Arisototelian teleology at the level of physics hinged upon the uniqueness of the earth and spheres. Elements of one sort went up, others down based upon their relation to entities that were unique (earth, moon, the set of spheres). Each element therefore had ONE telos, the contrary of which was unnatural.
Hidden premise in all of this is that the world as a whole is good, has a purpose or at least an ordered set of purposes. It is ONLY in view of such a presupposition that one could regard this or that motion of this or that element as telic/dystelic, i.e., consonant or dissonant with the goal of that part of nature.
Modern science gets rid of this uniqueness. As in Galileo's discovery that the sun has blotches (no more quintessesnce), the planets have moons (no more tendency of all earthy things to move toward the center of the earth. Instead, at the elemental level/level of physics one has a diversity of tendencies to act and be a rest. There is no sense of heirarchy among these tendencies. Nature has gone, if you will, from monarchic to democratic ('democracy' here understood as Plato did, as a kind of mob rule).
Rather than seem that there is no purpose to everything, it seems that there is no ONE purpose to any one bit of the physical world. Each thing can act in diverse ways under diverse conditions. No way to say that one of these interactions is the natural one and all others unnatural. Oxygen bonds with hydrogen one way, and another way with carbon: who is to say that one of these is natural in a sense that would exclude the others from being such?
If we dig even deeper into the presuppositions of Aristotle's scheme, we may be tempted to suggest that the uniqueness of the arrangement of the planet and spheres had something to do with the presence of humans on Earth. In other words, the cosmos seems to be just that, a cosmos rather than a chaotic whole because of the way it functions as a home to humanity.
HOME: if we take the cosmos as a whole ordered toward being a home to humanity (or more generally to RATIONAL BEINGS), then we might ask if the present cosmology would agree has the same order. The anthropic principle does not place humanity at the geographic center of the universe, but it does place REASON PRECISELY at the statistical center of a set of probabilities.
In such a case, it might be tempting to talk of telic/dystelic operations in nature. And this temptation is least worth entertaining...
Hidden premise in all of this is that the world as a whole is good, has a purpose or at least an ordered set of purposes. It is ONLY in view of such a presupposition that one could regard this or that motion of this or that element as telic/dystelic, i.e., consonant or dissonant with the goal of that part of nature.
Modern science gets rid of this uniqueness. As in Galileo's discovery that the sun has blotches (no more quintessesnce), the planets have moons (no more tendency of all earthy things to move toward the center of the earth. Instead, at the elemental level/level of physics one has a diversity of tendencies to act and be a rest. There is no sense of heirarchy among these tendencies. Nature has gone, if you will, from monarchic to democratic ('democracy' here understood as Plato did, as a kind of mob rule).
Rather than seem that there is no purpose to everything, it seems that there is no ONE purpose to any one bit of the physical world. Each thing can act in diverse ways under diverse conditions. No way to say that one of these interactions is the natural one and all others unnatural. Oxygen bonds with hydrogen one way, and another way with carbon: who is to say that one of these is natural in a sense that would exclude the others from being such?
If we dig even deeper into the presuppositions of Aristotle's scheme, we may be tempted to suggest that the uniqueness of the arrangement of the planet and spheres had something to do with the presence of humans on Earth. In other words, the cosmos seems to be just that, a cosmos rather than a chaotic whole because of the way it functions as a home to humanity.
HOME: if we take the cosmos as a whole ordered toward being a home to humanity (or more generally to RATIONAL BEINGS), then we might ask if the present cosmology would agree has the same order. The anthropic principle does not place humanity at the geographic center of the universe, but it does place REASON PRECISELY at the statistical center of a set of probabilities.
In such a case, it might be tempting to talk of telic/dystelic operations in nature. And this temptation is least worth entertaining...
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