Posted by Pat on October 20, 1999 at 21:42:30:
In Reply to: Sagan's history posted by Tom on October 20, 1999 at 13:17:32:
Tom:
Sagan's treatment of the origins of modern science is based in the professional folklore of science rather than in scholarly history. This folklore originated in the Enlightenment when folks (the French philosophes mainly)had an active interest in making science into a kind secular papacy. To do so they had to revise the evolutionary history of modern science in various ways to show that religion was its natural enemy. Buying into this tradition, Sagan perpetuates many common historical fallacies. The most remarkable of these is his complete denigration of Plato and Arisotle as anti-scientific philosophers.
Pat: The Medieval Scholastics overexaggerated this flaw, of course, but the notion of "go and see" was alien to the Aristotlians in large measure because of his disdain for evidence.
Aristotle, who was a remarkable thinker, had some notions incompatible with science of any kind. He was remarkably resistant to finding things out by checking them out. Hence, he was convinced that heavy objects fall faster than lighter ones, and that women had fewer teeth than men.
Tom:
Historians know that the modern scientific revolution resulted from modern elaboration and revision of Aristotelian notions of science, not from its abandonments. Sagan's greatest scientific hero of the 17th century is Johannes Kepler--who was a Platonist through and through--but Sagan never acknowledges this.
Pat: Sagan correctly points out that Kepler was a pivotal figure in science, tied on one hand to the old Platonism, and on the other a pioneer in modern science more akin to the ancient ionian scientists like Eratosthenes, who by experiment arrived at a measure of the earths circumference accurate to 1%. The conflict between authority and evidence is a lot older than you seem to think.
Nonsense. Sagan goes so far as to recount Kepler's early attempts to fit the motion of planets into a scheme using the Platonic solids. And he also points out that Kepler was so tied to the Platonic notion of the perfection of the heavens that he resisted almost to the very end the fact that the planetary orbits were ellipses and not "perfect" circles.
Tom:
Instead he turns 17th-century scientists into positivists. Like the enlightenment propagandists of the 18th century,
Sagan is forced to play down the influence of Platonic rationalism on science because of its close association with religion--which he is so determined to denigrate as anti-scientific.
Pat: And Sagan's novel Contact, far from denigrating science, favorably compares a decent and caring fundamentalist preacher to a shallow scientist, and has the protaganist at the end of the story, discover that the universe did indeed have a maker. Hardly the picture you paint of him.
As you can see (read Cosmos) that's so much prune product. Sagan was entirely aware of Kepler's Platonic roots and discussed them openly.