Very interesting! Why would Duhem make such a claim on the basis of a speculated “unintended consequence,” rather than looking for causal links to subsequent progress in science? It doesn’t sound like his method of historical inquiry was very “scientific.”
Thanks. Yes, Durham's historical reasoning is very poor. I think he fully accepted the widespread idea that the main obstacle to the rise of modern science was the dominance of Aristotle's cosmology. So when he saw the condemnation as a blow to Aristotle, he latched onto that as a fundamental cause. He was a committed Catholic, so he chose to evade the anti-science aspects of the condemnation. Also, as a side note, philosophically he was a positivist (science is only a description of phenomena) who rejected the reality of atoms in spite of plentiful evidence for them.
Very interesting! Why would Duhem make such a claim on the basis of a speculated “unintended consequence,” rather than looking for causal links to subsequent progress in science? It doesn’t sound like his method of historical inquiry was very “scientific.”
Thanks. Yes, Durham's historical reasoning is very poor. I think he fully accepted the widespread idea that the main obstacle to the rise of modern science was the dominance of Aristotle's cosmology. So when he saw the condemnation as a blow to Aristotle, he latched onto that as a fundamental cause. He was a committed Catholic, so he chose to evade the anti-science aspects of the condemnation. Also, as a side note, philosophically he was a positivist (science is only a description of phenomena) who rejected the reality of atoms in spite of plentiful evidence for them.