Why is this site called "Old School Physics"?
Everyone knows "old school" means doing things the rigorous, traditional way. This site is "old school" in seeking to understand nature in the deep way—the philosophical way—that preceded the mechanical methods of Descartes. Especially these days when theorists spin out myriad fantasies on the slightest mathematical pretext, we need to return to the physics of physics. Certainly mathematical methods are powerful and instructive, but in the end, physics is not mathematics. As indispensible as mathematics is, it's never a substitute for physical insight. Mathematics is a tool that serves insight. Physics is physics.
But this site is "old school" in another way. Before the "Enlightenment," the scholastics or "schoolmen" learned from the texts of Aristotle. This site is "old school" in likewise looking back to Aristotle. It's not that Aristotle has the solution to all our problems—far from it—simply that we would be wise to evaluate his ideas for ourselves. The so-called Enlightenment was hasty in dismissing him out of hand. Aristotle's conception of nature deserves serious consideration since his philosophical approach draws on an experiential basis broader and in many ways deeper than that of controlled experiment.
The Physics is a lecture in which [Aristotle] seeks to determine beings that arise on their own, τὰ φύσει ὄντα, with regard to their being. Aristotelian "physics" is different from what we mean today by this word, not only to the extent that it belongs to antiquity whereas the modern physical sciences belong to modernity, rather above all it is different by virtue of the fact that Aristotle's "physics" is philosophy, whereas modern physics is a positive science that presupposes a philosophy.[...] This book determines the warp and woof of the whole of Western thinking, even at that place where it, as modern thinking, appears to think at odds with ancient thinking. But opposition is invariably comprised of a decisive, and often even perilous, dependence. Without Aristotle's Physics there would have been no Galileo.1
More about the Physics at Wikipedia.
The twentieth-century discovery of quantum mechanics made evident the shortcomings of the mechanical conception of matter formulated by Descartes and advanced by Newton. So it makes sense to look back to the original conception of matter—that of Aristotle—when looking for the true nature of matter. Aristotle's conception of matter is definitionally indeterminate, which is precisely the quality that matter in the mechanical conception lacks. As Werner Heisenberg wrote:
[Quantum-mechanical probability] is closely related to the concept of possibility, the ‘potentia’ of the natural philosophy of the ancients such as Aristotle; it is, to a certain extent, a transformation of the old ‘potentia’ concept from a qualitative to a quantitative idea.2
Notes
1. Martin Heidegger (1991). The Principle of Reason. Studies in Continental Thought. Translated by Lilly, Reginald. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. pp. 62–63.
2. Werner Heisenberg, “Development of the Interpretation of Quantum Theory”, in Niels Bohr and the Development of Physics, W. Pauli, ed., (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1955), 13.
This site is optimized for Chrome and consists of three parts (tabs):
The tabs with Greek text have a context menu (right-click) for accessing online translation tools for selected text.
The line numbers presented in the Ross Pages are inexact for a number of reasons.
The bottom line is BEWARE: don't take these line numbers too seriously. Most are more or less right, but many are wrong. It's possible I'm making too much of the line numbers; my Ph.D. is not in classics.
This web app is written in React JS using Materials UI components. The data for page and chapter are simple static JSON files. (Data used to be stored in a Mongo DB as part of a MERN stack demo project, but that was expensive overkill.)
The Greek text presented here is taken from the recension by W.D. Ross, 1960 edition3. We should be grateful this text4, which was not included in the Perseus library, was finally digitized with some Bekker line information in 2016 as part of the Open Greek and Latin Project's First One-Thousand Years of Greek Project . For good and bad, the XML file is just a direct but rough re-presentation of the layout of the Ross edition, including the Bekker numbers at five-line intervals in the outside margins, but without line break information. As a result, the positions of the Bekker numbers in the text are tied to the oddness and evenness of the pages on which they appear. NB: For even pages, these numbers mark the the beginning of the line, but for odd pages, they mark the end. And since the XML contains no information on where the line begins, it's not clear from the file where the numbers on odd pages should be moved for consistency's sake. In sum, the data in this XML file is best suited to reproducing the Ross pages with rough Bekker numbers, but lacks the flexibility to do much else without assumptions and calculations about line breaks.
Nevertheless, in addition to the Ross-page presentation, there is a chapter-by-chapter presentation option, which includes the XML file's tag information, as described above. This latter presentation also includes an English translation. The English translation is that of Hardie and Gaye5, freely available in many places, but taken from here.
Stay tuned. More to come!
Notes
3. Aristotle (1936). Aristotle's Physics. A Revised Text with Introduction and Commentary. Translated by Ross, W.D. Oxford: University Press.
4. Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
5. Aristotle (1930). "Physica". In Ross, W.D. (ed.). The Works of Aristotle. Volume II. Translated by Hardie, R.P.; Gaye, R.K. Oxford: University Press.
My name is John W. Keck. I have a Ph.D. in Physics from Columbia University. But since around 2012, I've been a full-time software engineer. In my spare time I study natural philosophy. I am a fellow of The Institute for the Study of Nature My recent paper might be of interest:
John W. Keck (2022). Maximal motion and minimal matter: Aristotelian physics and special relativity.Synthese 200, 377. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03771-2
You can hold me accountable through my yahoo mail account: jwkeck15.
The DHS web version of Aquinas's commentary on Aristotle's Physics includes a useful parallel presentation of Aristotle's Greek alongside the Hardie-Gaye translation, which includes the Bekker page+column numbers. UNFORTUNATELY the link is dead, but you can still use the URL to find the commentary elsewhere, if you know where to look.
Two English translations known to be helpful:
Aristotle (2005). Physics, or, Natural Hearing. Translated by Coughlin, Glen. South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press.Uses what has become over the centuries standard terminology, and is alive to the issues in natural philosophy that are still relevant today. The introduction is an excellent explanation of the relevance of the Physics to the modern, scientific world.
Aristotle (1995). Aristotle's Physics: A Guided Study. Translated by Sachs, Joe. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.Tends to use non-standard terminology to bring out the novelty of Aristotle's positions; can come across as awkward, but can sometimes be quite illuminating.
For help with Greek, the Alpheios Project browser plugin is a great aid in exploring the text.
Connell, Richard J. (1966). Matter and Becoming. Chicago: Priory Press.Helpful for understanding Physics, book I.
David L. Schindler (1986) "The Problem of Mechanism" in Beyond Mechanism, ed. David L. Schindler (University Press of America, 1986), 1-12 at 3-4.The importance of the concept of nature vs. matter (Physics II.1-2, 7-9) and its relation to modern conceptions of mind and matter. You might need to re-read it a few times.
Mortimer Adler (1978) Aristotle for Everybody: Difficult Thought Made Easy.Supremely clear explanation of Aristotle's thought, most notably the chapter on the four causes (Physics II.3).
Michael J. Dodds (2001) "Science, Causality And Divine Action: Classical Principles For Contemporary Challenges," CTNS Bulletin 21.1 (Winter 2001), sect. 2-3.How the four causes of Physics II.3 relate to causes in modern science.
Rémi Brague (1990). Trans. Pierre Adler; Laurent d'Ursel. "Aristotle's Definition of Motion and Its Ontological Implications". Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal. 13 (2): 1–22. doi:10.5840/gfpj19901321.Excellent explanation of the definition of motion in Physics III.1.
John W. Keck (2022). Maximal motion and minimal matter: Aristotelian physics and special relativity.Synthese 200, 377. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03771-2.Section 2.2 explains the definition of motion. The paper shows the relevance of Aristotle's Physics for modern physics.