Volume 1 Issue 1 June 2017 Journal ofPhilosophical Criticism ISSN 2533-0675 Volume 1 Issue 1 June 2017 ISSN 2533-0675 Journal of Philosophical Criticism Editor-in-chief Marcio Gimenes de Paula, Universidade de Brasília, Brazil Associate Editor Catalina Elena Dobre, Anáhuac University, Mexico Reviews Editor Álvaro Rodríguez Vázquez, The English School, Colombia Editorial Committee Mitsy Barriga-Ramos, Free University of Berlin, Germany • María José Binetti, CONICET, Argentina • Àngel Puyol González, Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain • Gordon Marino, St. Olaf College, USA • Athanasia Theodoropoulou, University of Athens, Greece • Aleksandra Zdravkovic Zistakis, Greek Philosophical Society, Greece • Alexander Zistakis, University of Athens, Greece The Journal of Philosophical Criticism ( JPC) is a journal published by Menabò Publishing House. 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Journal of Philosophical Criticism Volume 1 Number 1 — June 2017 ARTICLES Aristotle in the History of Sciences Pierre Pellegrin 3 The Concept of Justice in Greek Philosophy (Plato and Aristotle) Afifeh Hamedi 15 What Is Systems Biology Tasos Zisis 24 From Democritus to Early Christian Liturgy Karolina Kochanczyk - Boninska 37 Journal of Philosophical Criticism Vol. 1, No. 1, 2017 Aristotle in the History of Sciences Pierre Pellegrin he problem I want to tackle is: to what extent should we consider Aristotle as a scientist in the modern sense of this term, and, consequently, to what extent should we include his works dealing with the special sciences in the history of thoseT sciences? Until recently, the main opposition between the French and the so-called Anglo- saxon traditions in the history of science was that between a continuist approach and a Bachelardian one. I still believe that Gaston Bachelard is basically right in thinking that there is a difference of nature, and not of degree, between pre- scientific thought and science itself. Even Bachelard’s most provocative claims —for instance that science has no parents— are substantially true. In the same way, I still consider the conception of the history of science as a cumulative process (i.e. an accumulation of discoveries made by the successive scientists, along with the idea that, in human history, human beings are always facing, roughly speaking, the same problems) is misleading. One of the most remarkable examples of this continuist conception has been that of my friend Alistair Crombie, a man of outstanding historical culture. I think that this quarrel was settled, in favor of the Bachelardian side, when Thomas Kuhn published his Structure of scientific revolutions in 1962. Borowing from Alexandfre Koyré the concept of a “scientific revolution”, Kuhn, as everyone knows, introduced the notion of a paradigm shift, which rendered obsolete the cumulative model of the history of sciences. But Kuhn is not so JPC much concerned with the birth of the sciences, as he is with their developments. One of the tasks of philosophy today is certainly to make clear distinctions between things which appear to be alike but are in fact different. Just as it is not the case that every system of be- liefs is a religion (even if it appeals to one or several gods), in the same way, it is not the case that every systematic explanation of the world is a science. Bachelard’s position is particularly strong on the rise of Galilean physics. As a Bachelardian, I still consider Galileo’s physics to be the first science, properly speaking, assuming that we leave aside two questions. The first is the difficult problem of Greek and Arabic mathematics. The sec- ond is the case of Arabic physicists. I think this second question is twofold: on the one hand, we find disciplines directly dependant on mathematics, like astronomy, optics and statics, one of the most prominent of these being that of Ibn al-Haytham. As we do in the case of the Greek math- ematicians (I have of course Archimedes especially in mind), these disciplines can be described as «applied mathematics». On the other hand, concerning physics properly speaking, I have the impression that Arabic physicists remained so to speak on the threshold of scientific physics, just as people like Jean Buridan also were. According to Bachelard, the birth of physics was a sudden event, though prepared over a long period, precisely by people like Buridan. This is what Bachelard calls the «epistemologi- cal break». In the case of physics, Aristotelianism was a formidable obstacle to the development of this Galilean physics, and particularly Aristotle’s dynamics and cinematics, which were both founded on an impressive cosmology, and also refered to his psychology and his metaphysics. And as a Bachelardian, again, I continue to think that Aristotle’s physics cannot be included as such in the history of physics. We should add that in the XVIIth century Aristotelianism is no longer the innovative and revolutionary doctrine it was in the XIIIth century. Instead of being suspect to the Catholic church (in 1277 the bishop of Paris Eugène Tempier had condemned several Aristotelian theses), - 4 - Journal of Philosophical Criticism Aristotle was the basis for philosophy teaching in religious colleges. This lasted until the begin- ning of the XIXth century. When I began to work on Aristotle’s biological treatises, more than thirty years ago, I in- tended to apply this Bachelardian framework to biology. I had two main reasons for doing so. (i) It seemed to me that there was no good reason to think that biology was an exception to the Bachelardian schema. I have been reinforced in this opinion by several publications, and especially Robert Joly’s Le niveau de la science hippocratique, published in 1966. (ii) because Aristotle himself includes his biology in his physics, and therefore made appli- cable to biology what was assumed to be the case for physics. This is why, in my first publications, I insisted on the necessity of contrasting Aristotle’s biol- ogy with modern biology. First, I stressed the fact that Aristotle’s biology could not be considered outside of Aristotelianism as a whole (this means that the main Aristotelian concepts, such as substance, act, potentiality, definition, etc. may have a biological use, but not a biological sense). Second, I intended to show that the questions the natural philosophers of the XVIIth and XVII- Ith centuries were dealing with, were not questions Aristotle had in mind. To make this second point, I took the example of taxonomy. If there is no fixed classification of animals in Aristotle, the reason is not that Aristotle could not have achieved it, but that he had no interest in doing so. Roughly speaking, my intention was to illustrate the thesis of Georges Canguilhem according to which there is no precursor in the history of science. Today I hold a more mitigated position, may be because I am aging... In fact Aristotle’s corpus is not homogeneous from the point of view of modern science. To- day I want to consider three chapters of the Aristotelian theory: cosmology, physics and biology. The cosmology of the De Cælo Aristotle’s cosmology, as represented in the De Cælo, should obviously be considered a typ- - 5 - JPC ical pre-scientific theory according to Bachelard’s standards. Aristotle’s conception of a finite, spherical, eternal and perfect cosmos is not a scientific picture of the universe, but the answer to a metaphysical challenge, that of Parmenides, who believe that no being could proceed from a non- being (and no non-being from a being). The first philosophers, from Thales onward, had no objec- tion to the idea that the cosmos as it was could be explained by the mere combination of primitive elements, such as earth, water, air and fire. Parmenides’ objection, if expressed in modern terms, is that negentropy, i.e. the constitution of more complex realities through the chance combinations of elements, cannot exist in the world.