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.
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Hi Abi, I glad you are developing opinions about the crazy men of late antiquity and the early dark ages (I don't think this period is referred to as the Middle Ages). I would really like to know what specifically you find to be a bit ridiculous about the ideas they were having about the universe, religion, etc.
ReplyDeleteI'll be getting to the thesis statement you handed in on Friday later today, but the topic you outline in this blog is a bit too general. You should pick a specific instance where you think philosophy is opposed or repressive to science. You should be able to develop a better thesis statement from there.