims. But he/she is then just re-iterating Russel's point. Don't base truth on authority.