Essential Thinkers #18 Galileo Galilei: The Quest for Knowledge Amidst Religious Dogmatism

Italian philosopher, astronomer, scientist and mathematician, Galileo Galilei (1564 – 1642) is probably best remembered for his work in support of Copernicus’ heliocentric theory of the solar system. For the sake of his life, Galileo recanted his views in 1633, admitting that the earth did not spin on its own axis. It is unlikely that the recantation was sincere and he nevertheless remained under house arrest.

In 1608 the Dutchmen Lippershey invented the telescope. Within two years Galileo used it to dramatic effect, showing by his astronomical observations that the Ptolemaic or geocentric theory which held that the Earth was at the centre of the universe, was seriously flawed. Galileo also observed that the Milky Way was in fact made up of many millions of individual stars. He observed the phrases of Venus and discovered the moons of Jupiter, which had theological experts up in arms. Indeed, Galileo’s findings attracted such sharp criticism, both from secular and ecclesiastical quarters that he felt compelled to offer, both in his defence and in reply to his critics, the Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina in 1615. In the Letter, Galileo argues that scientific and theological matters should not be confused. Science could not cast doubt on religious doctrine, only strengthen it. Nonetheless he was condemned by the Inquisition, first in private communication in 1616 and later in 1633, when he publicly recanted.

Although his work was instrumental in bringing the Copernican system into prominence, Galileo was far more than just an astronomer. Much of his important work lay in dynamics and the principles of movement. He was the first to discover the law of falling bodies, or constant acceleration, published after his recantation and whilst still under house arrest in 1638, in his Discourse on Two New Sciences.

Moreover, what would later be Newton’s celebrated first Law of Motion was directly taken from Galileo’s principle of inertia, namely that a body moves in a straight line with uniform velocity unless acted upon.

This principle was important in helping to support the Copernican theory. Critics of Copernicus had claimed that if the heliocentric theory were true, then a falling body should not fall in a straight line, but in fact land somewhat to the west of the point from which it was dropped, on account of the eastwise rotation of the Earth. It had been proven by experiment that this was not the case, a result which led many to dismiss Copernicus as wrong even if they did not share the religious reasons for dismissing him. It took Galileo’s work in dynamics to show why the prediction was not fulfilled. Simply put, the falling stone retains the rotational velocity of the Earth.

Philosophically, Galileo held that “the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics.” He was heavily influenced by Greek philosophy and a great admirer of Archimedes. He also maintained, like John Locke, that there was a metaphysical distinction between the primary and secondary qualities of bodies. The former are essential and inherent in objects, whereas the latter exist only insofar as they cause certain effects in the minds of observers. Undoubtedly, Galileo was a great thinker who risked much in the pursuit of truth, helping to set free the quest for knowledge from the chains of religious dogmatism.

[Summarized from Philosophy 100 Essential Thinkers by Philip Stokes, 2012]

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Essential Thinkers #17 Francis Bacon: Scientific Method and the Problem of Induction

English philosopher of science, Francis Bacon (1561-1626) was the forerunner of the famed British school of philosophers that include John Locke, David Hume, George Berkeley, J. S. Mill and Bertrand Russell. Bacon’s important works include The Advancement of Learning, New Atlantis and the Novum Organum. Bacon was also an essayist and enjoyed a successful legal and political career, in particular after James I’s succession of Elizabeth, whereupon he was made Lord Chancellor until being found guilty of corruption.

Attributed as the originator of the saying “knowledge is power,” his importance as a philosopher is most notable with regard to his concern for scientific method. Bacon was troubled by the two schools of thought that had come out of Platonism and Aristotelianism respectively. Firstly, the rationalist view that knowledge could be gained by examining the content and meanings of works – a view Bacon dismissed as like spinning a web from the inside of one’s own head. Secondly, the Aristotelians, intent on collecting masses of empirical data, where equally useless at helping a man arrive at any scientific hypotheses. What was needed, insisted Bacon, was a new way of collecting and organising data that would help generate inductive hypotheses.

Bacon, like many of his contemporaries and predecessors, had been concerned with the problem of induction, a problem that would later receive an astonishingly sceptical response from David Hume. The problem of induction, as Bacon’s contemporaries saw it, was that the mere repetitive occurrence of an incident does not guarantee that the same thing will happen again. To give a simple example, suppose a man draws nine blue marbles out of a bag of ten (9/10). It is no more likely that the tenth marble will be blue than it is that it will be red. The previous instances do not guarantee anything about the following instance.

Bacon saw that the answer to this problem lay in placing the emphasis of investigation on looking for negative instances to disconfirm hypotheses, rather than finding ways of confirming them. This is striking precursor to Karl Popper’s twentieth century falsificationist scientific methodology and his much vaunted claim of ‘solving the problem of induction.’ As Popper readily admits, he owes much to Francis Bacon.

However, unlike others of his time and later David Hume, Bacon was less interested in the problem of justifying inductive generalisations, than in how to generate good inductive hypotheses out of the masses of data collected by observation. Bacon revised a new method. To illustrate it, Bacon shows how one might generate a hypothesis on the nature of heat. One should, Bacon tells us, list all those things in which the property under investigation, in this case heat, is present, then all those things in which the property is absent and finally all those cases which admit of varying degrees of the property in question. From such list, Bacon believes the natural hypothesis will present itself, which in this case, as he well knew at the time, is that heat is produced according to the movement or excitation of molecules within a body.

Although Bacon’s method is undoubtedly one way of applying order to a body of data, and even perhaps a useful way in some cases, it nevertheless seems unlikely to fulfil his ambition, which was to find a systematic way of deriving scientific hypotheses from the arrangement of data. It is unlikely that there ever could be such a system. Bacon failed to take into account the creativity and imaginative aspect of scientific theory building. No matter how systematically one organises data, inductive hypotheses cannot be guaranteed to appear out of them. One may find that some facts deductively follow from a certain ordering of data, but that is not what Bacon was after.

Despite his failure in this regard, Bacon nevertheless made some important contribution to the philosophy of science and the problem of induction, not least, as we have seen, in being the first to stress the importance of negative instances.

[Summarized from Philosophy 100 Essential Thinkers by Philip Stokes, 2012. Also watch YouTube 60 Second Philosophy: Francis Bacon https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsScx7oeHOs]

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I Wonder #8 How Do People Age?

Ageing is a result of the gradual failure of the body’s cells and organs to replace and repair themselves. This is because there is a limit to the number of times that each cell can divide. As the body’s cells begin to near this limit, the rate at which they divide slows down. Sometimes the new cells that are produced have defects or do not carry out their usual task effectively. Organs can then begin to fail, tissues change in structure, and the chemical reactions that power the body become less efficient. Sometime the blood supply to the brain is not effective. The brain cells become starved of oxygen and nutrients, leading to forgetfulness. For most old people memories bring great pleasure. Strangely, even though recent events may be forgotten, old people often clearly remember events that took place in their childhood.

Fact: The skin becomes looser as people age. As skin sags it forms into wrinkles and creases because the fibres of collagen that normally provide support to the skin became weaker.

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I Wonder #7 How Does Our Body Grow?

The most important forces that cause growth lie inside a living thing from the beginning. These forces are called its heredity. The human body has stages of growth: embryo and foetus, infant, child, youth, mature adult and old age. People’s bodies grow faster in the early weeks of life than at any other time. Even before the end of the first year, they are growing less rapidly. Through the whole period of childhood, they grow at a moderate rate. Then growth starts to speed up again. All human beings are much alike in their growth. But there are important differences. Boys and girls all follow the same general pathway of growth, but each one follows it in his own way.

Fact: [From the Internet] The bones of a baby’s head are not fully fused at birth, making the skull flexible enough to pass through the mother’s birth canal. The bones eventually join, but a gap in the skull, called the fontanelle, may not close up for several months.

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Essential Thinkers #16 Thomas More: Utopia's Vision

Sir Thomas More (1478-1535), friend and supporter of Erasmus (refer to previous Thinker), led a dangerous but incorruptible political life which would earn him the death penalty from the same King who once knighted him, Hendry VIII. Unimpressed by Henry’s solicitations, More’s determined adherence to Catholic orthodoxy prevented him from recognising either Hendry’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon or his subsequent self-appointment as head of the English Church in order to marry Anne Boleyn. Fortunately for the history of Western thought, More managed to complete his most important philosophical work, Utopia in good time, 1518 in fact, before Hendry took his head in 1535.

In More’s Utopia, a traveller brings back tales of an island in the South Seas where everything is organized in the best possible way. The book takes the form of a dialogue, in which the traveller, Raphael Hythloday, divulges the wise ways of Utopia as he found them in the five years he spent there. More’s vision of Utopia is a kind of Christian communism, in which there is no personal property, internal commerce or personal ambition. Each member of society works six hours a day regardless of their job. This, says More, is entirely satisfactory in terms of providing enough labour. For other societies only require the poor to work long and exhausting days because of the existence of the idle rich.

The Utopia provides for its citizens by means of a system of farms, each consisting of at least forty workers. There are intellectuals and governors in More’s visionary society, but these are chosen by merit and only remain in their jobs so long as they prove satisfactory. There is also an elected Prince who acts as head of state, but can be removed in case of tyranny. Interestingly, More does not rule out slavery in his ideal society. So-called ‘bondsmen’ are given the distasteful jobs that More does not want his happy citizens to partake in, such as slaughtering the livestock and serving up communal dinners. The bondmen are people serving penal sentences for the breaking of any of the Utopian laws, such as virginity before marriage and chastity during wedlock. Bondmen are also drawn from other societies from among those who have been condemned to death.

Whilst More’s Utopia possesses some admirable liberal qualities, it is also, aesthetically oppressive in the same way as Maoist and Cambodian regimes have been in the real world. More expects all his citizens to wear the same plain, undifferentiated dress. Architecturally it is unremittingly dull. Each of the fifty-four towns are built according to an identical plan. The streets are all twenty feet across and every home is exactly alike. The residents swap homes on a regular basis according to the law to discourage the idea of private ownership, although since all the houses are alike this seems somewhat pointless.

Like The Republic of Plato, it is doubtful that More’s utopian vision could provide the basis for a realistic model of any society, let alone the transformation of an existence one. Nevertheless, the value of Utopia lies in the articulation of certain social and socialistic ideals in an age very far removed from such philanthropic concerns. Bertrand Russell probably sums up the problem with More’s vision, when he says, “If in More’s Utopia, as in most others, would be intolerably dull. Diversity is essential to happiness, and in Utopia there is hardly any.”

[Summarized from Philosophy 100 Essential Thinkers by Philip Stokes, 2012]

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