Abstract
The fact that the earth revolves around the sun, and not the other way around, is one of the most fascinating discoveries in history. It is also one of the most disquieting because it is in conflict with our immediate daily experience. We see the sun rise and set with infinite beauty, and we feel that the earth under our feet is solid and firm, as indeed the Bible maintains. The heliocentric theory placed the archaic vision of the cosmos in a state of crisis and opened up a new way of interpreting the world. This is why 1543, the year when the work De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium by Copernicus appeared, is seen as the date when human beings crossed the threshold of the modern scientific revolution.1 There can be no doubt that we now find ourselves in the modern condition of science opened up by Copernicus. In other terms, perhaps one can affirm that the human condition of today’s man during this epoch of science, after the Copernican-Galilean revolution and subsequent revolutions, is rightly a scientific condition, just as the human condition of ancient Greek man was (after the birth of philosophy) a philosophical condition. This means not only that science and technology have revolutionised our way of living and our very vision of the physical, the biological and in a certain sense the anthropological world, but with them the vector which indicates the deep movements of the spirit has also changed direction. In the search for truth one no longer proceeds from the physis to man, as was the case in ancient times, nor from the created being to the Creator and from God to man as was the case during the Christian age, but from man to man within the horizon of science.
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Notes
Cf. William Shea, “Copernico”, Le Scienze, IV, n. 20, April 2001.
“We have two expressions: world and nature, which at times are interchangeable. The first means the mathematical total of all appearances, and the totality of their synthesis, both in the large and in the small, or rather in the progress of this synthesis both through composition and through division. This very world, however, is called nature, because it is seen as a total dynamic, and one looks not first at aggregation in space and time to constitute the world of quantity but rather to the unity of appearances in existence” ( Kant, KrV, A 419/B 447).
Congetture e confutazioni. Lo sviluppo della conoscenza scientifica (Bologna, 1985), p. 198.
Ibid., p. 200.
The importance of the method of “inference to the best explanation” is emphasised by, among others, Dr. Canon Peacocke (winner of the Templeton prize) in his article “Double Helix”, Church Times, 11 May 2001, p. 16.
Opere (Florence, 1929–1934), vol. V, pp. 187ff. In order to learn about and measure these affections, Galileo employed mathematics. All the other methods have as their premise that “the great book of nature is written in mathematical figures” (ibid., p. 16).
In I De caelo et mundo, I, 1, no 28 (Turin, 1952), p. 15. For St. Thomas the science of astronomy “proceeds from appearance according to the senses in relation to the astral spheres” (ibid., II, 14, no 427, p. 212), whereas the philosophy of nature “sees the order of things which human reason finds but does not make” (In Eth., I, 1, no 2, Turin, 1964, p. 3).
Ibid., II, 17, no 451, p. 226. And more fully in a text of a previous date, cf. S. Th. I, 32, 1 ad 2.
Cf. Metaph., VI, 10, 1034 b 20ff.
Metaph., VII, 3, 1029 a 20f. For a more detailed analysis, see M. Sánchez Sorondo, Aristotele e San Tommaso (Rome, 1981), pp. 57–100.
“As regards primary matter, it is knowable only by analogy” (Phys., I, 7, 191 to 8.
Physics and Philosophy (New York, 1958), pp. 41, 53, 70, 73, 110, 160, 166, 180–186.
“Considerandum est quod sicut materia prima dicitur informis per defectum formae, sic informitas attribuitur ipsi primo Bono, non per defectum, sed per excessum; et sic, secundum quamdam remotam assimilationem, similitude Causas primae invenitur in materia prima” (In De Div. Norn., ch. 4, lect. 2, Turin, 1950, no 297, p. 97). Cf. S. Th., I, 44, 2; De Ver., II, 5; De Pot., III, 1 ad 12, 13, 14.
“Si tarnen aliqua imperfectio in creaturis sit, non oportet quod sit ex Deo neque ex materia; sed in quantum creatura est ex nihilo” (De Pot., 3, 1 ad 12).
In III Sent., d. 2, q. 1, a. 3, sol. 1 ad 2, Moos, III, p. 67.
For a more detailed analysis see C. Fabro, Partecipazione e causalità (Turin, 1960), esp. pp. 330ff., 370ff., 393ff.
T. Kuhn, La tensione essenziale (Italian translation, Turin, 1985), p. 35.
I. Prigogine and I. Stengers, La nuova alleanza (Italian translation, Turin, 1981), pp. 40, 78, 276.
I. Stengers, La nuova alleanza (Italian translation, Turin, 1981) Ibid., p. 268f.
M. Delbrueck, “Aristotle-totle-totle”, in J. Monod and E. Borek (eds.), On Microbes and Life (New York, 1971), pp. 50ff.
E. Mayr, “Teleological and Teleonomic: a New Analysis”, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 14, 1974, pp. 91–117; (Italian translation, see Biologia ed evoluzione, Turin, 1982).
Cf. E. Gilson, D’Aristote à Darwin et retour (Paris, 1971).
A.-T. Tymieniecka, “La fenomenologia critica della ragione”, in M. Sánchez Sorondo (ed.), L’atto aristotelico e le sue ermeneutiche (Rome, 1990), pp. 247ff. See also A.-T. Tymieniecka, Impetus and Equipoise in the Life-Strategies of Reason; Logos and Life: Book 4, in Analecta Husserliana, vol. LXX (Dordrecht, 2000), pp. 87–93.
R. Thorn, Esquisse d’une sémiophysique. Physique aristotélicienne et théorie des catastrophes (Paris, 1988).
Ibid., p. 12f.
T. Kuhn, La tensione essenziale, p. x.
Phys., VIII, 4, 255 b 31–256 a 2.
P. Feyerabend, “Una lancia per Aristotele”, in G. Radnitzky and G. Andersoon (eds.), Progresso e razionalità della scienza (Rome, 1984), pp. 121–161. For a detailed outline of Aristotle’s physics and its contemporary relevance see E. Berti, “La nascita della ‘Fisica’ in Aristotele”, in M. Sánchez Sorondo (ed.), Physica, Cosmologia, Nuovi approcci (Rome, 1993), pp. 1–14.
On the question of values Bertrand Russell’s conclusion is representative: “I conclude that, while it is true that science cannot decide questions of value, that is because they cannot be intellectually decided at all, and lie outside the realm of truth and falsehood. Whatever knowledge is attainable, must be attained by scientific methods; and what science cannot discover, mankind cannot know” (Religion and Science, Oxford, 1961, p. 243).
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Sorondo, M.S. (2004). Science and Reality. In: Tymieniecka, AT. (eds) Does the World Exist?. Analecta Husserliana, vol 79. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-0047-5_52
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