Aristotle and the Quantum Revolution | Prof. Rob Koons

The Thomistic Institute

Christianity, Religion &Amp; Spirituality, Society & Culture, Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic, Philosophy, Religion & Spirituality, Thomism, Catholicism

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 8 April 2022

⏱️ 64 minutes

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Summary

This lecture was given on February 11, 2022 at the University of Kansas. For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website at www.thomisticinstitute.org. About the speaker: Robert C. (“Rob”) Koons is a professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin, where he has taught for 33 years. M. A. Oxford, Ph.D. UCLA. He is the author or co-author of four books, including: Realism Regained (Oxford University Press, 2000), and The Atlas of Reality: A Comprehensive Guide to Metaphysics, with Timothy H. Pickavance (Wiley-Blackwell, 2017). He is the co-editor (with George Bealer) of The Waning of Materialism (Oxford University Press, 2010), and co-editor (with Nicholas Teh and William Simpson) of Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives on Contemporary Science (Routledge, 2018). He has been working recently on an Aristotelian interpretation of quantum theory, on defending and articulating Thomism in contemporary terms, and on arguments for classical theism.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This talk is brought to you by the Tamistic Institute. For more talks like this, visit us at
0:05.8	tamistic institute.org. I've long liked Aristotle's philosophy. It has a lot of advantages.
0:15.3	It provides for real human agency, provides a kind of natural foundation for ethics and value and all that.
0:22.6	I remember years ago, when I was at UCLA, one of my teachers said,
0:26.6	hey, AirSoll is so great, if only it were true.
0:28.6	But unfortunately, we had this scientific revolution,
0:30.6	and it showed that everything in the Aristotle is obsolete and can no longer be believed in.
0:35.6	Oh, yeah, that's terrible. So, so about 10 years ago or so, I was looking, studying quantum mechanics from a metaphysical point of view, right?
0:45.3	And I started realizing, I was reading people like Heisenberg and Plunk and others, and I realized, wait a minute,
0:53.3	there's some themes here that are merging
0:55.2	that are very reminiscent of Aristotle's philosophy. Maybe people have missed something here.
1:00.8	So the scientific revolution in 17th century seemed to make Aristotle obsolete. It said,
1:06.5	it's all just the little tiny bits of matter. That's all you need, understand everything.
1:10.8	And then quantum mechanics comes along and says, well, it turns out those little bits of matter
1:15.2	are a lot weirder than we thought. They don't seem to be self-explanatory. They don't sort of
1:20.3	stand on their own. They require a larger context. They require a kind of holism in order to make
1:26.6	sense of them.
1:32.9	And we need to start talking about not just the actual world, but all kinds of potential states of the world, which is exactly what Aristotle said.
1:35.2	So I've been working this last eight years in trying to dig into that.
1:38.1	And I've really, at least convinced myself that the quantum revolution of 100 years ago or so represents a kind of counter-revolution.
1:46.7	It takes us back from the sort of view of the world that the scientific revolution
1:50.8	has given to the 17th century and really rehabilitates Aristotle and Aristotelian framework.
	...

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