The Science of Leonardo by Fritjof Capra

Author:Fritjof Capra [Capra, Fritjof]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science; Renaissance, Italy, 16th Century, Artists; Architects; Photographers, Science, Science & Technology, Individual Artists, General, Scientists - Italy - History - to 1500, Renaissance, To 1500, Scientists, Biography & Autobiography, art, Leonardo, Scientists - Italy - History - 16th Century, Biography, History
ISBN: 9780385513906
Publisher: Doubleday
Published: 2007-10-30T05:00:00+00:00

ARISTOTLE’S SYNTHESIS OF SCIENCE

For science at the time of the Renaissance, the most important Greek philosopher was Aristotle. A student of Plato, Aristotle was by far the most brilliant in Plato’s Academy. But he was quite different not only from his teacher, but also from all his predecessors. Aristotle was the first philosopher to write systematic, professorial treatises about the main branches of learning of his time. He synthesized and organized the entire scientific knowledge of antiquity in a scheme that would remain the foundation of Western science for two thousand years. And when this body of knowledge was fused with Christian theology in the Middle Ages, it acquired the status of religious dogma.

To integrate the main disciplines of his time—biology, physics, metaphysics, ethics, and politics—into a coherent theoretical framework, Aristotle created a formal system of logic and a set of unifying principles. He stated explicitly that the goal of his logic was to learn the art of scientific investigation and reasoning. It was to serve as the rational instrument for all scientific work.

As a scientist, Aristotle was first and foremost a biologist, whose observations of marine life were unsurpassed until the nineteenth century. Like Pythagoras, he distinguished between matter and form, but as a biologist he knew that living form is more than shape, more than a static configuration of component parts.15 His highly original approach to the problem of form was to posit that matter and form are linked through a process of development. In contrast with Plato, who believed in an independent realm of ideal forms, Aristotle held that form has no separate existence but is immanent in matter. Nor can matter exist separately from form. By means of form, the essence of matter becomes real, or actual. Aristotle called this process of the self-realization of matter entelechy (self-completion). Matter and form, in his view, are the two sides of this process of development, separable only through abstraction.

Aristotle associated his entelechy with the traditional Greek concept of the soul as the source of life.16 The soul, for him, is the source not only of bodily motion but also of the body’s formation: It is the form that realizes itself in the changes and movements of the organic body. Leonardo, as I shall show, adopted the Aristotelian concept of the soul, expanded it, and transformed it into a scientific theory based on empirical evidence.17

Aristotle conceived of the soul as being built up in successive levels, corresponding to levels of organic life. The first level is the “vegetative soul,” which controls, as we would say today, the mechanical and chemical changes of the body’s metabolism. The soul of plants is restricted to this metabolic level of a vital force. The next higher form is the “animal soul,” characterized by autonomous motion in space and by sensation, that is, feelings of pleasure and pain. The “human soul,” finally, includes the vegetable and animal souls, but its main characteristic is reason.

In terms of physics and astronomy, Aristotle adopted the Pythagorean antithesis between the terrestrial and the heavenly worlds.

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