Did Modernism "overturn" or "evolve out of" Aristotle?

Question

It is often said that modern philosophy begins with a break from Aristotle, as developed by Galileo, Bacon, Hobbes, Descartes, Locke, et al.

Though the modernists struggled to "start from scratch," it seems that the "overturning" of Aristotle was very piecemeal and historically circumstantial. Divisions of church authority, experimental method, centrality of the subject, Kepler's cosmos, turn to critical epistemology, etc.

Without going philosopher by philosopher, point by point, can anyone summarize some sort of fundamental principle, category, or decisive, irreversible move that characterizes the modern break with Aristotle?

Answer 1

I'd suggest that one needs to distinguish between Aristotelianism and Aristotle; I find it quite difficult to conceive of how, for example, modern physics would have begun with Galileo without the work done by thinkers in Greek Antiquity, summarised in both Aristotle's Physics and Metaphysics, say; and illustrated quite directly by the drawing by Da Vinci, of Vitruvian Man which celebrates the turn towards man as a subject in combination with Greek science (i.e. geometry).

Rovelli, a prominent theorist in QG writes:

[Aristotles Physics] is the book that has given its name to the discipline; it is a profound masterpiece; it discusses Eleatism, the notion of change, the nature of motion, the infinite, space, time, infinite divisibility; some of the issues discussed, for example the nature of time, are still of relevance today; for example in QG research.

This perhaps shows that the historical breaks aren't as historical as we might wish to view them; but in part are constructed; and have lines of both continuity and difference; for example the SEP argues that despite Descartes reputation as a key representative of early modern thinking on Physics

many of Descartes physical hypotheses bear a close kinship with the Aristotelian influenced science of late medieval and Renaissance Scholasticism.

I'd suggest it was the rise of another Greek philosophy - that of the Greek atomists (Democritus, Epicurus and Lucretius) in a new guise - the Mechanical Philosophy that eclipsed that of Aristotelianism; for example:

The mechanical philosophy's explanation of natural phenomena, which Descartes quickly adopted [after meeting Isaac Beeckman, an amateur scientist and mathematician] rejected the use of Scholastic substantial forms, and favoured a contact or impact model of small, unobservable 'corpuscles' of matter (which possess only a limited number of mainly geometric properties: size, motion and shape).

Importantly, this philosophy in terms of Aristotles four-fold classification of causes, possesses only two: the material and efficient; it lacks the final cause, in Aristotles opinion the proper sense of cause, and prioritised over the others; and possibly the formal cause - though one suggestion there is that this is chance.

Answer 2

I believe it has been said that "all (Western) philosophy is refutations of Plato" --one might similarly say that all Western science is refutations of Aristotle. He wrote so widely, so systematically, and so influentially, that practically every scientific discipline has a Aristotelian and a post-Aristotelian version. In a certain sense, the "overturning" of Aristotle might be most simply described as the moment in which people within a given discipline were no longer willing to take Aristotle's word as the final authority on the subject. As you have noted, that happened at vastly different times in different disciplines: as early as Galileo for Physics, as late as Russell for Logic.

From a contemporary viewpoint, one of the most significant departures in modern philosophy from Aristotle is the rejection of Aristotelian teleology which sees a final "cause" or purpose in all things, however it's not clear that this is a historical match for the "break" you describe.