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Abstracting Aristotle’S Philosophy Of Mathematics, John J. Cleary
Abstracting Aristotle’S Philosophy Of Mathematics, John J. Cleary
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In the history of science perhaps the most influential Aristotelian division was that
between mathematics and physics. From our modern perspective this seems like an unfortunate deviation from the Platonic unification of the two disciplines, which guided Kepler and Galileo towards the modern scientific revolution. By contrast, Aristotle’s sharp distinction between the disciplines seems to have led to a barren scholasticism in physics, together with an arid instrumentalism in Ptolemaic astronomy. On the positive side, however, astronomy was liberated from commonsense realism for the conceptual experiments of Aristarchus of Samos, whose heliocentric hypothesis was not adopted by later astronomers because …