A/T blunder?

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thinkandmull

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I realized something the other day that I am surprised I didn’t see earlier. I am no worshipper of medieval philosophy. I find truth where ever I find it, whether it be in Hegel, Descartes, or Aquinas. Anyhow, scholastics in the medieval held two contradictory ideas. One, that knowledge starts first in the senses, and belief in Aristotle’s theories of the heavens. Aristotle was taken as scripture in these areas. When Galileo tried to show scholastics the moon through his telescope, some refused, some said they were hallucinating when they did, others said the telescope was a trick machine. Why did Aquinas himself, even, accept the idea that the stars were incorruptible when this was not based on sense experience and it was an empirical question? His worship of Aristotle remind me on the worship people give to Aquinas’s philosophy. At least the Church now have recognized alternative thinkers like Rosmini
 
thinkandmull said:
I realized something the other day that I am surprised I didn’t see earlier. I am no worshipper of medieval philosophy. I find truth where ever I find it, whether it be in Hegel, Descartes, or Aquinas. Anyhow, scholastics in the medieval held two contradictory ideas. One, that knowledge starts first in the senses, and belief in Aristotle’s theories of the heavens. Aristotle was taken as scripture in these areas. When Galileo tried to show scholastics the moon through his telescope, some refused, some said they were hallucinating when they did, others said the telescope was a trick machine. Why did Aquinas himself, even, accept the idea that the stars were incorruptible when this was not based on sense experience and it was an empirical question? His worship of Aristotle remind me on the worship people give to Aquinas’s philosophy. At least the Church now have recognized alternative thinkers like Rosmini
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I think the process of creating knowledge is as following: (1) Experiencing, (2) Constructing concepts (we need language to process thoughts), (3) Learning through thoughts and (4) Creating knowledge (knowledge is about relation between a set of concepts).
 
I think the root on some learning processes can’t be sense knowledge alone
 
Maybe they meant that knowledge starts in the senses, but not that every bit of informatiin has to be rooted in the senses? There are many things which we need to know about the world in order to be able to think about, but which are not themselves rooted in the senses.
 
thinkandmull said:
I realized something the other day that I am surprised I didn’t see earlier. I am no worshipper of medieval philosophy. I find truth where ever I find it, whether it be in Hegel, Descartes, or Aquinas. Anyhow, scholastics in the medieval held two contradictory ideas. One, that knowledge starts first in the senses, and belief in Aristotle’s theories of the heavens. Aristotle was taken as scripture in these areas. When Galileo tried to show scholastics the moon through his telescope, some refused, some said they were hallucinating when they did, others said the telescope was a trick machine. Why did Aquinas himself, even, accept the idea that the stars were incorruptible when this was not based on sense experience and it was an empirical question? His worship of Aristotle remind me on the worship people give to Aquinas’s philosophy. At least the Church now have recognized alternative thinkers like Rosmini
Click to expand...
Aquinas (following Aristotle) held that knowledge began in the senses, in that the most basic and immediate knowledge is of material things.

He would have said that there is nothing stopping us from going beyond that, using careful inference.

In other words, Aquinas was not denying that we could have knowledge of things that go beyond what our senses tell us, just that all of our knowledge is ultimately based on sense-based knowledge.

A modern example: we know that the sun is approximately 93,000,000 miles away from the earth. One way to figure this out is by making careful measurements of the relative positions of other plants (such as Venus), which in turn is based on observations of that planet’s movements that we make with telescopes. The earth-sun distance is not directly observable; however, we gain that knowledge ultimately by observations made directly through the senses.

Even the truths of the Faith work like this: we know that the Eucharist is the Substance of our Lord, because we have heard it from someone or read about it somewhere. There is no observation that could possibly distinguish a consecrated host from a piece of unconcentrated bread (transubstantiation changes the substance, but not the accidents); however, even the Faith that tells us that Jesus is present is transmitted to us ultimately in a sensible form (speech, text, etc.).

Was Aquinas (and Aristitle) guilty of some bad and unproven assumptions about the heavenly bodies? Yes, in a way. But I think it is best looked at as the working scientific theory (or “paradigm,” if you like Thomas Kuhn’s terminology) of the time. I don’t think this fact poses any particular problem for his epistemology.
 
thinkandmull said:
I think the root on some learning processes can’t be sense knowledge alone
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I agree. That would be empiricism.

That is why Aquinas (with Aristotle) posits the existence of an agent intellect that does two things:

(1) It takes the data acquired by our sensitive knowledge and forms concepts out of them. (For Aquinas and Aristotle, concepts have an intellectual character, not a sensitive one.)
(2) From these it formulates the first principles that all knowledge is based on.

Lock, Hume, et al., did not make this distinction—they did not acknowledge that intellectual knowledge is qualitatively different from sense knowledge—and so they had a hard time justifying basic elements of knowledge, like substance or causes.
 
Not sure how much of a difference it makes to your point, if any, but I thought it might be worth pointing out that Galileo was born centuries after the condemnations of 1277 by the University of Paris; study of Aristotle, Thomistic thought, scholasticism in general, etc. declined after this.
 
thinkandmull said:
I realized something the other day that I am surprised I didn’t see earlier. I am no worshipper of medieval philosophy. I find truth where ever I find it, whether it be in Hegel, Descartes, or Aquinas. Anyhow, scholastics in the medieval held two contradictory ideas. One, that knowledge starts first in the senses, and belief in Aristotle’s theories of the heavens. Aristotle was taken as scripture in these areas. When Galileo tried to show scholastics the moon through his telescope, some refused, some said they were hallucinating when they did, others said the telescope was a trick machine. Why did Aquinas himself, even, accept the idea that the stars were incorruptible when this was not based on sense experience and it was an empirical question? His worship of Aristotle remind me on the worship people give to Aquinas’s philosophy. At least the Church now have recognized alternative thinkers like Rosmini
Click to expand...
Vaisheshika philosophy (somewhere 6th century to 2nd century BCE) has only sensory or inference based knowledge. Aquinas taught that there was also beatific knowledge and infused knowledge.
 
SalamKhan said:
Not sure how much of a difference it makes to your point, if any, but I thought it might be worth pointing out that Galileo was born centuries after the condemnations of 1277 by the University of Paris; study of Aristotle, Thomistic thought, scholasticism in general, etc. declined after this.
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You might be on to something there: Galileo would have been influenced by Duns Scotus, Nicholas of Cusa, and Francisco Suarez, rather than Aquinas.
 
Vico said:
Vaisheshika philosophy (somewhere 6th century to 2nd century BCE) has only sensory or inference based knowledge. Aquinas taught that there was also beatific knowledge and infused knowledge.
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Good point, though infused knowledge was a privilege of man before the Fall (and, possibly, for our Lady), and beatific knowledge is only for the saints in Heaven. (Our Lord had both infused and beatific knowledge.)
 
My point was that Aristotle’s belief that the heavenly bodies were incorruptible was unverified by the senses, and yet Aquinas accepted it without question
 
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