Aristotle and Ockham

[peterdamian]

First, I don’t think that anyone, even Hannam at his most exuberant, would argue that the natural philosophers were part of an intellectual movement as broad and intellectually sophisticated as that achieved by the ancient Greeks.
newhumanist.org.uk/2444/science-gods-philosophers-and-the-dark-ages

I think it's broadly accepted that by about 1260, medieval knowledge had approached that of the classical period. After that, at least in logic and the philosophy of science, it had advanced well beyond that. The medieval scholars took what were an almost incomprehensible set of cryptic notes by Aristotle, worked out what they meant, re-expressed them in a way that was much more understandable, and in addition added many ideas of their own.

Secondly, and here Hannam helps us along the way, while the Greeks produced much original work, the vast majority of work done by the natural philosophers, were dependent on these same works (or, at least the few of them to be available in the Middle Ages).

Yes, but they amplified these works considerably. And remember (few people seem to address this) part of the problem was the Greek view on science, or at least the view of Aristotle, who dominated the medieval period. Almost none of Aristotle's opinions on scientific fact were correct. And his view of scientific method, which was to prefer the certainties of mathematical and geometric reasoning to 'empirical' reasoning, clearly hindered the development of modern science considerably.

Also, did Greek and classical era science evolve from its beginnings in the fifth and fourth century BC to the collapse of the Western empire in 476? It appears not. And note that it continued in the Eastern empire pretty much until the Fourth Crusade. If the Greek worldview was so advanced, why didn't modern science evolve in the early centuries AD?

And how was it that after recovering the science of antiquity in the thirteenth century, modern science was born in the seventeenth century? I don't have any answers to these questions, but they are fascinating all the same.

[edit]

Here's another extraordinary claim

Freeman is clearly a little mournful about the loss of logic until Thomas Aquinas
www.amazon.com/Closing-Western-Mind-Reason-Vintage/dp/1400033802/bedeslibrary

This is from a review of Freeman's book. Does Freeman say or suggest that? It's truly astonishing. I shall have a look at Freeman's book. As I say, the main thing Freeman would have to explain is why Greek science appeared to have stagnated well before the Christian domination of the classical world in the West.

[peterdamian]

I am about half way through. Some thoughts here.

ocham.blogspot.com/2010/11/hasty-generalisation.html

[edit - Monday 15h November]

However, I do take issue with what is said on p. 171 (quoted below). Spade is cited as the source for 'Multiple entities should never be invoked unnecessarily'. Ockham does say something like this (e.g. 'Frustra fit per plura, quod potest fieri per pauciora'), but that in no way means we should reject explanations of which we have no direct experience. Ockham clearly accepts the explanation of an eclipse as the interposition of the earth between the sun and the moon, even though we have no direct experience of that interposition (which we have to calculate by astronomy). Nor does Ockham reject explanation in terms of universal concepts. He would agree that what all dogs have in common is the fact that they are all dogs. What he rejects is the positing of some singular concrete entity beyond the individual dogs, a universal dogness. We should not interpret common terms as singular terms. Elsewhere (towards the end of book I of Summa Logicae) he says that we should not multiply entities according to the multiplicity of terms.

In this he agrees with Scotus, who says "ratio communis vel suppositi non attribuitur rei ut existit, sed ut concipitur apud intellectum. Quia ponere aliquid existere secundum quod sibi attribuitur ratio communis est ponere ideas, sicut Plato posuit" - "the nature of what is common or individual is not attributed to a thing as it exists, but as it is conceived in the understanding, because to suppose that anything exists according as the nature of the common is attributed to it is to posit ideas, as Plato did".

God's Philosophers p. 171: "[Ockham] actually said 'Multiple entities should never be invoked unnecessarily'. What this means is that we should reject physical and philosophical explanations tht posit the existence of things, like universals, of which we have no direct experience. From the anachronistic point of view of modern science, this is not a terribly good idea. Species, elements and electrons are all universals that have real and specific properties. The element carbon really does have a unique atomic structure and really does combine with oxygen (another universal) during combustion (yet another). Carbon is not just a collection of black lumps to which we have arbitrarily given a particular label."

[peterdamian]

I developed one of my comments above (about the problem of Aristotle) into a whole post here ocham.blogspot.com/2010/11/problem-of-aristotle.html

Why did Greek science (or at least the Greek science that has come down to us) not develop much beyond Aristotle. And how is it that when the medieval West got hold of Aristotle (they didn't really properly digest him until the middle of the 13th century) they developed beyond him so quickly?

I think part of the reason, as Hannam says on p.174 is that "the trouble is that is is impossible just to tinker with Aristotle's natural philosophy at the edges. It goes much deeper than that. His was a complete theory of reality and rejecting any significant chunks of it would cause the whole edifice to collapse." Although that doesn't explain why the medievals succeeded where the ancients did not.

Another thing to consider is the way that Aristotle (and perhaps all Greek science) places priority and intellectual status to reasoning a priori - from cause to effect - rather than a posteriori - from effect to cause.

And yet another consideration - I've only just noticed this in Hannam's book, is the development of the 'de potentia Dei' argument. This is an argument form that Ockham frequently uses: suppose that God changes the world in some way that is allowed by logic. What would the effect be? It's an early form of 'thought experiment'. Suarez and then Leibniz developed this form later, and it was used with devastating effect much later by Poincare then finally Einstein (the theory of relativity).

An example of the argument: suppose that God created the world ten years earlier than he did. What would be the effect: precisely nothing. Or what if God moved the whole universe one foot in some direction. Or turned the universe upside down. We would notice nothing at all. This suggests our ideas of time and space are relative.

Ockham uses the argument frequently (I will dig up some examples). You can see how it is consistent with his parsimonious principles, and his nominalism.

[humphreyclarke]

Nov 16, 2010 9:18:33 GMT peterdamian said:

Why did Greek science (or at least the Greek science that has come down to us) not develop much beyond Aristotle. And how is it that when the medieval West got hold of Aristotle (they didn't really properly digest him until the middle of the 13th century) they developed beyond him so quickly?

There is one historian (PHD from Columbia), Richard Carrier, who argues that the Hellenistic tradition did advance quite a way beyond Aristotle. James addresses this here

bedejournal.blogspot.com/2010/09/richard-carrier-on-ancient-science.html

For my part, I find when I go back to the primary evidence I find RC distorts or exaggerates his findings but it is a point of view which needs to be addressed.

[peterdamian]

Nov 16, 2010 13:18:31 GMT humphreyclarke said:

Nov 16, 2010 9:18:33 GMT peterdamian said:

Why did Greek science (or at least the Greek science that has come down to us) not develop much beyond Aristotle. And how is it that when the medieval West got hold of Aristotle (they didn't really properly digest him until the middle of the 13th century) they developed beyond him so quickly?

There is one historian (PHD from Columbia), Richard Carrier, who argues that the Hellenistic tradition did advance quite a way beyond Aristotle. James addresses this here

bedejournal.blogspot.com/2010/09/richard-carrier-on-ancient-science.html

For my part, I find when I go back to the primary evidence I find RC distorts or exaggerates his findings but it is a point of view which needs to be addressed.

Thank for the link, which I read with interest. The fact remains that, even if James is completely wrong, we have to explain why the Greek took so long to advance beyond Aristotle, and how it was that after the Latins completely absorbed Aristotle (a process which was completed at the end of the first half of the 13th century), and thus effectively reached 350BC, they managed within 50 years to get beyond Aristotle in logic, within 100 years beyond Aristotle in natural philosophy, and so on.

[James Hannam]

Thanks for raising this Peter.

When considering the why questions of science, I think it is helpful to ask the question the other way around. As George Saliba says of Islamic Science, the right question is not why modern science never arose in Muslim states (or China or India or Greece or whereever). It is clear that science is extremely difficult, in many ways counter-intuitive and not a 'given'.

So we need to ask why medieval and early modern Europe were exceptional, not what other civilisations lacked. Since almost all civilisations did not develop modern science, it does not make sense to ask why Greece in particular failed. There seems to be a related view that if you remove all impediments, science will arise automatically because clever freethinkers will somehow invent it. But if the Greeks really did enjoy intellectual freedom (a doubtful point, admittedly), this is clearly not the case. All their creativity alone was not enough.

So the answer to your question, I think, is to be found in the schools of medieval Europe and not the stoas of Greece.

Best wishes

James

[humphreyclarke]

Here is a link to an interview by the Oxford historian Allan Chapman.

christthetao.homestead.com/audio/chapmaninterview.mp3

The let down in science in the 3rd century AD is brought up but as Chapman reminds us, we should be cautious in expecting a constant interest in science. I’d agree, for example I seem to remember reading in Gaukroger’s Emergence of a Scientific Culture that the Royal Society was derided by the public for not producing anything of practical benefit – you don’t tend to get a lot of pay off in the beginning.

The other point which I think is interesting is that Chapman says the ancients had discovered pretty much all they could discover with the primitive instruments they had. They were developing angular instruments, the astrolabe, the armillary sphere – but you are only able to measure the same kinds of things unlike the telescope the microscope and the barometer. So for example, the Byzantines were great exponents of Ptolemy’s work but they didn’t have enough data to challenge his model. There is a limit to the amount of knowledge you can extract out of nature without additional optical devices.

I’d be interested to see what you think of this. I can certainly see how that relates to say astronomy or biology. Clearly there was a flood of new data during the scientific revolution. It doesn’t explain why Aristotle wasn’t overthrown earlier since some of the experiments that call into question his physics are pretty simple. I think a lot of it has to do with the stature the Ancients enjoyed. Galen had such a towering influence – ‘the first among doctors and unique among philosophers’ - even though his ideas were completely wrong. I think what happens with theories of that stature is that even when you find anomalies you try to fit them into the system.

[James Hannam]

Thanks Humphrey.

I'm not sure I entirely agree with Chapman here. He is right that instrumental inventions were important and medieval ingenuity helped here. But there were, as you say, lots of easy ways that Aristotle could have been disproved and was not. For instance, an easy experiment shows that maggots do not spontaneously appear in a carcass that rots in a sealed container, or even one exposed to air but covered in a fine net to keep the flies off.

Also, Tycho did not have access to the telescope for the observations that provided the backbone of Kepler's models.

And I do tend to distrust just this sort of neat explanation of what the Greeks lacked.

Best wishes

James

[himself]

I've always tended toward the view expressed by Toby Huff in The Rise of Early Modern Science that the inhibition was the lack of institutionalization of science. It was not "embedded in the culture" but was the private fascination of particular individuals. These are precisely the individuals we revere and cherish -- Aristotle, Archimedes, Galen, etc. -- and this gives us a skewed vision of Greek society as a whole as treasuring rational inquiry into the philosophy of nature.

There is also a tendency to confuse industry and technological innovation with science. But one may have the former without the latter; and the latter without the former. Facts, lore, and rules of thumb do not a science make. It was the 17th century revolution with its heady manifestos that enslaved nature to the service of man and his conquest of the universe -- F.Bacon, Descartes, et al. Now, to us, they seem inseparable.

It is possible, reading Grosseteste on Light, to suppose that he had a telescope. He described the Milky Way as composed of innumerable individual stars, in the context of a discussion of lenses that would make far things seem close. A lucky guess? Or did he do it? One of the prime pitfalls for problem-solving teams in industry is the tendency to drop a problem once the root cause is found, and not proceed to a solution. The thrill of discovery, of knowing a new thing, may lead to a sense of completion.

[peterdamian]

What were the differences between the Greek culture, the Islamic culture and the culture in the Latin West in the 12th and 13th centuries? Were there any negative causes which were present in the first two but absent in the third? I.e. causes inhibiting scientific progress?

Were there any positive causes which were present in the third, but absent in the first two?

Some differences.

1. The Latin West was undergoing a process of regeneration from at least the 12th century onwards. I am assuming here that there really was some Dark or at least Grey era between the fall of the Empire in the West, and the 12th century. Is there any evidence that such a situation can be a positive cause. (I'm not an expert on Islamic culture of the Golden age, however).

2. The West had two explicitly Christian philosophers (Boethius and Augustine) who dominated their thinking, and were sufficiently ancient to be regarded as 'authorities'. Islamic culture didn't really have such figures. Avicenna and Averroes came too late, and Averroes had little impact anyway. I don't know what the effect of this difference would be, but it *is* a difference.

3. In the Latin West there were many figures who had both high status in the Church (cardinals, bishops, archbishops and so on) and were intellectuals. Bonaventura, Grosseteste, many others. Was there an equivalent in the other cultures. I.e. great thinkers who also had great political power?

A connected point is that (as far as I understand - not much) Islam has no organised church. Is some kind of establishment or organisation necessary for science to flourish? (The phenomenon of thinkers like Spinoza and Hume suggests not, however).

4. There were the universities in the West. Were they genuinely different from the schools established in Islamic culture? (I'm not an expert on the latter - nor indeed on the former).

Nov 16, 2010 20:38:48 GMT himself said:

I've always tended toward the view expressed by Toby Huff in The Rise of Early Modern Science that the inhibition was the lack of institutionalization of science. It was not "embedded in the culture" but was the private fascination of particular individuals.

The problem here is explaining the success and influence of men like Aquinas, Scotus and even Ockham who necessarily operated within a power structure. Abelard did not, and look what happened. Ockham lies in between - he sought an alternative power structure, and in any case his greatest work (if you call the Summa his greatest work) was from within.

Nov 16, 2010 20:38:48 GMT himself said:

There is also a tendency to confuse industry and technological innovation with science. But one may have the former without the latter; and the latter without the former.

That is also true. One slight criticism of James's book is the way he mixes different kinds of innovation. There is invention, discovery and explanation. Technology is the first, the second lies in an odd class of its own. Only the first is science, properly so-called.

[James Hannam]

Nov 16, 2010 22:14:10 GMT peterdamian said:

4. There were the universities in the West. Were they genuinely different from the schools established in Islamic culture? (I'm not an expert on the latter - nor indeed on the former).

Some previous thought on this:

bedejournal.blogspot.com/2010/10/islam-and-invention-of-university.html

I think I might do a blog post on where I stand currently on the question of how important metaphysics and church discipline were to science.

Best wishes

James

[peterdamian]

The link below is worth a look – selections below. They read like a ‘New Atheist’ parody of the medieval worldview in which science was completely subordinated to the scriptures. Except (1) they are genuine, not parody. (2) There is pretty good evidence that the medievals did accept some sort of boundary between the divine and the natural (in the science that a creator created the natural laws from the beginning and, being a wise and consistent creator, very rarely intervened in their natural operation).

Does Islamic education tend more to the rote learning of key texts, and an emphasis on the teacher passing on exactly what they learned, and nor more and no less? Or is this a Western stereotype.

This point is exemplified by the views expressed by Saudi delegates to a high level conference held in Kuwait in 1983. The ostensible aim of the conference, attended by rectors from 17 Arab universities, was to identify and remove bottlenecks in the development of science and technology in the Arab world. But a single topic dominated the proceedings: is science Islamic? The Saudis held that pure science tends to produce 'Mu'tazilite tendencies' potentially subversive of belief. Science is profane because it is secular; as such - in their opinion - it goes against Islamic beliefs. Hence, recommended the Saudis, although technology should be promoted for its obvious benefits, pure science ought to be softpedalled."
[…]
to underscore the belief in the efficacy and existence of miracles, a large-scale international conference entitled Scientific Miracles Of Quran And Sunnah was held in October 1987 in the capital city of Islamabad […] The thrust of the conference was towards the following:

(1) Affirmation of the existence of 'scientific' miracles;

(2) Proving that all known scientific facts can be traced to either the Qur'an or Sunnah;

(3) New conjectures related to physical phenomena, ostensibly based on the holy texts;

(4) A condemnation of secular 'Western' science.
www.alislam.org/egazette/articles/Islam-and-Science-Religious-orthodoxy-battle-rationality.pdf

[peterdamian]

P.S. I had a friendly discussion with Freeman at the other forum and he made a comment here www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2010/a-truth-was-now-defined-and-enforced-by-law/#comment-63792 which was very revealing. Essentially he seems to be interested in ‘popular’ culture and thought in the medieval period, whereas I am interested in ‘intellectual’ culture as evinced in the works of Aquinas, Scotus, Ockham and so on.

It is an interesting question (and I think there is even a literature on it) as to how these two very different worlds interact with each other. Is the highbrow world ‘marginal to any form of actual life’ as Freeman suggests? Certainly Scotus (and to some extent Ockham) are impenetrable to those who do not have the patience. But Aquinas? Aquinas was not really an intellectual. He was an ingenious and masterful summariser, a synthesiser and a populariser. His influence on popular culture was immense, via his influence on Catholic thought and teaching.

[bjorn]

Nov 17, 2010 13:00:54 GMT peterdamian said:

P.S. I had a friendly discussion with Freeman at the other forum and he made a comment here www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2010/a-truth-was-now-defined-and-enforced-by-law/#comment-63792 which was very revealing. Essentially he seems to be interested in ‘popular’ culture and thought in the medieval period, whereas I am interested in ‘intellectual’ culture as evinced in the works of Aquinas, Scotus, Ockham and so on.

It is an interesting question (and I think there is even a literature on it) as to how these two very different worlds interact with each other. Is the highbrow world ‘marginal to any form of actual life’ as Freeman suggests? Certainly Scotus (and to some extent Ockham) are impenetrable to those who do not have the patience. But Aquinas? Aquinas was not really an intellectual. He was an ingenious and masterful summariser, a synthesiser and a populariser. His influence on popular culture was immense, via his influence on Catholic thought and teaching.

You're doing a great job, Peter!

However, if we were to evaluate the Medieval period by it's ‘popular’ culture and thought, why shouldn't we do the same for the Classical period?

The Greeks and Romans were far more interested in games, soothsaying and magical papyri than in e.g. Aristotle and Euklid. Their religious cults were perhaps even less interested in the latter.

In many ways the medieval innovation was to join philosophy and religion (for better and worse), and institutionalise both at another invention, the universities.

As I see it, this combination may have been a (or the) decisive factor in paving the road to modern science.

[himself]

As I recollect, the inhibiting factors were different in different civilizations. Huff credits the importance of "conscience" in Western Religion and then Western Law. This derived from Plato's Timaeus and Paul's Romans 2, and posited a human mind capable of drawing correct conclusions from moral reasoning and thence from reasoning about nature. This led, too, to the idea of jurisdiction and self-governance and hence to the corporate "person" exemplified by the University where science found a home base.

In Islam, the concept of "conscience" did not take root. The nearest equivalent was niyya meaning "intention." (Damir for "conscience" came into use following Napoleon's invasion of Egypt.) The fiqh of the ash'ari aqida was that men were simply to submit and follow a set of rules laid out in Holy Qur'an and the hadith. One could reason from these via qiyas (or "analogy"), but human reason could not be relied upon in general for correct conclusions. Significantly, the Timaeus seems never to have been translated into Arabic. Even so, there was a layer of Hellenism a thousand years thick on the ground in the lands the Arabs conquered, with a Christian layer of icing about half as thick. So the Arabs had a huge pool to tap and Islam came closer to inventing and institutionalizing science than any but the Latin West.

In ancient Greece, trees had dryads, springs had nymphs, and the stars were alive, divine, and influential in human affairs. It is hard to develop a natural science when Nature is self-willed and Hera could overrule Zeus at any moment. That a corporal's guard of Greek philosophers apparently did so was a great achievement.

China's stumbling block was that they never conceived of natural philosophy as a coherent, well-defined body of learning. They never came up with either Euclidean geometry or logic. Their astronomy remained purely arithmetical. And concatenation (and coincidence) remained for them as significant as cause-and-effect.

There were minority strains in China (the Moists) and in Islam (the mu'tazilites) that credited the ability of human reason to reach correct conclusions. History might have been very different had they triumphed over the Confucians and the ash'arites.

Schools. The Western University was an independently chartered, self-governing corporation with jurisdiction. It possessed its own courts and militias. It set curricula, courses of study, degrees of achievement, and the wearing of funny hats. No one else came up with that.

The Islamic madrassa was also independently chartered via an endowment, usually by a prominent scholar or his patron, but with one exception they did not teach natural philosophy. A master scholar taught his book and when the student had memorized the book and could explain it to the master's satisfaction, he was given an ijaza, which entitled him to teach that particular book. A student could wander from madrassa to madrassa collecting ijaza, but there was no course of study, no set of ijaza that added up to a "master's degree" or "doctorate." Nor was there the equivalent of the Western ius ubique docendi, the "right to teach anywhere." Further, while madrassas had libraries with a wide range of books, only Islamic studies were officially taught. Books in "Greek Studies" [as it was called] were in the library, and no one objected too much if someone wanted to read or teach such things privately; but there was no institutionalization of the study of natural philosophy and it was often suppressed. Only one madrassa, Marâgha, was chartered to teach something we would call science; viz., astronomy. It lasted about 75 years. Astronomers came under the authority of the muwaqqit, the time-keepers of the mosques, just as doctors were controlled by the inspector of the market-place, the muhtasib.

In China, the Imperial College was a department of the government. It was a training academy for mandarins and taught the Confucian classics, poetry, and so forth. Briefly, in Shen Kua's time, some questions on astronomy were included, but the examiners themselves were so ignorant and the essays so confused that, as Shen Kua wrote, all were passed with distinction. The important thing was not to know astronomy, but to be able to write an essay in the classical style. The cram schools were, as they sound, merely to prep candidates for the examinations.