Much of what is obviously wrong about Aristotle or likely to be wrong was discussed. Orseme for example wrote in the 1300s and discussed a lot of problems with Aristotle (or at least his logic). He proposed concepts of momentum and gravity that were more or less correct but lacked any quantization. And people from a much earlier time understood that Aristotle’s explanation of movement of thrown objects was deeply wrong. Attempts to repair this occurred well before the Scholastics even were around. Scholastics were more than willing to discuss alternate theories, especially theories of impetus. People seem to fail to realize how much discussion there was in the middle ages about these issues. It didn’t go Aristotle and then Galileo and Newton. Between Aristotle and Galileo were Oresme, Benedetti (who proposed a law of falling objects very similar to Galileo) and many others. Also, many of the Scholastics paid very careful attention to Avicenna’s criticism and analysis of Aristotle (Edit: My impression is that they became in some ways more knee-jerk Aristotelian after Averroism became prevalent but I don’t know enough about the exact details to comment on ratios or the like).
It might be fun to dismiss everyone in the Middle Ages as religion-bound control freaks, but that’s simply not the case. The actual history is much more complicated.
Much of what is obviously wrong about Aristotle or likely to be wrong was discussed. Orseme for example wrote in the 1300s and discussed a lot of problems with Aristotle (or at least his logic). He proposed concepts of momentum and gravity that were more or less correct but lacked any quantization. And people from a much earlier time understood that Aristotle’s explanation of movement of thrown objects was deeply wrong. Attempts to repair this occurred well before the Scholastics even were around. Scholastics were more than willing to discuss alternate theories, especially theories of impetus. People seem to fail to realize how much discussion there was in the middle ages about these issues. It didn’t go Aristotle and then Galileo and Newton. Between Aristotle and Galileo were Oresme, Benedetti (who proposed a law of falling objects very similar to Galileo) and many others. Also, many of the Scholastics paid very careful attention to Avicenna’s criticism and analysis of Aristotle (Edit: My impression is that they became in some ways more knee-jerk Aristotelian after Averroism became prevalent but I don’t know enough about the exact details to comment on ratios or the like).
It might be fun to dismiss everyone in the Middle Ages as religion-bound control freaks, but that’s simply not the case. The actual history is much more complicated.