STS112 Lecture 2: Week 2 Notes
8 Jun 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
Week 2: Natural Philosophy
Natural Philosophy in the Ancient World
• Attempt to systematically and comprehensively explain all-natural phenomena within a single body of
concepts ideas
• Downplay the use of supernatural forces in explaining nature
• Attempt to go beyond merely building multiple measurements of things but also offer fundamental
explanations for them
• Astronomy was prestigious area of interest, linked to measurement of time
• Emerged in the loosely confederated city states of Ancient Greece from about 600 BC
• Supplied conceptual resources, traditions against which many of the key ideas of the scientific revolution
were related to
Pythagoras (c. 531BC)
• Emphasis on number and mathematical harmonies as key to understanding nature
• Fire is a worthier element than earth, so it should be placed in the centre of the Universe
Plato (390BC)
• Nature has underlying mathematical harmonies built into it
• Less important to focus on day to day changes in nature revealed by careful observation, than to try to
identify the important underlying forms
Aristotle
• Extraordinarily broad interests wrote on almost every topic imaginable, logic, rhetoric, politics, etc.
• Concern with everyday changes in nature
o Identified the need to classify and explain objects according to the way that we can see them live or act
and how they fit in with broader natural systems
o Wary of artificial impositions on nature
• Supported the idea of the two-sphere universe
Nature
• Theories of causation
o Material
o Formal
o Efficient
o Final
• Key elements
o Water – Heavy, goes down
o Earth – Heavy, goes down
o Fire – Light, goes up
o Air – Light, goes up
o Earthy things to the centre, wet things also but resisted by earth, then air light and trying to rise and fire
lighter again trying to rise
Natural vs. Violent Motion
• Need to determine the natural place of an object in terms of the matter it is constituted from and whether and
in what ways it might be being hindered
• An object will fall at a speed proportional to its weight and the density of the medium through which it falls
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