zoobyshoe said:
I don't know. What I can tell you is that no one in the Church was particularly upset by Galileo disproving Aritotle's notions of falling bodies. It wasn't till his discoveries started to cast doubt on the accepted cosmologies that the church became concerned.
To be accurate, it's not like the Church adapted faithfully Aristotle's cosmology. The idea of the intelligences became the idea of heavenly spheres on which the orbits of the planets were planted, God's complete perfection was adapted to Christian dogma, and the argument from first cause became the major argument for the existence of God put forth by Aquinas. Final causation probably provided philosophical grounding for the idea of a purposeful universe, but I'm not sure about that one. There are still many notable differences, however. Aristotle's God was neither the creator of the universe nor a person, for one thing. Aristotle also never went into any detail about the physical geography of the heavens. It was Ptolemy that did so, starting from the idea of a geocentric universe and then developing all of his cycles and epicycles to make the theory fit the observation, something that Aristotle himself never bothered with. Final causation, also, if it was indeed adapted, could not have been done so faithfully.
Aristotle's cosmology was quite interesting. His explanation of motion was that the intelligences (heavenly spheres upon which heavenly bodies were mounted) attempted to emulate the perfection of God. Since they could not, the closest thing they could do was move in perfect circles, considered by Aristotle to be the perfect shape. This movement filters down somehow into all others things, imparting them with an impetus that is the efficient cause of their movement. The final cause of movement for all things remains the yearning for perfection. This takes the form of change in physical objects in everyday life. An acorn becomes an oak tree because that is its perfection. Interestingly enough, in humans this becomes the basis of his ethics, as human action is explained through the desire for happiness. Aristotle believes this is best achieved through the exercise of reason because the perfection of a human being is a being of pure reason. (I find this interesting because he seems to be the only philosopher, other than Hobbes, to ever physically derive an ethics). Anyway, his notion of God becomes that of a Prime Mover that is the final cause of all motion, but not the efficient cause, nor is God the cause of existence, as the universe in Aristotle's metaphysics is coeternal with the Prime Mover. According to Aristotle, this Prime Mover is not even aware of the existence of the universe. Obviously, this is radically different from any Catholic doctrine.
In reality, the scholastics, and Aquinas especially, simply picked and chose the elements of Aristotle that happened to be compatible with existing Church dogma to provide some form of logical underpinning which they felt they needed, in light of classical learning that early Christians had not been aware of. In addition to the development of a Catholic cosmology that borrowed elements of the
Metaphysics, it would seem that Marcus Aurelius was heavily influenced by the
Ethics in his own writings on virtue ethics.
Yes, there's confusion. What the church adopted was his notions about the perfection of the heavens, their immutability, and things like that. This may well better be termed "metaphysics" than "philosophy", I don't know.
Well, metaphysics is a part of philosophy. What I mean is that the arguments that scholastics used were the arguments that Aristotle laid out in his book titled
Metaphysics. I only meant that it's misleading to call this his 'philosophy' as that seems to suggest that the content of this one work constitutes the whole of his philosophy, when in fact he wrote many treatises on a great many diverse subjects, all of which were considered 'philosophy.'
Another interesting thing to note that is that the immutability of the heavens and the complete perfection of the Prime Mover were ideas that Aristotle himself adapted from Parmenides and Xenophanes (I could be wrong on Xenophanes, but it was another of the pre-Socratics). The major ideas that were actually uniquely his were the ones that are still popular today: moderation as the chief virtue, happiness as the telos of human action, and his theories on dramatic structure. Terms like "golden mean" and "catharsis" endure today, whereas "impetus" and "intelligences" are relegated to medievalist curiosities. He was also probably the first person to ever undertake any kind of taxonomy.
One thing that was brought in a discussion recently that piqued my interest was the possibility that the Buddhist conception of the 'middle way' might also be an adaptation of Aristotle, as it is eerily similar to his 'golden mean.' Alexander, who was tought by Aristotle, was in India a couple hundred years after the Buddha had died, but who knows whether or not some of his ideas may have been incorporated into early Buddhism, which was still very much in a developmental stage. Anyway, that's just idle speculation on the part of people who know way too little about history, myself included.
