Any Aristotle Fans out There?

[slickpoppa]

Anyone? His Nichomachean Ethics is probably my favorite work of philosophy, although it does have its flaws.

[kitaristi0]

I wouldn't call myself a fan, but i always preferred him over Plato.

[David Sklansky]

He thought that a moving body would slow down even if there was nothing causing that to happen. Not Ready called him one of the three or four smartest people who ever lived. If Aristotle in fact did think this, he wasn't in the top thousand. (Neither was Leibniz by the way if it is true he thought eleven had the same probability as twelve for two dice.) Some types of mistakes almost guarantee that a guy can't be that smart.

[BZ_Zorro]

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He thought that a moving body would slow down even if there was nothing causing that to happen.

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I'm interested in hearing why that's an unreasonable belief for 2000 years ago.

Agree with the two dice thing(??) though, didn't know about that.

[David Sklansky]

Its an unreasonable belief, for someone who is supposed to be real smart. I guarantee that neither Einstein nor Newton would have thought that if they lived back then.

[fnord_too]

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Its an unreasonable belief, for someone who is supposed to be real smart. I guarantee that neither Einstein nor Newton would have thought that if they lived back then.

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This is wild speculation. There are two big assumptions you are making:
1. That smart people don't make mistakes
2. That Aristotle's beliefs are unreasonable. The concept of friction really wasn't there AFAIK. The belief that all things came to rest was not that crazy, kind of like Newton not taking relativity into account with his theory of gravity was not that crazy, or Einstein not taking whatever discoveries we make over the next several centuries into account was not that crazy.

If you want to bust Aristotle for something, bust him for believing heavier objects fall faster than lighter ones, since that can be contradicted by observation. (Though, again, our old friend friction has some impact here, but that is splitting hairs.)

It is my understanding that Aristotle was more of a mathematician. His bent was working with givens and deriving things.

I cannot say where he ranks in history's smartest people, I don't even have an acceptable definition of intelligence nor have I studied him. I would tend to aggree on insufficient data and definition that he is not in the top 1000, but making that statement based on the fact that he thought the natural state of matter was rest is silly.

[David Sklansky]

I didn't say his idea was unreasonable. And if he hadn't actually written about the concept I could give him air. But he actually THOUGHT about it and still got it wrong. All he had to do was notice a few things (dense things slow down slower, he doesn't feel his movemment much on a steadily galloping horse) and see where that logically leads and he would have realized that there is no difference between stationary objects and moving unaccelerating objects. Incredibly smart people would realize these things. Newton certainly would have even back then.
And your comment about Newton missing relativety is wrong, because he did not know the results of the Michaelson Morley experiment.

As for smart people not making mistakes, the fact is that when they are incredibly smart and have thought about something hard enough to merit putting it on paper, their mistakes are so much rarer than less smart people that when confronted with a mistake like this, Baye's Theorem tells us that the much more plausible explanation is that he wasn't incredibly brilliant rather than he was and made a very rare error.

[drudman]

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Its an unreasonable belief, for someone who is supposed to be real smart. I guarantee that neither Einstein nor Newton would have thought that if they lived back then.

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This is the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard.

Newton was an imbecile by the way for not knowing that time was not absolute.

And everyone knows Einstein was a dunce for not knowing about quantum uncertainty.

I guarantee that Joe Physics Graduate would have known better if he lived back then.

[BZ_Zorro]

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And everyone knows Einstein was a dunce for not knowing about quantum uncertainty.

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Even being facetious you touch on a good point. It wasn't that Einstein should have guessed QM before his time, he knew about it, saw the clear evidence, and rejected it for many years. He publicy spoke against it even when his contemporaries could clearly see it was true. Work of a genius?

[JoshuaD]

[ QUOTE ]
He thought that a moving body would slow down even if there was nothing causing that to happen. Not Ready called him one of the three or four smartest people who ever lived. If Aristotle in fact did think this, he wasn't in the top thousand. (Neither was Leibniz by the way if it is true he thought eleven had the same probability as twelve for two dice.) Some types of mistakes almost guarantee that a guy can't be that smart.

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You're assuming a ton of knowlege that simply didn't exist back then.