Did Aristotle Fail in Physics? Part 7

The Last of Premise B: an Eternally Cycling Cosmos

As always, here’s the argument again from Part 1:

Premise A—>An organismic world view causes a failure in physics. (Part 2, 3)
Premise B—>Aristotle held an organismic world view. (Part 4, 5, 6, 7)
Therefore, Aristotle failed in physics. (Part 8)

This post is a review of Aristotle’s organismic world view, according to Jaki, as it relates to the doctrine of an eternally cycling universe.

Not in Relevance

Fr. Stanley Jaki does not mention the Greek idea of an eternally cycling cosmos or the Great Year in the Relevance of Physics, even as he attacks Aristotle’s organismic worldview as destructive to physics. He focuses on Aristotle’s two main assessments of the physical world in On the Heavens, for the celestial, and Meteorologica, for the terrestrial, pointing out examples of a priori explanations of physical processes as matching those of processes in living organisms. Relevance was published in 1966. Until now, I had not realized that Jaki did not mention eternal cycles in Relevance yet foc…