Aristotle against Epicurus: Atoms, Particles & Elements in Thomism | Prof. Matthew Gaetano

The Thomistic Institute

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4.8 • 873 Ratings

🗓️ 20 July 2019

⏱️ 57 minutes

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Summary

This was one of the lectures from our 2019 Summer Science Conference, "Novelty in Nature: Scientific and Philosophical Understanding of Flux and Chance in the Natural World." For more info about upcoming TI events, visit: www.thomisticinstitute.org/events

Conference Theme:

Modern science consistently presents us with new and surprising truths about the natural world, particularly about how new things come to be, whether stars and galaxies, plants and animals, or chemical and physical structures. In many ways this creativity and flux in nature might seem antithetical to the classical picture of nature that Aquinas inherited from Aristotle. The theme for the second annual Thomistic Institute symposium on modern science and Thomistic philosophy, “Novelty in Nature: Scientific and Philosophical Understanding of Flux and Change in the Natural World,” touches on this question. Expert scientists and philosophers will discuss whether Thomistic philosophy is compatible with our modern scientific view of nature and how the two might enrich one another. The symposium is primarily intended for graduate students in the sciences and the philosophy of science and will include introductory sessions on basic of Thomistic philosophy of nature in its own day and in the history of science.

2019 Featured Speakers:

Karin Oberg (Harvard University), Robert Koons, (University of Texas), Fr. Nicanor Austriaco, (Providence College), Marissa March (University of Pennsylvania), Fr. James Brent, OP, (Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception), Thomas McLaughlin (St. John Vianny Theological Seminary), Matthew Gaetano (Hillsdale College), Dr. Brian Carl (Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception).

Transcript

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0:00.0	I see my main task for this afternoon as putting somtomists on the table for discussion,
0:06.2	who are not writing centuries before the science of revolution,
0:09.7	or like us, trying to make sense of the science of revolution centuries after it occurred,
0:16.6	but who were dealing with it as it was unfolded.
0:20.2	And I hope that will be of some use to our proceedings as we go forward.
0:25.6	So the rejection of the Aristotelian account of matter is fundamental to the shift towards what we think of as post-renaissance modern thought.
0:33.6	The notion of prime matter related issues were among the scholastic documents that came under fiercest criticism during the scientific revolution.
0:43.3	The question that I hope to address is how the proponents of these ancient and medieval traditions of thinking about the fundamental principles of material bodies confronted these early modern developments.
0:53.3	This question helps us think with greater care
0:55.4	about what was at stake in the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment. The scholastics
1:00.1	were presented by their opponents as bookish professors, slaves to Aristotle, closed off to the new
1:07.9	discoveries about nature that we associate with Galileo, Descartes, Robert Boyle, and Isaac Newton.
1:13.5	Francis Bacon actually describes scholastics as spiders,
1:16.7	and generating these complex webs out of their bodies rather than going to get things like ants and bees.
1:23.2	One of the major Enlightenment encyclopedists in 18th century France, Jean-Laurend d'Alembert, described Francis Bacon
1:31.3	as at the head of the illustrious personages
1:35.3	who would illuminate the world in the 17th century and beyond.
1:38.3	Instead of thinking of Bacon as advancing a millennial-long discussion
1:43.3	about nature and scientific inquiry, as I think many of us are inclined to see today.
1:48.6	Donald Bear described Bacon as being born in the depths of the most profound night, fully aware that philosophy did not yet exist.
1:58.3	For Dolombert, it was not until the late 17th century that Newton created physics.
2:03.6	Thus, any attempt to defend ancient natural philosophy after Bacon and Newton, let alone the
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