[ExI] Why Physics Needs Philosophy

[William Flynn Wallace]

On Fri, Apr 1, 2016 at 12:02 PM, John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Fri, Apr 1, 2016 at 11:52 AM, William Flynn Wallace <
> foozler83 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> ​> ​
>> Is there any reason to think that Aristotle/Bacon, many others,  would
>> not be hard-nosed scientists today?
>>
>
>
> Aristotle's theories could have been easily refuted even in his own day
> but nobody did
> ​,​
> including Aristotle. Aristotle was supposed to be a master of logic but
> when he applied it to physics the result was a complete muddle. Take his
> theory that heavy things fall faster than lighter ones, even if he was too
> lazy to perform the experiment he should have been able to figure out from
> pure logic alone that it can't be right because it leads to self
> contradiction. If you take a heavy rock and tie it to a slightly lighter
> rock with some string that has some slack in it and drop them then both
> rocks would fall slower than the big rock alone because the slower moving
> lighter rock would bog it down, but the tied together object would fall
> faster than the heavy rock because the new object is heavier than the heavy
> rock alone.
>
> Bertrand Russell didn't think much of Aristotle either, he said:
>
> "Aristotle maintained that women have fewer teeth than men; although he
> was twice married, it never occurred to him to verify this statement by
> examining his wives' mouths."
>
> ​ John K Clark​
>
>
> ​I recall a big meeting of philosophers somewhere around the 14th
> century.  Issue:  how many teeth does a horse have?  Some wag suggested
> they get a horse and he was kicked out of the meeting:  only rationalism
> can decide truth - like the Greeks did.  Following the Greeks was
> apparently more like a religion.
>

​How in the world did humans get this far with this kind of behavior?  ​

​Or maybe the people who were not at the top actually ran the world
according to a rough empiricism and observational learning​, and tradition
most of all.

What if Aristotle had looked in his wife's mouth and discovered
empiricism?  Where would we be now?  Interesting alternative history
fantasy.

bill w

> ​
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