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Fantastic Negrito Rocks Hard: "The Duffler"

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wheat-dogg, raker of forests, master of steam6/18/2018 2:34:53 am PDT

re: #316 Wendell Zurkowitz ((slave to the waffle light))

I had trouble with Thomas A because I was raised Catholic and had rejected everything they taught. But seeing him in his cultural and historical and cultural context, he was trying to do something pretty awesome.

He and Copernicus both operated under similar constraints. Don’t rock the boat too much, or the consequences could be severe. Aquinas could have read all of Aristotle and Plato and decided, “Boy, did the Church get it all wrong! This is really good stuff!” Copernicus died before he had a chance to really explain his cosmology, but the evidence suggests he would have avoided directly contradicting the geocentric model proposed by Aristotle (and integrated by Aquinas into dogma) by stating his heliocentric model was the true arrangement of the solar system. In 1543 that kind of talk would have meant a visit from the Inquisitors.

From the standpoint of the history of astronomy and physics, Aquinas and the Church did Europe a great disservice by wrongly solidifying Aristotle’s physics into dogma — something the Greeks themselves would have never done, despite Aristotle’s pre-eminence. Even Aristotle would have probably suggested his ideas were only ideas, not concrete facts. OTOH, Aquinas disseminated something that was so wrong physically that eventually someone was going to notice Aristotle’s physics was a pile of shit.