Newton, Aristotle, and Plato

The Newtonian universe is a revolutionary hybrid of both Aristotle and Plato, with important differences from either. Like Plato’s universe, it contains a domain of items we will never see: gravity, capacitance, voltage, natural selection, the law of supply and demand etc. These items are not perceptible, but they are intelligible i.e. we learn about them by using the set of reasoning and observing processes known as the scientific method. This method relies very heavily on mathematics. One of Galileo’s most famous statements, which was controversial in his time, was that the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics. According to the philosophical position called Scientific Realism, the items discovered by means of this method are also, like Plato’s Forms, realer than the items that are most directly available to sense perception. Although it is convenient for us to refer to the item in front of us as a table, that item is “really” a collection of atoms (quarks? strings?) arranged in a particular pattern.[1]

But although scientific knowledge relies heavily on mathematical formulae, these formulae are not necessarily true. Unlike Plato’s beloved geometry, they are not justified by the Light of Reason. Like Aristotle’s categories, they are justified by the repeated observations of inductive reasoning. Ideally, these observations are made under controlled laboratory conditions specifically designed to test abstract theories. Nevertheless, they are still observations, not deductions from axioms or postulates. That is why the concept of…