Before, I was busy cranking out papers and went several weeks without recording the students’ discussions. Today I’ve caught everything up in one go, and along the way I also pulled out some of my own replies; some of them may still be a bit interesting, though most of the views I’ve written about before too..
On Philolaus’s “Counter-Earth”
People at the time believed that “ten” was the most perfect number, but with the Sun, Moon, gold, wood, water, fire, earth, and the Earth, that still only makes nine, so people guessed there must be another planet on the opposite side of the Earth, called the “counter-earth,” but has anyone noticed that even adding the counter-earth only makes nine…
What is the missing tenth one?
Mm. The standard answer is indeed the “sphere of the fixed stars.”
But there is still a problem.
Because this “standard account” may be fictional. See Philolaus’s wiki entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philolaus
A popular misconception about Philolaus is that he supposed that a sphere of the fixed stars, the five planets, the Sun, Moon and Earth, all moved round his Central Fire, but as these made up only nine revolving bodies, he conceived in accordance with his number theory a tenth, which he called Counter-Earth. This fallacy grows largely out of Aristotle’s attempt to lampoon his ideas in his book, Metaphysics. In reality, Philolaus’ ideas predated the idea of spheres by hundreds of years. He never recognized the fixed stars as any kind of sphere or object.[17]
Roughly speaking, the idea that Philolaus added such a “counter-earth” merely to make ten comes from Aristotle’s retelling. We know that the writings of pre-Socratic thinkers have basically all been lost, and that many of their ideas reach us through the retellings of the great synthesizer Aristotle. But the problem is that his retellings cannot be guaranteed not to be ripped out of context; at the very least, they are certainly massively simplified, and may even be distorted, misunderstood, or downright mocking. Philolaus’s “making up ten” may well belong to one of these cases.
So why introduce a “counter-earth” at all? Wikipedia gives another explanation that looks reasonable: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counter_Earth
Roughly, the idea is that a “counter-earth” was needed because Philolaus’s “earth” was in motion. Once it was moving, many problems arose. They did not yet have concepts like “gravity”; how were they to explain why things on Earth fall downward rather than being flung away or flying upward? The Pythagoreans were, after all, a bunch of people who took logic seriously, and Philolaus needed to give an account. So the explanation for falling things was: “up” and “down” are relative; with the cosmic central fire as reference, the direction toward the center is down. Thus the “earth” in Philolaus becomes flat again, or rather the inhabited region of humanity is confined to the flat part of one side of the Earth, the side facing away from the central fire, while the back side of the Earth (the side facing the central fire) is uninhabited. Then the next problem is that all the other celestial bodies were thought to be made of weightless ether, whereas the Earth was full of dense elements; as a result, the structure of the whole cosmos would seem extremely unbalanced, with the center of its density far from the center of its space—in short, very lopsided. That is why they thought of adding such a “counter-earth.”
Of course, compared with the “making up an integer” idea, this “making up a balance” idea seems equally willful…
On Religion and Science
Are religion and science completely opposed?
The faith in religion and the faith in science are of completely different natures, right? One is anti-intellectual, while the other is fervent and passionate. The large-scale development of religion and its strict enforcement will hinder the development of science; this should be beyond dispute. But what about science’s effect on religion?
Why is it that during periods when science develops relatively rapidly, the Christian church also develops on a large scale?
Is it because the social applications of science and technology were not widespread enough? Or because it remained a niche thing?
Who says that faith in religion must be anti-intellectual… Modern science was entirely nurtured in the soil of Christianity.. Modern people’s various prejudices against medieval Christianity were to a large extent added on after the Enlightenment.. For example, when we now often mention medieval scholastic philosophers discussing things like “how many angels can stand on the point of a needle,” the implication is that they were absurd. But if you think carefully, the very possibility of such questions precisely reflects the scholastic philosophers’ extreme devotion to rational inquiry and logical distinction—of course the actual topics were not that simplistic; they may have discussed questions about angels and the nature of space. By comparison, Archimedes could ask, give me a lever and I can move the Earth; Newton could say, in an infinite space where nothing else acts on it, an object will forever maintain uniform straight-line motion… These imaginings all rest on premises that are unreal, even absurd to ordinary people—where is such a lever? Where is such a space? Whereas the scholastic philosophers simply took angels or God as their premises and carried out their thought experiments. Why should they be deemed irrational? The reason the modern cosmic picture shifted from an ancient picture that was finite, organic, and anisotropic to a world picture that is infinite, mechanical, and isotropic is inseparable from the conceptual soil prepared by the various theological disputes of the early modern period, and also from the spirit of absolutism prized by Christians and the many cultural ideas bound up with it (for example, Christianity regarded all things as the works of God and thereby cleared away animism).
I think religion is merely people’s imagination and conjecture about the world. Although it has exerted some influence on understanding the world, that only counts as a coincidence.
Also, although both science and religion can be handed down from generation to generation, in the case of science later people can overturn or supplement the achievements of their predecessors through experimental study, whereas in religion later people only inherit things in one direction; they cannot correct earlier conclusions, much less overturn them. This is why people trust science, but have faith in religion.
Isn’t your understanding of the history of religion also just your own “imagination and conjecture”? Of course, religious theology generally does not have experimental methods (ancient science didn’t either), but that does not mean it can only be inherited and not overturned. Otherwise, how do you understand the countless theological disputes and doctrinal reforms in history, and the religious Reformation, which was just as disruptive as the Scientific Revolution?
In fact, if we look at the origins of modern science, the pioneers of the new science were in a certain sense even less rational. Many of them were even religious heretics or sectarians—for instance, Bruno was burned for advocating anti-Trinitarian and other theological heresies (support for Copernicus was only one of the incidental charges). Others ignored the fact that Copernican theory could not explain the experimental phenomena of the time, and instead sided with heliocentrism out of Neoplatonism, Hermeticism, and other mystical currents. By the time experimental evidence really could be read as favoring Copernicus, heliocentrism had long since been generally accepted by scientists.
In addition to lacking the support of the law of inertia, heliocentrism at the time also did not fit the observed phenomena, namely that annual parallax had never been observed. The explanation for this phenomenon was either that the Earth was stationary, or that the stars were simply unimaginably far away. But the assumption that the stars were that far away did not fit another observed phenomenon, namely the apparent size of the stars. At the time, people believed that the stars had an apparent size; the method of measurement was to hold a thin thread in front of one’s eyes at a certain distance and see when it could just cover the starlight. We now know this was caused by a visual illusion, because under a telescope the apparent size of the stars does not change. But at the time, it was a repeatable observation. If the stars really did have a certain apparent size, then if they were so far away that people could not observe annual parallax, their actual size would become outrageously large; the sun could not remotely compare with them. In such a situation, why would a rigorous and rational person “believe” in such a bizarre setup?
Of course, with hindsight it is easy for us to view those early scientific pioneers as prophets who foresaw the future, but if we restore them to their own background knowledge, they were actually hot-blooded in much the same way as many theologians. History is not black and white; the simple relationship of science good, religion bad, science rational, religion ignorant is often just our own “imagination and conjecture” about history.
At what stage did the development of science in ancient China stop?
Was it the Qing dynasty? I’m very curious whether science developed at all in the Qing… Was the slow pace of its development only because the Qing government adopted a closed-door policy? Or was it also because the Qing people were arrogant and self-satisfied? Chinese culture emphasizes literature and ritual knowledge, intellectuals are eager for fame and profit, and in an agrarian society the relatively highly developed practical science of agriculture is prioritized; do these also count as reasons?
In fact, many technologies and sciences had already reached their peak in the Song dynasty, and much of the work of the Ming dynasty was encyclopedic compilation and organization. The cultural destruction caused in the Jin and Yuan periods, especially by the Mongol cavalry, was enormous.. The significance of the Qing dynasty lies in its obstruction of the importation of Western science and technology. Since the Qing dynasty was originally a foreign ethnicity, the rulers should not have been too closed to Western ideas. But precisely because it was a foreign regime, it attached special importance to the stability of its rule; in adhering to traditional rites and customs it instead became especially rigid and contrived, and it particularly did not want the people’s minds to open up, still less did it want the techniques for manufacturing new weapons to flow into private hands. For example, the Qing imperial house did not reject Christian missionaries; Christianity, like Confucianism, was foreign to the Manchus. But once the missionaries tried to bypass the imperial house and directly incite the populace, they were harshly suppressed by the court. Stability overrides everything; the stability of the regime overrides cultural openness; too much concern is invested in the legitimacy of a regime whose foundations are unstable… These things (why does this sound so familiar?) meant that the Qing court could not possibly implement a cultural strategy of freedom and openness..
On the University as Self-Governance by Teachers and Students
Some time ago, a professor at Renmin University blasted the student union, and then some anonymous student union member came out in protest, saying “the aim of the student union is to serve our fellow students wholeheartedly” — but the key point is that, regardless of whether China’s student unions today really serve students, fundamentally speaking the purpose of a student union was never supposed to be serving students, just as the purpose of a labor union is not to serve workers. In the Western tradition, organizations like “student unions” and “labor unions” continue the tradition of medieval guilds; their meaning is to band together to safeguard one’s own rights and interests. For example, a student union should unite students as one body to make claims on teachers and on the school; a labor union unites workers as one body, enabling collective strikes and making claims on the government. The school’s logistics department should serve the students; if they do not serve well, the student union should protest and fight for things so that they will properly serve the students; the student union absolutely should not elect some leaders to play the role of logistics staff. In China now there are simply no student unions in the true sense; members of student unions are either pseudo-bureaucrats or cheap logistics lackeys. The same goes for labor unions: a labor union whose purpose is to serve workers is not a real labor union.
The main issue now is the role of the government. Teacher Wu says that in the Middle Ages, “guilds” constituted a third force, and this relation of power division and checks and balances was of great significance for the later rise of the free market and modern democracy. But now the government directly controls university education; teachers do not collect money from students but ask the government for money, and schools do not care at all whether students go on strike, only whether the government provides subsidies. If students really want to strike and make trouble, then the government will be the first to come in and maintain stability; the school doesn’t need to worry about students at all, and can simply devote itself to flattering its superiors..
On Christianity’s Role in Western Civilization and Technology
I remember that when I took the course “Introduction to the Bible,” the teacher said that Christianity is the root and driving force of the entire development of Western civilization and even technology. I’ve always been rather puzzled by this view. In my view, although medieval history was not the utter darkness of legend, the history of the Inquisition’s suppression of scientific forces is still vivid. So how could a religion that had become extreme and had already acquired anti-scientific qualities become the root source of technological development? Although I’ve read The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, where Weber emphasizes that Protestantism requires each person to do their best in their own work as service to God, or to face their work with the heart of serving God, while also living a relatively ascetic life, and that such Protestant ethics promoted the eventual development of capitalism and even technological progress, I still haven’t figured out why Christianity would be the source of Western civilization and technology? Why not ancient Greek culture instead? Please advise…
Exactly how the so-called history of the Inquisition’s suppression of science is “vividly” in view is also worth reflecting on and investigating.. And many modern historical narratives carry too strong a bias.
First, the Inquisition was a vile tyranny; that much is beyond question. But its wickedness was not necessarily a problem of religion itself. For example, Hitler could commit mass murder in the name of evolution, but that atrocity should not necessarily be laid at the feet of evolutionary science. Granted, the Inquisition committed all kinds of evils in the name of religion, but the development of Christianity itself did not take only this one path; there were many other ways to develop and interpret Christianity.
Second, the Inquisition was mainly there to judge heresy and sectarianism; its enemies were other forces within religion, not science. To be frank, “science” at that time was nowhere near qualified to be the Church’s opponent. “Science” had not yet formed an independent force worth mentioning. Of course, new scientific ideas could be exploited by heretics and sectarians; for example, Bruno used Copernicus to promote his anti-Trinitarian Christian interpretation. But Bruno was burned not because he promoted Copernicus, but because he promoted his own non-mainstream doctrines. Compared with the various heretics persecuted by ecclesiastical courts, the persecution scientists suffered throughout the whole of modern history was relatively light. Galileo was first tolerated, and only later, when he insisted on picking a fight with the pope, did he have to be dealt with—but even then the result was nothing more than house arrest. The so-called vividly remembered history of suppression is to a large extent the result of embellishment and exaggeration.
Finally, modern scientists were first and foremost Christians, and often among the most devout of believers; accordingly, they were even more committed to doctrinal interpretation and even more steadfast in a faith that did not fully coincide with that of the mainstream church. Christian belief supplied concepts such as the “absolute” and the “infinite”; moreover, the world created by God must be rational, and this rationality could be understood by human beings. This whole series of convictions made the scientist’s pursuit possible. In Plato, the ideas are perfect and absolute, but Plato’s demiurge is a craftsman, who takes the ideas and impresses them onto matter to form the real world; that real world need not therefore be absolutely perfect or absolutely orderly. Christianity, however, elevates the creator from a wise craftsman to an omniscient and omnipotent God, so that the material world of reality acquires a perfect rationality: to study the world is to study God’s work, and to feel and praise God’s omnipotence is the way to do it.
On the Four Causes
“Efficient cause” should not be understood as “motive”; “motive” is indeed closer to “final cause,” but it is not entirely the same thing either.
In fact, the Chinese translations are all misleading. Efficient cause, effect cause, is more appropriately translated as “effective cause,” and has nothing to do with “motive.” And “final cause,” final cause, would perhaps be better translated as “ultimate cause.”
Let me try to give an example: take, for instance, the result “Zhang San died”; its causes are:
1. Formal cause (the related structure and condition): he died because he suffered excessive internal bleeding after being struck with a blunt object
2. Efficient cause (the agent that exerts the force): because Li Si hit him
3. Final cause (the condition ultimately brought about): because in this way his money ended up in Li Si’s pocket
4. Material cause (the condition of possibility): because a blow from a blunt object can cause death, and because his body could not withstand such a blow
On Pythagoras’ Number and Quantity
For Pythagoras, and indeed for classical mathematics as a whole, “number” and “quantity” are absolutely two different concepts. Pythagoras clearly says “all things are number”; you must never take it upon yourself to turn that into “all things are quantity.”
Pythagoras’ study of “number,” in a certain sense, is still the study of “quality” rather than “quantity.” For example, his number theory is concerned with numbers that have various properties: square numbers, perfect numbers, triangular numbers, and so on. Which number represents justice, which number represents love, and so forth… these are all qualitative concerns. Paying attention to the square root of 2 is likewise a matter of caring that it “cannot” be expressed as the ratio of two integers; one does not care at all whether this “quantity” is 1.41 or 1.14… Ancient Greek geometry was also entirely qualitative: they absolutely did not care whether π = 3.14 or 3.41, only that π is a fixed value was enough. The ruler in compass-and-straightedge construction is without measurement; it is merely a simple straight line. Geometry is concerned with the “properties” of figures—whether they intersect, whether they are equal, whether they are parallel, and so on—rather than with the measurement of figures. Modern mathematicians still preserve this tradition; rather, it was the development of modern physics that conflated “quantity” and “number” and brought them back within the domain of mathematics…
Unless otherwise noted, all are original articles by Guā, please indicate when reprinting: reprinted from Suixuan. Or refer to the copyright notice
Article link: https://yilinhut.net/2011/10/28/3489.html
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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