6 ideas
| 8011 | Aristotle is a buffoon who has misled the Church [Luther, by MacIntyre] |
| Full Idea: Aristotle is a buffoon who has misled the Church. | |
| From: report of Martin Luther (talk [1525]) by Alasdair MacIntyre - A Short History of Ethics Ch.10 | |
| A reaction: Before he became famous, Luther was a university lecturer on Aristotle. This remark was a hundred years before philosophers began serious criticism of Aristotle. Presumably Protestants just stopped reading him. |
| 7903 | The six perfections are giving, morality, patience, vigour, meditation, and wisdom [Nagarjuna] |
| Full Idea: The six perfections are of giving, morality, patience, vigour, meditation, and wisdom. | |
| From: Nagarjuna (Mahaprajnaparamitashastra [c.120], 88) | |
| A reaction: What is 'morality', if giving is not part of it? I like patience and vigour being two of the virtues, which immediately implies an Aristotelian mean (which is always what is 'appropriate'). |
| 21236 | Instead of gravitational force, we now have a pervasive gravitational field [Farmelo] |
| Full Idea: Physics replaced the notion that bodies exert gravitational force on each other by the more effective picture that the bodies in the universe give rise to a pervasive gravitational field which exerts a force on each particle. | |
| From: Graham Farmelo (The Strangest Man [2009], 08) | |
| A reaction: This still uses the word 'force'. I sometimes get the impression that gravity is the curvature of space, but gravity needs more. Which direction along the curvature are particles attracted? The bottom line is the power of the bodies. |
| 21235 | The Schrödinger waves are just the maths of transforming energy values to positions [Farmelo] |
| Full Idea: Dirac showed that the Schrödinger waves were simply the mathematical quantities involved in transforming the description of a quantum based on its energy values to one based on possible values of its position. | |
| From: Graham Farmelo (The Strangest Man [2009], 08) | |
| A reaction: Does this eliminate actual physical 'waves' from the theory? |
| 21234 | Experiments show that fundamental particles of one type are identical [Farmelo] |
| Full Idea: It is an established experimental fact ...that every single fundamental particle in the universe is the same and identical to all other particles of the same type. | |
| From: Graham Farmelo (The Strangest Man [2009], 07) | |
| A reaction: A loud groan is heard from the tomb of Leibniz. I'm unclear how experiments can establish this. If electrons have internal structure (which is not ruled out) then uniformity is highly unlikely. |
| 6609 | With respect to religion, reason is a blind whore [Luther] |
| Full Idea: With respect to the mysteries of the Christian religion, reason is a blind whore. | |
| From: Martin Luther (talk [1525]), quoted by Robert Fogelin - Walking the Tightrope of Reason n4.2 | |
| A reaction: Reason is presumably a blind whore with respect to all impenetrable mysteries. Since the reason of Aquinas endorsed the mysteries of Christianity, the remark seems a bit strong, but it is appropriate if you think that only faith (in Christianity) matters. |