Timeline for Why is Russell so critical of Aristotle?
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17 events
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| Jul 1, 2021 at 16:48 | comment | added | CriglCragl | @user9166: The Renaissance is defined by the 'rebirth' of interest in antiquity, such as to be able to begin to correct the classics rather than slavishly accept them -Aristotle's mistake about harbour buoyancy & men & women having different numbers of teeth, Vesalius' more than 200 anatomy corrections to Galen. Saying Aristotle's ideas were trash is like saying Copernicus' ideas were trash because he thought the sun was the centre of the universe. It's worse, because Aristotle was the clearest thinker on science available for around 2 millennia. The problem was how good he was, not how bad | |
| Apr 21, 2015 at 18:53 | comment | added | Mozibur Ullah | And one must recall just how simple the technology was then - Galileo had the advantage of the telescope, and Newton the prism; but that technology wasn't available then - simple as it is. | |
| Apr 21, 2015 at 18:49 | comment | added | Mozibur Ullah | And is it worth asking just how much actual 'artificial' experimentation Newton and Galileo did? | |
| Apr 21, 2015 at 18:46 | comment | added | Mozibur Ullah | For example: I don't think for example he has an 'absolute' notion of down for instance; his physics is really a priori physics; so for example he says, in line with his predecessors forces comes in pairs ie contraries; and this is borne out by modern physics. | |
| Apr 21, 2015 at 18:39 | comment | added | Mozibur Ullah | @jobermark: I think that's the image we have of Aristotle; and that through his later disciples; rather than Aristotle himself. | |
| Apr 21, 2015 at 17:56 | history | edited | Chris Sunami | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Apr 21, 2015 at 17:54 | comment | added | Chris Sunami | @jobermark I made another edit to account for Boole and Frege. But I stand by the rest of my answer. The OP's quoted paragraph clearly focuses on logic --science and philosophy are tangential (to at least that one passage). | |
| Apr 21, 2015 at 17:47 | history | edited | Chris Sunami | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Apr 21, 2015 at 17:19 | comment | added | user9166 | Also, Boole and Frege were a century before Russell, so there is progress there, and it was still 1800 years between Aristotle and Galileo, so you are overstating how much this is about logic and vs science in general. You make it sound like Russell lacks perspective outside his own domain. | |
| Apr 21, 2015 at 16:43 | history | edited | Chris Sunami | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Apr 19, 2015 at 4:59 | comment | added | user9166 | Aristotle's negative impact on physics and biology is even more major, so Russell's gripes are just as supportable all around. Aristotle's opposition to artificial experimentation, and his bias that things should be observed naturally, had a major negative impact on all of the sciences. Notions like horror vacui and the absolute definition of 'down' were clearly disproved by contemporaneous folks in other countries (who made vacuum barometers and measured the diameter of the Earth) and Aristotle's physics would have been seen as trash, but for its timing and geography. | |
| Apr 18, 2015 at 3:53 | comment | added | Chris Sunami | @MoziburUllah I'm a fan of Schriebers' concept, but I've never heard that argued anywhere else but in his post --it certainly isn't a standard line of thinking. And while Aristotle definitely anticipated and pioneered many things developed in modern logic, his logic wasn't even able to consider much of what modern logic handles with rigor and elegance. You couldn't build a computer on Aristotelian logic, for instance. | |
| Apr 17, 2015 at 23:46 | comment | added | Mozibur Ullah | @sunami: how does that gel with Schriebers answer? I'd suggest that it's more likely that it was already immanent in it. | |
| Apr 17, 2015 at 6:19 | comment | added | Chris Sunami | @Geremia Well, syllogisms and the like are occasionally still taught, but modern symbolic logic is far more dominant now --it's much more powerful. | |
| Apr 17, 2015 at 6:17 | comment | added | Geremia | How is there a "modern dethronement of Aristotelian logic"? | |
| Apr 16, 2015 at 2:53 | history | edited | Chris Sunami | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Apr 14, 2015 at 17:22 | history | answered | Chris Sunami | CC BY-SA 3.0 |