Ultimate Mange

I think Koestler finds Kepler to be this sort of stereotypical overzealous and defensive hurt mangy dog like person, but still lovable in a pathetic sort of way nonetheless. From childhood to growing up, Koestler never really writes of Kepler in an unfavourable light exactly. He might point out his shortcomings but ultimately Koestler writes of Kepler redeeming himself in some way.

Copernicus on the other hand seemed to just be this nervous old wishy washy wet rag who never overcame his past and upbringing in the way that Kepler did. Probably I would think Koestler was pretty frustrated with Copernicus whereas you see this zeal written about Kepler that has to indicate some sort of fondness.

I swear I didn't look to the next blog entry.

So I mean last blog didn't exactly answer the blog prompt for Monday (apparently I didn't either. What's wrong with me?)

Anyway. To just sort of restate what I'd said before... or maybe I'm puttin' down the final words about it given that I really finished the chapter this time. Copernicus was not like the rest of the great philosophers (well he's a mathematician). He may rank right up there, but he's the only one who pussed out on his hypotheses and didn't put them right out there with vigor. The irony is that he had the best idea of all of his predecessors but the worst self esteem about them. He knew he was right but that his book was crap. He wanted to keep his hypotheses following Aristotelian physics when in truth that was what was wrong with his hypotheses. He worried too much about being put in a bad place or being looked down upon that he forsook his very student Rheticus, among others. As far as I could tell, he was a wet rag, not this high and mighty God-Man of philosophy.

And I sort of like that. As to why, see previous entry.

Copernicus is another iceberg!

To be fair, most of who/what we've discussed in class has been relatively similar to an iceberg. We all came to class with a little bit of information on a handful of various philosophers and astronomers (well everybody else did, I didn't know much at all, haha) and we read a little and come to find out that there really was more than that.

Well, maybe not in Copernicus's case given how, as the title so appropriately asserts, timid he was.

Anyhow, I seem to be more interested in the personalities of all these various movers and shapers in the world of astronomy. Which is all fine and dandy but somewhat irrelevant nonetheless. I guess their personalities make me better understand their ideals and motivations and make them less lofty and in many ways less respectable. I mean, I'm not trying to break people down or anything, but it's always nice to be able to feel like you can disagree with somebody who was as influential as, say, Plato or Aristotle.

My biggest thing with the Copernicus section is the idea that, jeepers, would somebody else have pushed the idea of geocentrism if Giese and Rheticus hadn't been around to reassure Copernicus that his ideas were valuable? Or what if Rheticus hadn't been so devoted to write the narratio prima? I guess that's not really a good question, because the same could be said about anything in history. What if so-and-so hadn't done such-and-such?

Let me come back to reblog about it. The reading hasn't sunk in quite yet.

Meanwhile, the whole church thing reminded me of Brad Neely and his brilliance. Let me apologize for how absolutely crude he is, but you must admit, it's pretty witty:

Take... Wait, what take are we on?

In the readings (wow what a lame way to start a blog), I found it interesting not in the fact that the Church and Aristotle were challenged (or rather that somebody challenged them...) (because I mean you figure that that's going to happen anyway) but how the laws that they managed to set so nearly in stone were contradicted. From cadavers to free will, this working from the first step forward with me learning about astronomy and how things came to be is all very fascinating.

Anyway. Aristotle's ideas needed to be challenged for the simple fact that they weren't true. They weren't based on legitimate empirical evidence and I think these discoveries resulted in not just a change of ideals but a change in the way we come about these ideals. Or maybe I'm just looking too far into something that isn't really there. I don't know. This is how I see it. Every time something that we take for granted and true is broken down by legitimate evidence, it challenges us to look further into anything else that we might take for truth. And that is always a good place to be in.

As it pertains to this class, at least they're sort of trying. Or I mean. At least somebody is trying to challenge these things. I wouldn't say that Galileo was exactly inspired by the notion to challenge things because, just from the little bit I read of Galileo's daughter, he seemed always the kind of rebellious guy to go around telling people that tradition is silly, etc., and I mean maybe some of that was his background (what with his father, right, challenging Pythagoras's music theories?). Anyway, I think just the whole mentality of things needing to be challenged and being challenged and changing thus was starting to heat up, whether or not the Church liked it. So there.

This late stuff has got to stop.

In reading the excerpts, I thought at first (though not for very long) that perhaps the Philosopher was just a general term for Philosopher, but rereading, Aquinas is being more specific than that. He's definitely talking about Aristotle. The fact that he calls him "THE Philosopher" (capitalized and everything) indicates one-and-onliness.

As I'm starting to write this, I'm realizing that everything we discussed yesterday in class is coming together. For whatever reason, I don't make connections very well when I'm thinking about or discussing it but when I really start putting words down, things click. For that reason, I want to apologize for not having written this pre class and my subsequent muteness during class discussion.

Anyway.

We know that Augustine was fiercely Platonic and now we see that Aquinas is, again, chiefly Aristotelian although not as loyally as Augustine was Platonic (his bio states that, despite his Aristotelian views, his critical thinking skills did not escape those ideas of Aristotle that he disagreed with). Though Aristotle was Plato's student, they greatly differed in their philosophies mostly in that Plato was about rational thought and logic and Aristotle was about empirical evidence and observing. In that same way, Augustine differs from Aquinas. Aquinas uses the same exact Aristotelian physics to prove the existence of God where Augustine might have just said "Well, we know he exists because we have faith. If you have scientific evidence to back me up, great, but know that you're a sinner for the pleasurable acquisition of said evidence and you're going to hell."

The effect this had on the church is somewhat unclear to me. It seems that at least getting away from Platonic hypotheses and philosophies and onto Aristotelian ones would be better than what they were doing, but Koestler asserts on page 111 that, while the tone of Aristotelian physics and philosophies (empirical) was a step in the right direction, scientists and "schoolmen" of the time took it too far to start believing what Aristotle had actually written and said and "for the next three hundred years this rubbish came to be regarded as gospel truth."

I'm having another moment. I think my thesis is going to be on this very subject, specifically the argument that Aristotle wrote regarding motion. I'm not sure how broad I want to take it, but I definitely want to mention that these very physics were used by Robert Chisholm in the 60's as support for the existence of immanent vs. transient causation regarding free will. In the very same argument, Chisholm quotes Aquinas as well and his idea of God as the "Prime Mover".

So onto bibliographies!

Post Redemption, Reverse Redemption (Oh, and my thesis)

So after I totally owned the last three blogs, I got the most recent blog notification late and thus waited (I swear accidentally) til today to write yesterdays.

But enough about excuses.

This whole section about the Middle Ages really seems to me like one big chaotic mess. I'm sort of envisioning a bunch of scraggly men running around waving books and pens shouting out different things. While I can see their reasoning (really really poor reasoning but at least they tried) for all the different changes in the perception of of the universe, it doesn't answer why. The most interesting part is that all the people responsible for the absurd hypotheses put forth in the Middle Ages were philosophers. Now, I do not deny that, pre middle ages, those that truly shaped the universe as they perceived it were NOT philosophers, they most definitely were. But at least there were astronomers trying to back up what the philosophers said (ie: Ptolemy and his wondrous and deliciously impossible model). In the Middle Ages (and maybe I missed this?), it was just philosophers making stuff up with, as Koestler put it, "terrifying verbal acrobacy," which, in a sense, is all that philosophy is anyway.

From this, I want to begin to form (begin to form! Shouldn't it already be formed?) my paper's thesis. I'm not sure how yet I want to phrase it, but I want to make an argument somehow relating the nature of philosophy to the hinderance of true scientific discovery. It seems to me that all philosophy does it make very nice arguments for things that might not necessarily be true and it gets away with it by being so good at making said arguments that it's hard to point out exactly where the argument is false. In this way, it makes it very easy to simply accept what one is given in a philosophical argument as opposed to legitimately challenging it because you're not quite sure where the argument fails if it fails at all. I will continue to flesh this out, but for now, that's where it lies.