Lesson 4: Assignments
Required Reading
Chapter 6 in "The Science Before Science"
Written Assignment
What proof can be given using common experience, not historical analysis, that modern science is not opposed to philosophy?
Is a circle a real being or a being of reason? Explain.
What is being?
Define philosophy and science in both the wide sense and their narrow (modern) senses. What is the danger of seldom speaking of the unity of the sciences? In particular, why is having a vocabulary that designates that unity important?
List the three degrees of abstraction and what they mean. Draw the diagram of Maritain that uses spheres to show the various levels.
Make a table listing the pure sciences of physica, mathematica and metaphysica. For each of these, list two areas of study. List two applied sciences and two methodological sciences.
How is the concept of square root of minus one reductively real?
Define physica, how is it that so much of modern science has excluded large parts of physica, except somewhat unconsciously.
What is quantity? What is quality? What is a major difference between them?
Give an example of a minimally empiriometric portion of physica, like the deducing that the earth is round from a lunar eclipse.
Give an example of a maximally empiriometric theory, where the deductions from the observations involve intertwined concepts that lead only to conclusions about real beings in an indirect and probable way.
What does the statement "the empiriological method is a tool of physica" mean?
Why does the empiriometric method work so well in modern physics?
Since one can conclude from direct conversion of empiriometric theory approached from quantum and classical sides that light is a respectively both localized and not localized, one must conclude what? Is light both localized and not localized at the same time and the same way?
What is the largest danger of mistaking the empiriological for the ontological?
How does one determine if a being is a one of reason or real?
Kant's regulative ideas fit will with empiriological science, but not with the final goal of science, which is to understand the real things as they are. Explain.
Can we judge things merely by the clarity of our ideas?
Why is mathematica at its base connatural to the human mind? What dangers does judging the world by mathematical standards alone present? List the dangers and give examples.
Given that most assign a preeminent role to Galileo in the establishment of modern science and that modern science was born live nowhere else in the world but within the Catholic generated culture of Europe. How is it that so many buy the simplistic argument that modern science was born against a tide of anti-science characteristic of Catholicism? Further, why have so few noted the fact that Galileo was a Catholic, even one who tried to be a devout Catholic, and learned directly from other Catholics and breathed the intellectual air of the Catholic culture?
Did Aristotle know about the mixed sciences, particularly about the empiriometric?
Newton, did not invent the empiriometric method. What then was Newton's great and unique contribution?
Did Galileo have predecessors?
We said Aristotle was right up to a point and then went wrong. In what way was he wrong? Does this undermine the things that we said in previous chapters? Why or why not?
List and explain three essential cultural beliefs that are needed to sustain a culture in which science thrives. What is the fourth?
What quote from the Bible was popular in the middle ages?
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