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.

I'm Starting to Immensely Distrust Philosophy!

As a preface, let it be noted that the book preview for the Literal Meaning of Genesis specifically excluded pages 43-79 in which, I assume, chapters 9 and 10 were. Sorry. I don't really know what to do about that. It straight jumped from page 42 to 80...?

So, this is what I gathered from Augustine. (And I truly read him because I felt like I needed to redeem myself (again) in class.)

The bit of his biography that was the most relevant to the class was such: " So long, therefore, as his philosophy agrees with his religious doctrines, St. Augustine is frankly neo-Platonist; as soon as a contradiction arises, he never hesitates to subordinate his philosophy to religion, reason to faith."

A red flag if ever I saw one.

With that in mind, I continued on to his writings.
The biggest thing that Augustine asserted and reasserted was the fact that Plato is a lover of God and that all philosophies Platonic were the closest to the church's doctrines and scriptures and therefore was the most trustworthy of all the philosophers, I guess is the word I'm looking for. In this sense, he didn't really ignore philosophers so much as pick and choose which ones were legitimate according to him and thus the church. I mean, I guess he paid attention to the philosophers, or rather philosopher, in this sense. He admits: " If, then, Plato defined the wise man as one who imitates, knows, loves this God, and who is rendered blessed through fellowship with Him in His own blessedness, why discuss with the other philosophers?" At least he admits his bias or preference.

He goes on to discuss the nature of the various heavenly beings-- " In every changeable thing, the form which makes it that which it is, whatever be its mode or nature, can only be through Him who truly is, because He is unchangeable." He synonymizes 'natural' with 'physical' in the Godly sense (a very Plantinga statement, haha) which manages to full circle back to Plato being Godly, etc. ("to philosophize is to love God").

The part that really struck me was his definition of the nature of philosophy:
" He is on his guard, however, with respect to those who philosophize according to the elements of this world, not according to God, by whom the world itself was made; for he is warned by the precept of the apostle, and faithfully hears what has been said, 'Beware that no one deceive you through philosophy and vain deceit, according to the elements of the world.'"

Now, I will grant that he is a God-fearing man, but that just seems to be unreasonable. I guess that's what I get for not being a theist, but it seems awfully silly.

Augustine is relevant in that I feel like he speaks a lot for the church, not necessarily that he is the church's mouthpiece or spokesman but that, simply, he represents what the church at the time probably thought. The real zinger is that Plato is probably the least (well maybe not the least) reliable source of astronomical rules/discoveries given his disposition regarding astronomy in general, which is disdainful. Hence my title. Plato plus Plantinga today really made me distrust the art of philosophy. Plato was this heralded man in the world of science (in general, philosophy, astronomy, you name it, people usually took his word for gospel--no pun intended) but in the realm of astronomy anyway, I just imagine Plato boredly describing these elabourate plans for the universe, waving his hand about in a holier-than-thou manner, not really giving a hang about it. And Augustine trusted it because Plato was similarly a God-fearing man and therefore he was the most reliable?

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, that fifth chapter of Sleepwalkers really helped wrap up the early theories of astronomy quite nicely. The succinct timeline/rundown of astronomers ending with the Ptolemaic [and perfected] model for the universe really ended that first bit well in that there is still a big chunk of the book left dedicated to completely destroying this "perfected" system. I mean, and for the time it was pretty perfected (well, I mean excluding the differences in brightness and size, but everybody at the time was pretty much trying to ignore that). It explained the speed ups, slow downs, retrograde motions, and it included the beloved circles. See my post before last for my Eureka moment.

How 'bout them apples?

RE: Alvin Plantinga (AKA modern day Plato)

A true philosopher. He plays with words without any sort of scientific backup. I can respect a good philosopher, but truly he is a modern day Plato. He could make a good case but when it came to legitimate scientific evidence, he refused to back up his claims, even admitting he knew nothing about the actual subject, that he was only a philosopher. The stalactite/stalagmite mixup was questionable to me but even if I let that slide, the one stumper of a question that (and godblessit I wish I knew his name) the kid with the Japanese Nikes on had (I think) everybody (including me) in the FSEM grinning:

(And I paraphrase...): "So, are we the end of evolution? God guided evolution to us since we are in his image, I mean, are we going to sprout wings or something? If not, why would God send his only son to die for us if we're only going to evolve to something greater?"

To which Plantinga replied something along the lines of, I don't know, "I don't have an opinion on that."

What good is a philosopher if you only want to give valid arguments that aren't necessarily sound? (For those non philosophers out there, a valid argument works within itself, that is Premise A and B do add up to the conclusion, but a valid argument requires true statements.) Isn't philosophy more than word play? It's about reality, existence, knowledge. You can't just make shit up, it doesn't work that way. (Excuse me, that was rude.)

Eureka! ...!?

I just wanted to blog (legitimately blog in that a blog is supposed to be something you truly want to express rather than a means of conversing with classmates--No offense, Professor Bary) that I had a Eureka moment just now, reading Koestler. A couple weeks ago, we had mini group discussions about the failure of nerve. I didn't see an example of "failure of nerve" in the chapter assigned. To me, a failure of nerve is one's personal holding back of ideas because one thinks they're not true or one thinks probably that the argument is weak. All I saw in the chapter were people trying to give evidence to a hypothesis that was set in stone as opposed to finding evidence and modifying the hypothesis as such.

In reading Koestler today, however, I got my Eureka moment. The top of page 81 wraps up a discussion on the continued myths of circles vs. ellipses, which was the discussion of the "failure of nerve" section as well. The very last sentence in the whole thing lays out failure of nerve right there!:

We shall see that, two thousand years later, Johannes Kepler, who cured astronomy of the circular obsession, still hesitated to adopt elliptical orbits, because, he wrote, if the answer were as simple as that, "then the problem would already have been solved by Archimedes and Apollonius."

I reread the sentence, underlined it, circled it, wrote next to it "failure of nerve" and then promptly got up to write this blog. It's too perfect! The reason why people hesitated to put out new ideas wasn't for fear of church persecution but for simple self doubt. The whole idea was that it would have been too easy to be right and by the same token that all the great philosophers and astronomers past hadn't put it out there first.

This is by no means the assigned blog for Friday, but I just thought I'd redeem myself a little bit. And by God, I hope I'm not wrong.