The Basis of Modern Science

Although we might sometimes think of science and philosophy as two rather different academic subjects, they are in many ways related. We can see this in, for example, some of the words used in a current science textbook (An Introduction to Physical Science, a commonly-used college freshman text, 2009, Houghton Mifflin). Early in the introduction, it offers us this quote from the Lutheran pastor and philosopher, Johannes Kepler:

Theory guides, experiment decides.

Kepler, often known today for his discovery that planetary orbits are elliptical and not circular, spent most of his life thinking about theology, having studied at the seminary in Tübingen in Germany.

The textbook goes on to state in its own words that

Based on the assumption that the universe is orderly enough to be understood, a method of observation and rules for reasoning and making predictions have been formulated.

The clear philosophical import of this text is the “assumption” that the universe is rational, that it follows the laws of algebra and geometry, and eventually, the laws of chemistry and physics. The universe, then, has been designed around a set of principles - according, at least, to the current thinking in physics departments at the nation’s universities. Further, there are “rules” for reasoning.

The idea that there are rules for reasoning, in physics at least, goes back as far as the theologian Isaac Newton. Outside of physics, in pure mathematics and logic, the idea is even older. This is the foundation of observational and empirical science as we now know it. Isaac Newton, because of his discovery of mathematical truths like the theorems and principles of calculus, and because of his discovery of physical laws like gravitation, spent most of his scholarly effort analyzing, and wrote most of his publications about, the Bible.

We see, from the works of men like Kepler and Newton, that there is a thick tangle where philosophy, mathematics, natural observational sciences, and theology meet. Assumptions about the possibility of phenomena in the universe being subject to mathematical modeling come very near to expressing certain aspects or properties of God.

Anaximenes: Is the Universe a Machine?

Philosophers and scientists have long wrestled with notion of a mechanistic universe: it is attractive, to the extent that it reflects both the formalized assumptions and intuitive concepts of physics and chemistry, both of which can be modeled mathematically. On the other hand, it fails to correspond to our ideas of imagination, creativity, and chance. We can see clearly that some aspects of the cosmos are mechanistic - gravitational forces can be calculated and reliably predicted. But is there a decision process which would have allowed us to predict, after Beethoven finished his eighth symphony, which form and content would comprise his ninth symphony?

Anaximenes was perhaps the first to advance a strictly mechanistic cosmology. Even though Thales and Anaximander had rejected mythological “psyche” into their systems of physics, attributing something like a capability for arbitrary decisions to objects. Modern physics would like to tell us that even in a situation like the flipping of a coin, the results are, if not actually calculable, still in principle calculable. Anaximenes would agree. Yale’s Professor Brumbaugh writes that Anaximenes

discovered that nature can be explained mechanically. Anaximenes thought that all changes were the result of changes in density brought about by the condensation and rarefaction of one underlying form of matter.

And this, in fact, is not far from current twenty-first century natural observational science. The vast majority of what is around us consists of three rather generic forms: electron, proton, neutron.

The great virtue of this new idea was that it gave the scientist experiments, models, and clear-cut physical explanations of changes and their causes. This is still our own way of thinking.

If we review the first three philosophers in succession - Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes - then we can see their cumulative progress:

To recognize the magnitude and importance of the Milesian achievement, with its three progressive insights into the materiality, uniformity, and mechanical causality of nature, the modern reader must realize that here we have the ancestors of contemporary physics and astronomy.

These first three philosophers lived in the town of Miletus, and are thus called Milesian; their lifespans overlapped and so they almost certainly knew each other. Anaximenes additionally proposed the notion of rotation as central to the universe, and so it is: planets rotate on their axes, orbit their stars, and a grouped into larger galaxies which also rotate and orbit. This notion of rotation fits well with his primary notion of density:

Modern astrophysics can trace the life histories of starts in terms of alternate increases and decreases in their density.

And so, Anaximenes has made a persuasive case for a mechanistic universe. Yet the counterexamples remain: artistic creativity among humans, the uncertainty principle in physics, and the question of the origin of the universe. Anaximenes is persuasive, but not conclusive.

Anaximander

It’s frustrating to come in second - most Americans know that George Washington was the first president, but far fewer can name the second president; John Glenn was the first American astronaut to orbit the earth, but the name of second American to orbit the earth is not so well known; Charles Lindbergh was the first pilot to fly solo across the Atlantic, but who was the second? Edmund Hillary was the first man to climb Mount Everest, but who was the second?

So it is with Anaximander: Thales was the first philosopher, and many textbooks begin with his name. But less often do philosophy classes dwell on the work of his successor.

Anaximander began where Thales left off: the quest for a grand unified theory, to borrow a phrase from modern physics, or, in older phrasing, cosmology. Yale’s Professor Brumbaugh writes:

Leaping beyond the brilliant yet simple notion that all things are made of the same stuff, Anaximander showed how deep an objective analysis of the real world must penetrate. He made four distinct and significant contributions to human understanding:

1. He realized that neither water nor, indeed, any such ordinary material could be the fundamental form of matter. He saw the basic stuff as a more sophisticated though somewhat obscure boundless something. This theory was to serve science well for twenty-five centuries.

2. He extended the concept of law from human society to the physical world - a clean break with the older view of a capricious, anarchic nature.

3. He invented the use of models to make complex natural phenomena easier to understand.

4. He deduced, in a rudimentary way, that the earth had changed over the ages.

Quite a list of intellectual accomplishments! His understanding of matter is a direct ancestor of both modern chemistry and modern atomic physics. His understanding of the laws of nature - which amounts to saying that the universe is rationally constructed using algebra and geometry - is the necessary precondition for the development of chemistry and physics. The skill of modeling, which follows from the fact that the universe is assembled using the laws of algebra, is the basis for the understanding of natural processes: they can be mathematically modeled, which allows us to predict where the planet Neptune will be at this time next year, or describe how continental drift has slowed from miles per day to per to inches per year. A fossil hunter himself, Anaximander reasoned that even the highest mountains must have at one time been covered by water, a massive world-wide flood.

Agreeing with Thales that there must be one common principle underlying all matter, he disagreed with Thales on what it was. Rejecting the first philosopher’s hypothesis of water, Anaximander noted that this proto-material must be able to manifest itself in nearly endless qualities and properties we see in different objects:

If everything real is a matter with definite qualities, it must be possible for this matter to be hot in some cases, cold in others, sometimes wet and sometimes dry. Anaximander thought of qualities as always being contrary pairs. If one identifies matter with one quality of such a pair, as in Thales’ “all things are water,” how can one explain the existence of the contrary quality? If “to be is to be material,” and “matter is water,” then it would seem to follow that “to be is to be moist.” All right: what happens when things become dry? If the matter they are made of its always wet, drying would destroy the matter of things: they would become immaterial and cease to be. In the same way, matter cannot be identified with any one quality to the exclusion of its opposite. From this, the concept of matter as the boundless, a neutral and indeterminate something, follows. From this reservoir, the opposite qualities “separate out”: from the boundless all specific things arise, and to it they return when they cease to be.

Although we don’t think of neutrons, protons, and electrons as “boundless”, they are in some sense “neutral” and, until they are placed into atoms and molecules, indeterminate. Anaximander was realizing that, in order to express all possible qualities and properties, the basic building blocks of matter would have none of those qualities or properties, and would be capable of being configured in many, perhaps infinitely many, different patterns to yield the different properties we experience in actual bits of matter.

Thales - the First!

It is widely-known, of course, that nearly every book on the history of philosophy lists Thales as the first philosopher. It is even more widely-known that this statement can be contested. Aren’t there other people who could claim the title of first philosopher? For example, the author of the book of Ecclesiastes, which probably pre-dates Thales by several centuries?

And yet Thales endures, and clings to his title of “first” philosopher, despite the fact that we have only a few small textual fragments from him, and they reveal a cosmology which is naive and overly-simplistic. He retains his title of “first” for reasons best described in Friedrich Nietzsche’s defense of him - and thereby also set the trend for several centuries of pre-Socratic philosophy. As Yale’s Professor Brumbaugh writes,

Thales could, with some right, have claimed the ideas of matter, of physics, of science, and of philosophy as his inventions. However strange this may seem, all of these ideas had to be discovered. And to be discovered, mythology had to be abandoned. To state - as Thales did - that “all things are water” may seem an unpromising beginning for science and philosophy as we know them today; but, against the background of mythology from which it rose, it was revolutionary. The break was not complete; it could not have been. Thales still had no abstract idea of matter, as opposed to an imaginative picture of a fluid sea; the two were mixed together. And his idea of change was still based on a feeling that “all things are full of soul.” But he had asked a new kind of question. His question has given distinctive shape to Western thought.

The question posed by Thales, if perhaps tacitly, is the question of cosmology: what is the nature and structure of the universe? what is its origin and design? His answer, if laughably wrong, is understandable in the sense that water is 75% of the earth’s surface, is 75% of every human being and most other living creatures, is necessary for all forms of life, is the only substance commonly seen in all three states (solid, liquid, gas), and is found everywhere except in the vacuum of deep space between planets.

The rejection of mythology by Thales led to other pre-Socratic philosophers, but perhaps most of all to Xenophanes, who would reject anthropomorphic deities of polytheistic mythologies, and instead move forward to a rational conception of God: invisible, eternal, and monotheistic.

To seek to provide an answer to the question, What are all things?, required tremendous insight and imagination. For the question assumes that everything forms a part of some single world of being, and that all things have some common property. It raises the question of what being is, as opposed to less general questions about what these or those particular being are. And prior to answering the question, Thales had assumed that there is enough system among the infinite variety of things in the world to permit some sort of single answer. This assumption marks the beginning of philosophy.

In Thales, then, we see already the notion of system, the notion that the world is rational and understandable - that the universe is constructed with axioms and principles. This is the foundational assumption of physics and chemistry. Thales has indeed earned his title as “first” philosopher.

Parmenides

Parmenides is pivotal in the history of philosophy - in order to understand Anaxagoras, Empedocles, or Zeno of Elea, one must first understand Parmenides, because those later thinkers were writing in reference to him. Yale’s Professor Robert Brumbaugh writes:

Parmenides was greatly influenced by the Pythagoreans. He invented formal logic by applying their mathematical methods of proof to the philosophical problem of the natures of being and not-being. Presenting his argument in the form of an epic poem, he used logic to show that being is unchanging and uncreated. This conclusion denied the possibility of any appearance of variety or change. A corollary to this positive, if mystical, conclusion was that human reason has the power to understand reality.

He is, then, not only foundational for understanding later generations of Greek philosophers, but also many modern philosophers, starting with Descartes: the philosophical admiration for the strength of mathematical reasoning has led a diverse set of people - from Spinoza to Hegel, from Wittgenstein to Quine - to model various branches of philosophy on the patterns of proof and theorem found in mathematics. Parmenides touches on another central point in philosophy: he poses a question about the strength and abilities of human reason. To be sure, he also answers that question - and thereby finds for himself both a number of allies and opponents. It is the question that is the beginning-point for Kant’s philosophy: which questions can human reason answer, and which ones can it not answer? Such a question is properly prior to any philosophizing, because before we can try to answer any further philosophical questions, we should first know whether or not those questions can be answered at all, and whether it is human reason, or some other faculty, which might be able to answer them.

Interestingly enough, Parmenides also wrote about astronomy, biology, and other sciences. Yet if his main insight was sound, the many changing things these sciences study could not be real. Vividly aware of change and the individuality in the world they observed about them

later Greek philosophers would try

to find ways to keep Parmenides’ logical method but to avoid his mystical conclusion.

It doesn’t bother Parmenides that the natural sciences must be, on his terms, dealing with what are illusions. He is content to deal with the parade of images presented by, as, or through sense-data, while realizing that they are merely images, that there is no underlying change behind the image of change, no underlying coming-to-be behind the image of coming-to-be, and no underlying passing-away behind the image of passing-away. Again, one sees here the seeds of Kant and phenomenology: the seeds of the former, inasmuch as the logic of causal relations in the phenomenal world does not apply to, or even entail the existence of, the noumenal world; the seeds of the latter, inasmuch as Parmenides brackets, even if he has already answered, the questions about the existence and nature of the noumenal world. Parmenides (as synopsized by the Brumbaugh) sets up his argument:

Suppose someone assumes that being is divided into many separate beings. Then what is it that separates them and holds them apart? It cannot be being, for then all of the parts would still all be together in one totality, and it not be distinct. On the other hand, if one says things are separated by not-being this leads to absurdity. For not-being, if it is the opposite of being, can only be a void, a kind of pure nothing: if one says that non-being is a separator, he is treating it as being, which by definition it is not. If one says that though it is nothing, it still separates the parts of being, this is the same as saying that “nothing separates being into parts,” which in fact is a statement denying that the parts are separated. How can nothing do something positive? The idea is self-contradictory.

Parmenides is both making a specific metaphysical statement here, and also laying down a principle for argumentation in general:

In explicitly recognizing that noncontradiction is a fundamental property of existence, as well as of thought, Parmenides hit a upon a most important principle. Once it is recognized that only consistent entities can exist, the truth of generalizations can be tested by examining their consistency.

It is worthwhile to sharpen the notion “that noncontradiction is a fundamental property ... of thought.” One might more specifically say “ ... of rational thought” or “ ... of logical thought” or even “ ... of significant thought,” for a self-contradictory sentence, and the proposition which is represents, cannot signify, i.e., cannot have a referent. The net impact on philosophy

was to reinforce philosophical formalism by showing that there is a close connection between reality and abstract logical form, and to make philosophers more conscious of the methods by which they arrived at their conclusions.

Future philosophers would appreciate “the value of precise logical form,” an impact which places Parmenides into the category of very important philosophers!

Empedocles

Empedocles wrote his philosophy partly in reaction against, and partly in support of, the ideas of Parmenides. Empedocles agreed that the basic nature of the universe was changeless, but he allowed for a changing arrangement of the changeless building blocks of the universe. Thus he is often seen as the first thinker to state the concept of elements, from which we get our modern idea of chemistry. Yale’s Professor Brumbaugh writes:

To account for change, without assuming that “something comes from nothing,” he introduced the idea of a plurality of “elements,” which mix in different ratios but themselves remain unchanged. However, both the form and content of his poetry suggest that Empedocles was more interested in interpreting the vivid world of our sense than in finding some other reality behind appearance. He had an imagination able to combine the most divergent notions - so much so that many later readers have been unable to appreciate the originality of his work. Those of his ideas that were most philosophically influential were his notion of a plurality of “elements” ...

Brumbaugh goes on to describe one possible way to interpret the murky texts of Empedocles:

One can deny that there is any deep-hidden reality underlying appearance and argue that truth is to be found in close observation of what we can see or touch or imagine vividly. Someone who takes this standpoint will be less trustful of appeals to to mysterious “realities,” to highly abstract arguments, than he will be to more vivid items of experience.

If this is, in fact, what Empedocles thought, then he not only anticipated the modern chemical system of elements, but he may also have anticipated several other philosophical schools: phenomenology, epiphenomenology, and the radical empiricism of Hume and the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle.

Anaxagoras

To understand the work of the Greek philosopher Anaxagoras, it helps to see him against the backdrop of two other philosophers: Zeno of Elea and Parmenides. Parmenides emphasized what he believed to be the unchanging nature of the universe and its basic components: if something exists, it has always existed and always will exist, because nothing can come into being out of nothing - which is to say, something does not emerge from nothing. Because things don’t come into being out of nothing, it follows (at least for Parmenides) that things don’t cease to exist, either: something cannot disappear into nothing. Parmenides further extrapolated that, because things neither enter nor leave existence, things also do not change in any meaningful way. Finally, he concluded that because things neither change, nor begin to exist, nor cease to exist, then there is essentially only one thing in the universe: what seems to us to be many things is actually a type of cosmic unity.

Zeno of Elea (not to be confused with Zeno of Citium) was a follower of Parmenides, and wanted to support his theories via a set of paradoxes. Zeno wanted to show that if one holds views which contradict the views of Parmenides, then one will wind up believing absurdities. Zeno wanted to show that motion, because it is a type of change, doesn’t really exist, despite the testimony of our sense-data: motion entails paradoxical results when one uses rigorous logic in physics. Likewise, the overarching cosmic unity of all being is consistent, but Zeno says that if we assume the existence of many things, we encounter self-contradictory results.

We arrive then at Anaxagoras. Yale’s Professor Brumbaugh writes:

Anaxagoras contributed three new ideas to Greek philosophy. First, he developed the view that matter is a continuum. This is one way to escape Zeno’s paradoxes, since it gives both space and time the property of infinite divisibility. Second, he presented a new concept of the mind and its place in the cosmic scheme, maintaining that although all other things mix together, mind remains pure. This was not yet a mind-matter dualism, but it was an important philosophic contribution. Third, Anaxagoras formulated a new way of relating these two dimensions, using mind as the motive power that sets matter in motion.

While Anaxagoras wanted to find solutions to some of Zeno’s paradoxes, he did not flatly reject Parmenides.

Impressed by Parmenides’ statement that “nothing can come from nothing,” Anaxagoras held that matter changes only through a different mixing of qualities which all things share. There is never a sudden bursting into being of something that was nothing just before. Instead there are changes in intensity of the mingled qualities that flow from one place to another. The qualities themselves, once they have separated out of the primordial state when “all things were together,” are conserved, not created or destroyed.

In this way, Anaxagoras tries to preserve Parmenides’ basic doctrine, while explaining the appearance of change and motion. There is something akin to modern molecular chemistry in the ideas of Anaxagoras, although he would not have thought of it that way: the individual atoms do not essentially change, but they can be recombined into different compounds.