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Aristotle’s Aether and Contemporary Science
- The Thomist: A Speculative Quarterly Review
- The Catholic University of America Press
- Volume 68, Number 3, July 2004
- pp. 375-429
- 10.1353/tho.2004.0015
- Article
- Additional Information
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The Thomist 68 (2004): 375-429 ARISTOTLE'S AETHER AND CONTEMPORARY SCIENCE CHRISTOPHER A. DECAEN Thomas Aquinas College Santa Paula, CA PROPONENTS OF THE perennial philosophy tend to be embarrassed by its natural science, and this is, to some extent, understandable. That the progress of the sciences in the past four hundred years coincided with a widespread repudiation of Aristotle's philosophy in general, and his natural philosophy in particular, is not coincidental. As the natural philosophers of the 1600s looked at nature more and more closely, evidence began to accumulate that much of what Aristotle thought was true about nature was not. Perhaps, many suspected, none of it was true. The most obvious instance of this challenging of Aristotelian natural philosophy came from the Copernican revolution, in which the Earth was elevated from the status of an immobile lump of dross at the center or bottom of the universe to that of "planet," one of the heavenly bodies orbiting the immobile sun.1 Our promotion seemed to fly in the face of Aristotle's now frequently derided bifurcation of nature into two regions, the celestial and the terrestrial (or more accurately, the supra- and 1 It is often repeated that the Copernican revolution was a demotion for the Earth and for mankind in general, taking him from the center of the universe, a privileged place in contemporary speech, and placing him in a position ofsubordination and subservience. Now man would realize, the story goes, his own insignificance in the great scheme of things. (I doubt I need to cite evidence of this claim; examples are legion.) Regardless of whether some may have derived an overly anthropocentric world view from the centrality of the Earth, Aristotle did not. He consistently argued that the part of the cosmos beneath the moon was the least both in quantity and quality. See, for example, Meteor., 2.1.353a35-b6. 375 376 CHRISTOPHER A. DECAEN sublunary), each corresponding to two radically different kinds of matter: aether and the familiar Empedoclean elements. If the Earth is just another one the planets, and the planets and the other stars are the only sensible evidence of Aristotle's aethereal substance, then the case for positing aether weakens; the planets, or "wandering stars,"2 are no more aethereal than is the ordinary kind of matter with which we are intimately familiar. That was the beginning of the end for Aristotle's incorruptible aether. Although the notion that an aether was still needed as a medium for conveying gravitational and electromagnetic forces would occasionally surface, by the end of the nineteenth century the view prevailing among experimental scientists was that aether was superfluous. Modern-day Thomists and disciples of Aristotle were forced to choose between clinging to doctrines againstwhich the entire scientific community was arrayed, and admitting that their masters were egregiously mistaken in a large part of their philosophy. That many have taken the latter path, trying to ameliorate the situation by claiming that Aristotle's natural philosophy is not foundational for his metaphysics or ethics, or by insisting that St. Thomas Aquinas's philosophy, unlike that of Aristotle, is essentially metaphysical or theological, is well known. This essay, however, will, in a manner of speaking, take the former path, arguing that while experimental science has indeed made a definitive case against certain particularities of Aristotle's aether, the existence of some kind of aether, one not entirely unlike his celestial matter, has not yet been refuted. Indeed, a positive case can be made in favor of it still, a case based upon recent developments within experimental science itself. In short, we will argue that there was a real insight driving the Philosopher's claim that to explain the cosmos more is needed than just the sort of matter that we can touch and grip in our 2 Setting aside the presence or absence of twinkling, to the naked eye a planet looks no differentfrom a star, and hence a planetwas thought to be one of the stars, distinguished from the others only because its circular motion had certain irregularities, earning for it the name planiftes, "wanderer." Likewise, then, if the Earth is one in kind with the...