Understanding the Chemical Aspects of the Aristotelian-Thomistic View | Prof. Thomas McLaughlin

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🗓️ 18 July 2019

⏱️ 65 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

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	So Aquinas' natural philosophy combines what might be called composition out of the co-principals of matter and form
0:07.0	with a theory of composition out of the elements.
0:10.0	And the challenge is to combine these two different kinds of theories into a coherent, unified account.
0:17.0	I'm going to focus on what we would now call the more chemical aspects of the Aristotian-Tumistic view of things,
0:25.7	primarily from the historical standpoint of the 13th century.
0:30.5	So I'll speak about the nature of an element, the four-element theory, mixtures, virtual presence.
0:36.8	I'm not going to talk about alchemy, although the Aristotelian
0:39.6	domestic chemical tradition becomes interwoven with alchemy in the beginning of the 13th century,
0:47.0	especially in the figure of St. Albert de Great. Now, what we might call the Aristotelian
0:53.3	to mystic tradition in chemistry is present within several
0:58.6	different disciplines, and much of it was bound up with what we would now call philosophy of chemistry.
1:05.2	But I want to begin by locating it cosmologically.
1:10.1	In Aristotle's cosmology, the universe is finite and spherical,
1:15.6	and it's divided into two very, very different regions, the inner and relatively small sub-lunar region below the moon
1:23.6	and the very much larger outer celestial region.
1:28.3	And the celestial spheres were thought to be made of ether, sometimes called the
1:33.6	fifth essence.
1:34.5	And there's no chemistry in the celestial regions.
1:42.0	There is, the celestial bodies are a certain fundamental drivers of chemistry, especially the sun, in the
1:52.4	subluner realm.
1:54.1	Now the subluner region below here is the realm of chemistry.
2:01.6	Aristotle accepted the four-element theory of Empedocles and other Presocratics, although we understood them rather differently.
	...

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