: Edward Feser
: Aristotle's Revenge The Metaphysical Foundations of Physical and Biological Science
: Editiones Scholasticae
: 9783868381993
: 1
: CHF 17.80
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: Allgemeines, Lexika
: English
: 515
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Actuality and potentiality, substantial form and prime matter, efficient causality and teleology are among the fundamental concepts of Aristotelian philosophy of nature. Aristotle's Revenge argues that these concepts are not only compatible with modern science, but are implicitly presupposed by modern science. Among the many topics covered are the metaphysical presuppositions of scientific method; the status of scientific realism; the metaphysics of space and time; the metaphysics of quantum mechanics; reductionism in chemistry and biology; the metaphysics of evolution; and neuroscientific reductionism. The book interacts heavily with the literature on these issues in contemporary analytic metaphysics and philosophy of science, so as to bring contemporary philosophy and science into dialogue with the Aristotelian tradition.

Edward Feser is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Pasadena City College in Pasadena, California, USA. His many books include Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction, Aquinas, and the edited volume Aristotle on Method and Metaphysics.

2. The scientist and scientific method


2.1 The arch of knowledge and its “empiriometric” core


The chapters to follow will argue that theresults of modern science not only in no way conflict with the central claims of Aristotelian philosophy of nature, but in some respects even vindicate those claims. The present chapter argues that the verymethods of modern science vindicate those claims – and in an even more decisive way. For while the results of science might change (as currently accepted theories are abandoned and replaced by new ones), at least the core elements of scientific method will not.

Naturally, this raises the question of exactly what the scientific methodis – something which has, of course, been a matter of great controversy in modern philosophy of science. I am not suggesting that that controversy is susceptible of easy resolution, nor will I try to resolve it here. My point is that although various details of scientific method are matters of dispute, there are some basic assumptions that all sides to the debate tend to agree on, and it is these which presuppose an essentially Aristotelian conception of nature (whether most philosophers of science realize this or not).

To see what these core assumptions are it will be useful to consider the history of what philosopher of science David Oldroyd (1989) has called the notion of “the arch of knowledge,” and in particular the ways that notion was developed by early modern thinkers like Bacon, Galileo, Descartes, Newton, Boyle and others, and modified by more recent philosophers of science. As Oldroyd notes, the basic idea of the “arch” in fact goes back at least to Plato. But it is the construal of the “arch” associated with the fathers of the scientific revolution that has in modern times come to define what constitutes “science.”

Bacon famously put heavy emphasis on observation as the evidential foundation of science. That was not by itself in any way novel. The thesis thatnothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses had been a commonplace of medieval Aristotelianism. Where Bacon took himself to be departing from his Aristotelian predecessors was in hisapplication of this principle. For Bacon, the Aristotelians were too uncritical in their appeal to empirical evidence, in two respects. First, they were in his view too quick to draw general conclusions from that evidence. What was needed was patience, and in particular the slow and painstaking assembly of as many observations as possible of the phenomenon under investigation, under as wide a variety of circumstances as possible. Only after this was done could one be confident of the general conclusions one might draw about the nature of that phenomenon.

Second, in Bacon’s view the Aristotelians had an insufficient appreciation of the biases that can infect individual observations. These biases were enshrined in what Bacon’sNovum Organum characterizes as the “Idols of the Mind,” of which there are four. The first are theIdols of the Tribe, by which Bacon means the biases inherent in human nature, such as our tendency to take it for granted that things really are as they appear to the senses. The second are theIdols of the Cave, or the biases that derive from a person’s individual temperament, education, experiences, social setting, and so forth. The third are theIdols of the Marketplace, our tendency uncritically to suppose that the way language carves