Thank you for your corrections. I always appreciate anyone who is willing to help me become a better writer.
However, I think it’s worth pointing out that there are pre-Christian elements which had an important part to play too.
For logic and reason you absolutely have a point. For science I don’t think that the impact was much greater than giving formal logic and a mathematical basis. They lacked not only the investigative spirit that science requires, but the ability to reason that they should investigate.
For a simple example, the earliest heliocentric model was from the Pythagoreans and I can’t credit them as having anything like science in its proposition. For the Pythagoreans fire is nobler than earth and the center is a nobler position. So fire has to be in the center.
Aristotle noted of them that:
In all this they are not seeking for theories and causes to account for observed facts, but rather forcing their observations and trying to accommodate them to certain theories and opinions of their own. – Aristotle, On the heavens II.13.293a
This is the same Aristotle who noted that heavy objects should fall faster than light objects on account of their being heavier. Not only did Aristotle never trudge to the top of a cliff with a heavy rock and a light rock of roughly the same shape and an observer down the bottom to see which landed first—the thought never even occurred to him that this was something that there would even be any benefit in doing.
I also think the translation of logos with rationality is unsatisfying and doesn’t really capture St John’s meaning.
Here (and everything afterward) I agree with you. It misses a great deal of meaning (creativity is missing for one, so too and more importantly is love), but it captures a part of the meaning which I was hoping would be conveyed. Correct me if I’m wrong but rationality is a subset of logos—though logos is greater, rationality is contained within.
Not only did Aristotle never trudge to the top of a cliff with a heavy rock and a light rock of roughly the same shape and an observer down the bottom to see which landed first
Thank you for your corrections. I always appreciate anyone who is willing to help me become a better writer.
For logic and reason you absolutely have a point. For science I don’t think that the impact was much greater than giving formal logic and a mathematical basis. They lacked not only the investigative spirit that science requires, but the ability to reason that they should investigate.
For a simple example, the earliest heliocentric model was from the Pythagoreans and I can’t credit them as having anything like science in its proposition. For the Pythagoreans fire is nobler than earth and the center is a nobler position. So fire has to be in the center.
Aristotle noted of them that:
This is the same Aristotle who noted that heavy objects should fall faster than light objects on account of their being heavier. Not only did Aristotle never trudge to the top of a cliff with a heavy rock and a light rock of roughly the same shape and an observer down the bottom to see which landed first—the thought never even occurred to him that this was something that there would even be any benefit in doing.
Here (and everything afterward) I agree with you. It misses a great deal of meaning (creativity is missing for one, so too and more importantly is love), but it captures a part of the meaning which I was hoping would be conveyed. Correct me if I’m wrong but rationality is a subset of logos—though logos is greater, rationality is contained within.
Have you done this?
Not a cliff, but every child who has graduated highschool in my country has done this experiment from the top of a multi-story building.
I have done this. In year 10.
We tried to troll the teacher saying that the larger object landed first. He claimed this was due to ‘parallax error’.
Science is murkier than it looks.
Sounds like a nice country.
It’s not too bad. Like most countries it has its own particular problems.