Subverting Aristotle: Religion, History, and Philosophy in Early Modern Science

by Craig Martin

How new thinking about history, evidence, and scientific authority depended on undermining the authority of Aristotelianism. “The belief that Aristotle’s philosophy is incompatible with Christianity is hardly controversial today,” writes Craig Martin. Yet “for centuries, Christian culture embraced Aristotelian thought as its own, reconciling his philosophy with theology and church doctrine. The image of Aristotle as source of religious truth withered in the seventeenth century, the same century in which he ceased being an authority for natural philosophy.” In this fresh study of the complicated origins of revolutionary science in the age of Bacon, Hobbes, and Boyle, Martin traces one of the most important developments in Western European the rise and fall of Aristotelianism from the eleventh to the eighteenth century. Medieval theologians reconciled Aristotelian natural philosophy with Christian dogma in a synthesis that dominated religious thought for centuries. This synthesis unraveled in the seventeenth century contemporaneously with the emergence of the new natural philosophies of the scientific revolution. Important figures of seventeenth-century thought strove to show that the medieval appropriation of Aristotle defied the historical record that pointed to an impious figure of dubious morality. While numerous scholars have written on the seventeenth-century downfall of Aristotelianism, almost all of those works have examined how the conceptual content of the new sciences―such as the heliocentric cosmology, atomism, mechanical and mathematical models, and experimentalism―were used to dismiss the views of Aristotle. Subverting Aristotle is the first to focus on the religious polemics accompanying the scientific controversies that led to the eventual demise of Aristotelian natural philosophy. Martin’s thesis draws extensively on primary source material from England, France, Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands. It alters present perceptions not only of the scientific revolution but also of the role of Renaissance humanism in the forging of modernity.

Genres: Philosophy

272 pages, Hardcover

First published April 3, 2014

Reviews

[Charlie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Martin's contribution is a single important thesis. Deviation from Aristotle's philosophy in the early modern period was motivated not merely by secularism or perceived empirical failings but also by doubts about Aristotle's congruity with the Christian faith. Perennial concerns over Aristotle's doctrines of the eternality of the world and the mortality of the soul, combined with a perception that Aristotle either denied providence or furnished an insufficient rationale for uniting philosophy and theology, led some thinkers to strike out in other directions, either repristinating other ancient philosophers or developing new systems of thought. Martin certainly demonstrates that theological and moral arguments were used against Aristotelianism. What is much more difficult to decide is whether these were sincere, whether they were the root motives (as opposed to scientific or empirical concerns), and to what extent they were responsible for the changing fortunes of Aristotle.

I found Martin's coverage mixed. 200 pages of body text simply wasn't enough space to do a thorough job across the time span he set for himself. Some portions of the book felt like encyclopedia entries strung together, but other sections offered serious analysis.

Key points:
critics of Aristotle were increasingly able to tie him to Averroes and leverage generally low opinions of Averroes' character against Aristotle
Averroes was dangerous to Aristotelians because he represented a strain of detaching natural philosophy from theological supervision (i.e., Pomponazzi)
the emerging fields of patristics and of history of philosophy in Renaissance humanism furnished historical reasons for relativizing Aristotle in the curriculum
Jesuit education adopted Thomism but set the curriculum to mask ambiguities in Aristotle's teaching and reception
Pierre Bayle's Dictionnaire set the tone for Enlightenment reception of Aristotle