31 - Probability and evidence
from VI - The Understanding
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008
Summary
INTRODUCTION
At the outset of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle cautioned against confusing the kind of evidence and degree of certainty suitable to various disciplines: ‘For it is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits: it is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician demonstrative proofs.’ Seventeenth-century thinkers from the most varied backgrounds and with the most varied objectives made Aristotle’s warning their motto but turned it to quite non-Aristotelian ends. Theologians, jurists, historians, and natural philosophers vastly expanded the realm of the probable at the expense of that of the demonstrative and denied the possibility of irrefragable certainty to all disciplines except mathematics and perhaps metaphysics. Whereas Aristotle had hoped for sciences of, inter alia, physics and astronomy worthy of the name, grounded in demonstration, the seventeenth-century admirers of the introduction to the Nicomachean Ethics doubted that any part of natural philosophy could aspire to such certainty. However, theirs was not a counsel of despair. On the contrary, they regarded contemporary developments in natural philosophy as marked advances over scholastic achievements. They were able simultaneously to demote the new physics to the status of probable knowledge and to affirm its superiority to Aristotelian physics because they understood ‘probable’ in a new way.
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- The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-century Philosophy , pp. 1108 - 1144Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000
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