Atheism and the existence of peanut butter

[vulcanlogician]

But, there is a question. How much of this history should a physicist know to be able to do physics? How much do the actual conclusions of the Oxford calculators impact the ideas we have today in physics?

And the frank answer is "not much". While they were absolutely essential to *getting to where we are*, their ideas and techniques have been supplanted and NONE of modern physics (anything past Newton) replies on their analyses. That is very different than the impact of Newton on the *current* ideas in physics.

I liked your thoughtful reply. And this is an interesting conversation to have.

I agree wholeheartedly with you on pretty much everything. I agree with your thesis: "It's important not to overestimate the importance of history of science." But my thesis is this: history of science is important to some degree. It's not an overly-ambitious thesis. All I'm saying is, we will have lost something valuable if we can't trace our knowledge of the world back to its roots and study the voyage from ignorance to gnosis.

I feel the same way about literature. Is it super important to conduct a forty page analysis of Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury? No. But it is important. I personally wouldn't touch a forty page Faulkner analysis with a ten-foot pole. Not my cup of tea. But I'm glad there are disciplines that perform such analyses. Literature tells us much about the human condition... in a way science can't. Philosophy is in this same boat. I think you know me well enough, Poly, to recognize I love science and I'm not knocking science in any way. Historically speaking, science pretty much embarrassed philosophers' attempt to understand nature. I guess what I'm saying is: science is but one mode of investigation into reality (maybe the best one, the most indisputable one)... but not the only one... that yields fruitful insights and gets us closer to the truth.

So, Aristotle and Ptolemy, as well as Thomas Badwardine, are *historically* important, their ideas are NOT important for how modern physics actually approaches problems. Literally nothing in their analysis of physics remains in anything required in a modern physics class. But the ideas of Galileo, Newton, Maxwell, Faraday, and others *are* relevant to our current understanding. These people were right in ways that previous thinkers were wrong.

So, yes, I agree, these lessons were hard fought. The insights of many people were required for us to get where we are today. They should be honored and studied for their *historical contributions*. But their ideas, outside of learning the history, can be safely ignored if all you want to do is understand physics.

Agreed.

And I agree. I am very interested in the history of ideas. How did we get to the understanding we have today? That is a very interesting question to me. And to understand the progression of ideas can be a useful caution to taking our current ideas too seriously. But the *conclusions* of these thinkers is often, even usually *wrong*. And unless you want to investigate the history, their views can be safely ignored and should certainly NOT be part of the current debate about how things work.

I also think that *very* few of the ideas of Aristotle have stood up to the studies of the past 2000 years. Again, he was crucial to getting us on the right track, but his conclusions are almost universally wrong. He was a product of his time, with many of the biases and ignorance of that time. That is NOT saying he was not important historically.

But his ideas are NOT important for any modern analysis, I think.

Something we're trying to parse through in Neo's Aquinas thread is whether Aquinas's notions are contrary to modern physics. Does Aquinas say something that directly contradicts a modern understanding of nature? If so, his postulations either need to be corrected to conform to a modern understanding OR (and this is the way I'm leaning) be dismissed entirely on account of "Aquinas misunderstands reality."

It's also possible that Aquinas is talking about something "deeper" than that to which modern physics refers. I'm giving that one some consideration too, but hopes are slim.

I remember several lectures discussing: "Why are philosophers so concerned with history of philosophy?" It's a good question, as nearly all philosophers are. But why?

History of philosophy is important, I would argue, because ancient thinkers had valuable insights concerning timeless questions. Things that we still ponder today. Things that haven't really been settled by science or contemporary philosophy. The ancients' thinking is still "good" on some matters. Ethics or metaphysics will never be "settled" in the way scientific matters can be. But I would argue that ethics is (nonetheless) really, really important to pay attention to. What kind of fools would the human race be if they didn't concern themselves with ethics? But luckily, we do. And maybe we'll never make progress in the arena of ethics, but at the very least we aren't foolish enough to ignore ethics altogether. (This isn't an argument for moral realism; even those who reject moral realism are impelled to do some thinking about ethics... it's important even to them).

I don't want to go on and on here, but I do want to provide some reflections on how wrong ideas are (sometimes) just as valuable as correct ones. Luminiferous ether. Wrong idea. But a hypothesis supported by good reasoning, considering what we knew about waves when it was formulated. In proving the idea wrong, we learned something about the nature of light and space. Since we now know that luminiferous ether doesn't exist, there is little value in returning to it and studying it (your thesis). But at the same time we ought to recognize how instrumental that wrong idea was in getting us to the right idea. It was like a sounding board for the right idea.

Wrong ideas are more valuable than we take them to be. I don't mean "any" wrong idea. I mean well-supported ones. Not bigfoot or some shit. I mean ideas that are wrong but still seem true to reasonable people. Ideas that can't be easily dismissed or disproven. These kind of wrong ideas are necessary stepping stones to right ideas. Indispensable to finding the right ideas I might argue (if I was feeling fruity). Not feeling THAT fruity... but still leads back to there being some value in following our knowledge back to its roots.