![]() In order to evaluate the health of a particular human body, a doctor must have an idea of what a perfectly healthy human form is. In order to judge a sculpture, painting, or natural setting, a person must have an inner sense of beauty. True philosophers do not focus on the material world as it is, but on the forms that material things imperfectly reflect. That is, forms are the eternal blueprints of perfection which the material world imperfectly represents. The world and the things in it are imperfect and perishable realizations of perfect forms that are eternal, and that continually give birth to the things we see. What is Plato’s “Theory of Forms”? In brief, Plato argued that the world we see around us - including all people, trees, and animals, stars, planets and other objects - is not the true reality. For part 5, I wish to look more closely at the role of Forms in causation - what Aristotle called “ formal causation.” This theory of causation was strongly influenced by Aristotle’s predecessor Plato and his Theory of Forms. ![]() I have already critically examined certain aspects of the metaphysics of modern science in parts 3 and 4. (See The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science by E.A. Modern scientists, however, rejected much of medieval metaphysics as subjective and saw reality as consisting mainly of objects impacting or influencing each other in mathematical patterns. As I mentioned in my previous posts, the rise of modern science was accompanied by a change in humanity’s view of metaphysics, that is, our theory of existence. Medieval metaphysics, largely influenced by ancient philosophers, saw human beings as the center or summit of creation furthermore, medieval metaphysics proposed a sophisticated, multifaceted view of causation. Now we come to the final part of our series of posts, “What Does Science Explain?” (If you have not already, you can peruse parts 1, 2, 3, and 4 here). ![]() ![]() Furthermore, it must satisfy certain esthetic criteria - that is, in relation to how much it describes, it must be rather simple. - John von Neumann (“Method in the Physical Sciences,” in The Unity of Knowledge, 1955) The justification of such a mathematical construct is solely and precisely that it is expected to work - that is, correctly to describe phenomena from a reasonably wide area. By a model is meant a mathematical construct which, with the addition of certain verbal interpretations, describes observed phenomena. The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try to interpret, they mainly make models. ![]()
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