But wait, there was something between the shapes and the elements according to Plato, no? The tetrahedron represent fire, the tetrahedron air, the cube represent earth the icosahedron water and the dodecahedron represents aether. And the main concurrent theory opposed to atomism at the time was the 5 elements right? And so, did Plato believe the world was made of the 5 elements and the shapes were just representations or did he believe that the 5 elements themselves were “made of” these shapes?
I’m gonna throw a guess here. Aren’t these non-materialist realist philosophies due to the fact that at the time realists philosophers didn’t agree on what the world was made of because of the limitations of the sciences of the time? Since we now know from modern science that, if there is a reality independent from the mind, that reality is made of matter, aren’t all modern realists necessarily materialists since science has eliminated the possibility of the world being made of anything that isn’t matter? If that’s the case, these alternative realist philosophies were artifact of our limited knowledge early on and modern realism is materialism. What do you think?
Yes, though aether came later. Plato believed in four elements instead of atoms, but those too were just material “shadows” of the mathematical objects and less real then the forms behind them.
I think it’s true, that science can influence philosophy. And also that modern materialism historically coincided with advances in science and engineering. So I agree, that there is a real connection here. But like you said, atomism already existed at ancient times. So it might be more complex to pinpoint the exact advantage modern science gave modern philosophers arguing for materialism. Marx argued about how projects like digging canals can fail for reasons outside our minds, so that’s an argument for realism inspired more by engineering than science.
A historic materialist analysis would look at how a materialist worldview served to further the hegemony of the ruling class at the time of the industrial revolution. I’m sure people have already written on this topic.
The modern standard model of physics is based on quantum field theory. While many physicists would probably describe themselves as philosophical materialists, the actual building blocks of reality in this model are fields. Exitations in these filds correspond to massless quantum objects, which can sometimes gain (rest-)mass by interacting with each other, which can give rise to matter. But the fields themselves are not necessarily what modernist philosophers would have thought of as material. Under different historical conditions, this cosmology could probably have been integrated in very different kinds of metaphysics, including materialist or non-materislist ones. So this is an example of how a scientific model doesn’t need to have a one to one correspondence to specific metaphysical worldviews like ontological materialism or ontological idealism.
These metaphysical questions really are outside the scope of physics. Arguments about them can be made by philosophical discussion or based on praxis and class struggle and science can inform these debates but not decide them.
All in all, I think that science as natural philosophy is just a part of broader philosophy and no easy path leads from scientific results to metaphysical theories. Ancient people were just as smart as we are. Many good philosophical theories, that we will never learn about have probably existed, but didn’t survive until our time. I can easily imagine, ancient dialectical materialists, whose work was just never written down. Or written down, but only copied once. Or only copied a dozen times over a few generations and then forgotten. We only get the stuff that was copied hundreds of times over thousands of years. What is copied is decided by the ruling class. The dominance of certain philosophical worldviews are more influenced by historical developments and class struggle then by science. But science influences technology which influence the means of production and thereby also philosophy.
But wait, there was something between the shapes and the elements according to Plato, no? The tetrahedron represent fire, the tetrahedron air, the cube represent earth the icosahedron water and the dodecahedron represents aether. And the main concurrent theory opposed to atomism at the time was the 5 elements right? And so, did Plato believe the world was made of the 5 elements and the shapes were just representations or did he believe that the 5 elements themselves were “made of” these shapes?
I’m gonna throw a guess here. Aren’t these non-materialist realist philosophies due to the fact that at the time realists philosophers didn’t agree on what the world was made of because of the limitations of the sciences of the time? Since we now know from modern science that, if there is a reality independent from the mind, that reality is made of matter, aren’t all modern realists necessarily materialists since science has eliminated the possibility of the world being made of anything that isn’t matter? If that’s the case, these alternative realist philosophies were artifact of our limited knowledge early on and modern realism is materialism. What do you think?
Yes, though aether came later. Plato believed in four elements instead of atoms, but those too were just material “shadows” of the mathematical objects and less real then the forms behind them.
I think it’s true, that science can influence philosophy. And also that modern materialism historically coincided with advances in science and engineering. So I agree, that there is a real connection here. But like you said, atomism already existed at ancient times. So it might be more complex to pinpoint the exact advantage modern science gave modern philosophers arguing for materialism. Marx argued about how projects like digging canals can fail for reasons outside our minds, so that’s an argument for realism inspired more by engineering than science.
A historic materialist analysis would look at how a materialist worldview served to further the hegemony of the ruling class at the time of the industrial revolution. I’m sure people have already written on this topic.
The modern standard model of physics is based on quantum field theory. While many physicists would probably describe themselves as philosophical materialists, the actual building blocks of reality in this model are fields. Exitations in these filds correspond to massless quantum objects, which can sometimes gain (rest-)mass by interacting with each other, which can give rise to matter. But the fields themselves are not necessarily what modernist philosophers would have thought of as material. Under different historical conditions, this cosmology could probably have been integrated in very different kinds of metaphysics, including materialist or non-materislist ones. So this is an example of how a scientific model doesn’t need to have a one to one correspondence to specific metaphysical worldviews like ontological materialism or ontological idealism.
These metaphysical questions really are outside the scope of physics. Arguments about them can be made by philosophical discussion or based on praxis and class struggle and science can inform these debates but not decide them.
All in all, I think that science as natural philosophy is just a part of broader philosophy and no easy path leads from scientific results to metaphysical theories. Ancient people were just as smart as we are. Many good philosophical theories, that we will never learn about have probably existed, but didn’t survive until our time. I can easily imagine, ancient dialectical materialists, whose work was just never written down. Or written down, but only copied once. Or only copied a dozen times over a few generations and then forgotten. We only get the stuff that was copied hundreds of times over thousands of years. What is copied is decided by the ruling class. The dominance of certain philosophical worldviews are more influenced by historical developments and class struggle then by science. But science influences technology which influence the means of production and thereby also philosophy.