| Elements of Epistemology |
Aristotles Diagrams Aristotle (c. 9650 HE; 350 BCE) who was among the students of Plato, is one of the fathers of visual statistics, as he used diagrams to illustrate points of explanation. Among these diagrams is a series of concentric spheres:
Geosphere
(Earth at the center
of the Universe)
Hydrosphere (Earth's oceans)
Atmosphere (Air surrounding the Earth)
Pyrosphere (Sphere generating lightning)
Stellarsphere (Stars above the Earth)
with
the prime mover (the first cause) initiating their spinning motion. Teilhard de
Chardin (1881-1955) replaced the Aristotles pyrosphere with his concept
of noosphere. He
reasoned that while evolution diversified the living forms, humankind
reversed this divergent process into a convergent one. While many species are
on the verge of extinction, the diverse human cultures are converging toward
the omega point. Teilhard de Chardin predicted that after reaching the
omega point, humankind will cover the Earth's surface with collective human
consciousness, the noosphere (from Greek noos, mind), superimposed on
the already-existing biosphere. He elaborated these concepts in an
effort to reconcile
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Aristotles school building |
Corpus Aristotelicum The collected works of Aristotle, Corpus Aristotelicum, are divided into logic, physics, and metaphysics. The metaphysics consists of teleology, epistemology, cosmology, ontology, and ethics. Aristotle thought that every entity in the universe moves toward a goal, teleos, inherent in its nature. The principle subjects of teleology thus are development and change. Materialists understood these as mutually interconnected causal chains of events. The idealists thought that these chains of events must have been initiated and guided by a spiritual, supernatural principle, the ultimate source and cause of all things and events. From these deliberations, philosophy developed along two parallel lines. One was realistic and secular, the other was idealistic and religious. The realistic tradition maintains that the concept of supernatural original cause is redundant, unnecessary to understand our world and the meaning of our existence. The idealistic tradition maintains that in order to understand the world and the meaning of our existence, the concept of God is necessary. The next question then is, how we can know that God exists? This used to be the central question of epistemology, the Greek episteme meaning 'to know.'