Galileo on Aristotle: Too Empirical!

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The common myth about the Scientific Revolution is that it represented a turn from ungrounded speculation to theory based solidly upon facts. However, as Feyerabend notes, Galileo criticized Aristotle for relying too much upon the experience, and paying insufficient attention to speculative reason! He quotes Galileo (from On Motion):

"[Aristotle] asserted [his theory of motion] on the basis of no other reason than to experience... But, to employ reasoning at all times rather than examples (for what we seek are the clauses of effects, and these causes are not given to us by experience)..." -- Paul Feyerabend, Philosophy of Nature, p. 182

Comments

  1. love the girls12:50 AM

    You can go further and say that modern science denies the empirical because every science assumes the better known is not the empirical.

    In contrast, God created a world that is knowable to the common man, that is, what we perceive is what actually exists.

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