Autor: Lonergan, Bernard J.F.

Buch: A Third Collection

Titel: A Third Collection

Stichwort: Brancis Bacon: Novum Organum -> neues Ideal

Kurzinhalt: FROM ARISTOTLE'S Posterior Analytics TO NEWTON'S Principia; cautious rule of the Royal Society that excluded questions that neither observation nor experiment could solve

Textausschnitt: 30/9 With the first stage of that transformation we are now concerned. If its triumph was Newton, still its goal was not Aristotelian theoretical knowledge but the practical utility praised by Francis Bacon in his Novum Organum. Its conceptual framework took its inspiration not from Aristotle's metaphysics but from Galileo's program of mathematicizing nature. Its field of inquiry was defined not by Aristotle's intellect, capable of fashioning and becoming all, but by the cautious rule of the Royal Society that excluded questions that neither observation nor experiment could solve. (136; Fs) (notabene)

32/9 In the second chapter of the first book of that work one is aware that Aristotle's basic concern is with causal necessity. We think we understand, he notes, when we know the cause, know that it is the cause, and know that the effect cannot be other than it is. But straightway this concern with things and their causes is transposed into syllogistic theory. We are told how knowledge of causal necessity is expressed in appropriate subjects and predicates, premises and conclusions, and thereby manifests its nature as science. We are told how one science can find its principles in the conclusions of another more general science. But when at the end of the second book it is asked how the initial premises are obtained on which the whole deductive structure has to rest, we are told about a rout followed by a rally. The line breaks. Sauve quipeut! But as the fleeing line scatters in every direction, somewhere someone will turn and make a stand. Another will join him, and then another. The rally begins. The pursuing enemy now is scattered. Victory may be snatched from the jaws of defeat. I think this military analogy is sound enough. For it represents the chance accumulation of clues that can combine into a discovery. But it is not at all clear that a necessary truth will be discovered and not a mere hypothesis, a mere possibility that has to be verified if it is to merit the name not of truth but of probability. If the only premises the Posterior Analytics can provide are just hypotheses, verifiable possibilities, then we have many words about causal necessity but no knowledge of the reality. (136f; Fs)

33/9 Further, the syllogistic approach distinguished philosophy and science simply as the more and the less general. It followed that together they formed a seamless robe with the basic terms and basic relations of philosophy ramifying through the less general fields and robbing them of their autonomy. But experimental science has to be autonomous. For ...