A tribute the man who may have made it all possible

Q.G. · Aug 26, 2010

Ron LarFor4X5 said:
Private Group Created : A.P.U.G., Atheist Photographers Users Group.

Is that a group for people who use atheist photographers for something or other?
Or?

ntenny · Aug 26, 2010

(scientific method)

Q.G. said:
The fact that these things were described so many centuries before already, by men who were not to be sniffed at either, would make it highly improbable (but still possible) that he would be the first to sit down with some paper and a pencil, to decribe how i works. Let alone figure out how it works.

On the other hand, *somebody* had to be the first, and the classical Greeks whose work he was building on weren't big on abstracting their methods---especially the "natural philosophers" who really could be seen as laying the groundwork for the modern experimentalist view of the scientific method. (The pure mathematicians sound more like their modern counterparts, but then as now the mathematicians seem to have been widely felt to have a screw loose.)

Remember, too, that while those earlier thinkers look like contemporaries to us and probably did to ibn al-Haytham, they weren't really. It's not like Galen and Euclid and Aristotle ever had the opportunity to sit down over coffee and say "Now, what is it we're really doing here, gentlemen?" and synthesise a clear model of their working methods.

-NT

Q.G. · Aug 26, 2010

ntenny said:
(scientific method)

On the other hand, *somebody* had to be the first, and the classical Greeks whose work he was building on weren't big on abstracting their methods---especially the "natural philosophers" who really could be seen as laying the groundwork for the modern experimentalist view of the scientific method. (The pure mathematicians sound more like their modern counterparts, but then as now the mathematicians seem to have been widely felt to have a screw loose.)

Remember, too, that while those earlier thinkers look like contemporaries to us and probably did to ibn al-Haytham, they weren't really. It's not like Galen and Euclid and Aristotle ever had the opportunity to sit down over coffee and say "Now, what is it we're really doing here, gentlemen?" and synthesise a clear model of their working methods.

Hmm... I don't know.
Aristotle, for one, had all the time in the world to do that. In fact, that's about all he ever did.
It was his work the arabic world elaborated on. And it was his work, when mediated by the arabic thinkers, sparked the modern science thing over here.

There are many difference between us now and them 1000 and 2500 thousand years ago.
But we really are not that different as you appear to suggest at all.

So in short: i disagree. You're mostly wrong.

(I disagree too about the role you assign to the early natural philosphers. But that's another thread. Another forum perhaps.)

ntenny · Aug 26, 2010

It's not like Galen and Euclid and Aristotle ever had the opportunity to sit down over coffee and say "Now, what is it we're really doing here, gentlemen?" and synthesise a clear model of their working methods.

Q.G. said:
Hmm... I don't know.
Aristotle, for one, had all the time in the world to do that.

Not with people who weren't alive at the same time he was, he didn't! (OK, Aristotle and Euclid overlapped slightly, but my point is that we take the people of several centuries and look back on them as if they were a single remarkable working group.)

-NT

Q.G. · Aug 26, 2010

ntenny said:
Not with people who weren't alive at the same time he was, he didn't! (OK, Aristotle and Euclid overlapped slightly, but my point is that we take the people of several centuries and look back on them as if they were a single remarkable working group.)

Yes.
But's it's not that wrong at all to do so. Despite our optimistic view of ourselves, we have progressed very little since the earliest times we know of.

holmburgers · Aug 26, 2010

I agree... except in terms of technology, we're no different than we were eons ago. I believe that technology gives us the illusion that we are more advanced, and indeed we've formalized so much more, but our base instincts and faculties have remained the same. We're not smarter, but our technology and organized civilization is such that we are bombarded from birth. That effect is the only thing that makes us different from people a million years earlier.... save maybe a handful of negligibly advantageous mutations

ntenny · Aug 26, 2010

Q.G. said:
Yes.
But's it's not that wrong at all to do so. Despite our optimistic view of ourselves, we have progressed very little since the earliest times we know of.

It sounds like you think you're disagreeing with me, but I don't get why. I'm certainly not saying "we got better".

But it's easier to see big patterns in How People Work when you're looking back on them from a few centuries later than it is in real time. So I don't have too much trouble believing that it took a while before anyone had the perspective to reify something that we'd recognise as "the scientific method", even though that person's predecessors had all the ingredients and were sort of doing the same thing.

I also think Aristotle couldn't falsify a hypothesis if it bit him on his pompous posterior, but I'm prepared to admit that this may not be a purely objective opinion.

-NT

Q.G. · Aug 26, 2010

ntenny said:
It sounds like you think you're disagreeing with me, but I don't get why. I'm certainly not saying "we got better".

I'm disagreeing with your historic perspective thing.
To exagerate only a bit: 2000 years ago is like yesterday.

ntenny said:
I also think Aristotle couldn't falsify a hypothesis if it bit him on his pompous posterior, but I'm prepared to admit that this may not be a purely objective opinion.

Pompous? The man who wrote (amongst lots of other stuff) the Topics?
The man who invented both the hypothesis, and the many ways to falsify just about anything?

You must think of someone else.
Or (switching from a disagreeing to a agreeing state of mind - don't know whether that would be more agreeable, but that's another matter): yes, that does sound very much like a purely objective opinion. (Or am i now disagreeing again? Hard, this...)

A tribute the man who may have made it all possible

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