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JDaniel
Guest
What?
Accepted.
I have a question for you: Can an animal think in the future perfect tense simultaneously with the present?
jd
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jd
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agangbern
Guest
So you want to enter into the world of pure ideas. But if you enter into the world of pure ideas, how could you as biologist find a living organism in the field of ideas:?
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Leela
Guest
???
I was actually talking about reality. I had thought you were, too. I don’t know what you are getting at here.
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agangbern
Guest
That is the point of this thread.Biologists attacking Plato and Aristotle. People whose main concern are actual living organisms wanting to enter into the world of pure ideas. It is like a fish wanting to live in land.
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Earnest_Bunbury
Guest
See scientists delve into the spiritual on “Ghost Hunters” on Sci Fi channel.
Not if he denies the spiritual.
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Leela
Guest
I understand the point of the thread. I just didn’t know that we disagreed about whether we are talking about the same reality. As far as I know, the world of ideas and the world of organisms are the same place.
Best,
Leela
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agangbern
Guest
They may be in the same place, but they are not in the same plane.
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Quack
Guest
Darwinsbulldog and Leela,
The problem was not that a biologist was talking about the relation between biology and philosophy. The problem was that the biologist wrote things that displayed a complete misunderstanding of Plato and Aristotle. The biologist does not have to respect anyone’s beliefs, but he does have to refrain from pontificating on things that he does not understand. This is not spirituality or theology, but philosophy.
Biologists can and should correct Aristotle’s errors in his biological treatises, but when they go into metaphysics and linguistics?
His claim was that “Darwin’s most dangerous idea was his recognition of the reality of the variations that exist between individuals in populations” is absurd. Plato and Aristotle were fully aware that there were variations within a class, species, type, or kind.
The common nouns dog, town, and triangle refer to classes, and the individuals and we apply these common nouns to and place in classes are particulars that are different. Plato and Aristotle never claimed that variations “don’t matter.” In fact, it us because there are variations within a class that we can say that we apply common nouns to the individuals indifferently. To say that we can apply words to a number of individuals indifferently is to say that there is a certain sameness in the individuals that one recognizes. By means of an abstract concept, we understand what is common to all of the particular dogs or triangles that we can perceive or imagine. This is what Aristotle had in mind. (I paraphrase from a modern Aristotelian philosopher named MJ Adler)
It is the philosophy of nominalism that the biologist is defending, but evolution does not lead to nominalism, as the biologist states. The one thing that the biologist got right was his statement that nominalism can be traced back to the 14th Century philosopher William of Ockham. It is a linguistic and metaphysical dispute on which evolution has nothing to say.
The problem was not that a biologist was talking about the relation between biology and philosophy. The problem was that the biologist wrote things that displayed a complete misunderstanding of Plato and Aristotle. The biologist does not have to respect anyone’s beliefs, but he does have to refrain from pontificating on things that he does not understand. This is not spirituality or theology, but philosophy.
Biologists can and should correct Aristotle’s errors in his biological treatises, but when they go into metaphysics and linguistics?
His claim was that “Darwin’s most dangerous idea was his recognition of the reality of the variations that exist between individuals in populations” is absurd. Plato and Aristotle were fully aware that there were variations within a class, species, type, or kind.
The common nouns dog, town, and triangle refer to classes, and the individuals and we apply these common nouns to and place in classes are particulars that are different. Plato and Aristotle never claimed that variations “don’t matter.” In fact, it us because there are variations within a class that we can say that we apply common nouns to the individuals indifferently. To say that we can apply words to a number of individuals indifferently is to say that there is a certain sameness in the individuals that one recognizes. By means of an abstract concept, we understand what is common to all of the particular dogs or triangles that we can perceive or imagine. This is what Aristotle had in mind. (I paraphrase from a modern Aristotelian philosopher named MJ Adler)
It is the philosophy of nominalism that the biologist is defending, but evolution does not lead to nominalism, as the biologist states. The one thing that the biologist got right was his statement that nominalism can be traced back to the 14th Century philosopher William of Ockham. It is a linguistic and metaphysical dispute on which evolution has nothing to say.
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Darwinsbulldog
Guest
I certainly will back up my claims, but I thought that the things Aristotle got wrong were common knowledge, and therefore do not need supporting evidence. Nor did I make so-called “universal statements” regarding Plato or Aristotle, I merely said they got some things wrong. Both men were excellent thinkers, and contributed much. I certainly admire both as philosophers and scientists. Aristotle’s cosmology was quite wrong however. The Earth is not the center of the universe.
I draw your attention to Aristotle’s view of cosmology in the physics section:-
newadvent.org/cathen/01713a.htm
Aristotle also made other assumptions that are weak or even absent in evidence, like his assumption of first cause.
As for these assumptions, they are simply that, assumptions.
I object, in particular to the last two. You can have design without a designer, and that “designer” is natural selection. Darwin demonstrated that quite complex adaptation can arise from natural causation. This is even true for complex, non-living things, like snowflakes or weather,
Finally, although Aristotle used reason and simple observation, he did not use modern scientific practice, which includes the falsification of hypotheses.
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crowonsnow
Guest
No.
The biologist in the OP is simply stating that there is no such thing as an ideal human. Obviously he’s right on in his statement. He’s also implying there’s no such thing as an ideal dog, triangle or anything else. That’s good science.
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agangbern
Guest
There is an ideal human, Jesus Christ.
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Darwinsbulldog
Guest
Jesus Christ was either human, or divine, you can’t have it both ways.
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Image_of_God
Guest
I tried to resist replying to this statement, but I can’t.
Take for example a deformed person who is missing a leg, an arm and an eye. The reason why that person is called deformed is because he falls short of what most of us perceive as the ideal human. The ideal is that that deformed person have two arms, two legs and two eyes. Now, in that strictly biological sense and in the sense only, there is such a thing as an ideal human. However, Hitler had a warped sense of the ideal human (Aryan race). In that sense, which is also biological, I argue that there is no such thing as an ideal human.
However, Plato’s ideal human is placed in the supernatural realm of ideas. Therefore, it is odd that a biologist should be talking about. It has more to do with theology than biology. Someone above has stated that Christ is the ideal human. That is a true statement that every Christian is required to believe. I also believe, as many other theologians believe, that in the mind of God, which early Christians argued was where Plato’s theory of the realm of ideas is at, there is the personal idea of every human being. For example, the ideal human in God’s mind is obviously someone who of the utmost purity and filled with the highest charity. In that sense, I would argue that there is an ideal human and that that topic is not in the realm of biology.
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Image_of_God
Guest
Jesus was a divine person with a human and divine nature. He was divine.
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agangbern
Guest
We have him both. True man and True God. I`m sorry that this thread must go astray for a moment. The comment that there is no ideal human was simply uncalled for in this thread.
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Darwinsbulldog
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Yes, you can make a statement like that, but by just asserting it, does not make it true. It is a logical fallacy, in fact. Either Jesus was man, or not man. If Jesus is a deity, then he is a deity, and therefore not a man.
By definition gods are spiritual, immortal and immaterial, and men are material, and mortal.
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Image_of_God
Guest
Jesus was a divine person with a human and divine nature as I said previously. To say that it is impossible for God to assume a human nature is to limit God to your own finite mind and therefore to make yourself above God. You define gods as “spiritual, immortal and immaterial”. You are right. But if that’s the case you admit that a god is above man and therefore cannot be completely understood by him. The idea of God assuming a human nature is not irrational. It is nonrational. It is not against logic, it is only against what we understand to be logical.
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Image_of_God
Guest
You are right. God has both a true human nature and a true divine nature. However, he is only a divine person. Dawinsbulldog’s statements are inherently contradictory. God is not bound by reason nor is reason bound to him. God is reason and therefore anything he does must be logical. Dawinsbulldog says that Jesus cannot be both divine and human. But to say that to a divine person, means to say that that person is not divine. For if something is divine that means it is not bound by the limitations of man.
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RobbyS
Guest
Why THIS ,mention? because the writer obviouly does not understand Plato and Aristotle, and blithely reveals his ignorance of what they have to say. One wonders if he knows any philosophy except what he has picked up on the fly.I’m not sure why Plato would be mentioned at all, other than as Aristotle’s teacher. It is Aristotle who dealt most heavily with the material world and how “ideal forms” interact with matter. Plato mentioned these things, but it wasn’t his focus; for Aristotle the material world was a major focus.
Speaking as someone who considers myself a Thomist, I don’t see how Darwinian biology really poses a fundamental problem, though it does challenge some of the presumptions Thomists and Aristotelians held regarding material, scientific facts.
Thomists always held that changes in matter could produce a change in form. In fact, I would say that they insisted on this moreso that even Aristotle and Plato. They weren’t fools, and they could see that melting a coin down to slag changed its form. While they didn’t know about genes, they knew that crossbreeding certain species caused offspring that weren’t quite either parent (mules, for example).
Another point is that Aquinas often talks about matter being “prepared to receive a form”, and he does so both about purely accidental forms (read: physical shape and size and such), such as shaping a ball of clay into a pot, and essential changes, such as air becoming fire (obviously his science was off in this regard, but the point is that he clearly believed that something could change forms at the most fundamental level). One can easily look at the shifting of genes as being “preparation to receive a new form”, even if we can’t quite demarcate when the new form is received. Transitional forms, like transitional species, are real even if we can’t quite p(name removed by moderator)oint their existence.
All of this, of course, is speaking about the metaphysical definitions, rather than the “pure science” of people like Aristotle and Aquinas. In “pure science” they obviously didn’t understand as much as we do today about genes and chemistry and such, and had other theories for how and why changes occured which are now disproven. That’s just the way of science, however, and doesn’t shake these philosophies to their core by any stretch.
Personally I don’t see why these people should come up at all in a biology textbook, especially if the idea is apparently to challenge their philosophy, and not their scientific errors.
Peace and God bless!
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crowonsnow
Guest
Yes. How tall is the ideal human? What color hair and eyes? Right handed? Ambidextrous? What language? How old? At what age death? What is the ideal human diet? Gut biota? Number of offspring?
There aren’t any ideal humans or an ideal human except to pretend there is one. And everyone would have a different ideal, meaning there isn’t any ideal at all.
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