Modern Age - Summer 2014 - 59

REVIEWS

can understand the world by simply thinking about it; that is, through reflection on
normal experience. The Greeks had no technology to view anything outside the normal
realm of human experience-the very large,
the very small, the very fast, the very high
energy, etc. As a result, their views were
shaped by such experience, and on that basis
they extrapolated to all of reality. This does
not work for science; experimentation is necessary. Though Aristotle is justly famous for
his dissection work on plants and animals
and his classifications, he did not formulate
hypotheses and then test them empirically.
His theory that plants get their food (and
thus their mass) from the soil sounded reasonable, but clearly the relevant experiment
was never done. As the author points out, it
was not until the Middle Ages in Europe that
the idea that one had to get his hands dirty
in order to do real investigation of nature
came of age with Grosseteste and others. But
this did not come through the Aristotelians,
who never really left the Greek tradition,
but through the Benedictines and later the
Franciscans. It can be argued that modern
science grew out of the Franciscan tradition
more than any other, and specifically the
work of Scotus and Ockham (Grosseteste
was associated with the Franciscan order but
not a member).
The author correctly observes that there
are aspects of reality that elude the senses
but that are nonetheless conveyed to us by
our perceptual system. This permits us to
inquire about reality utilizing the concepts
of ordinary experience as well as those of science. As Abbott Suger famously said in the
twelfth century, "De materialibus ad immaterialia" (De Administratione 33). He was
referring of course to the soaring new Gothic
church of St. Denis that he was building, but
his remarks hold generally. Kant's critical
philosophy, perhaps the only serious rival

to realism in the minds of some scientists,
crashed and burned in the nineteenth century with the development of non-Euclidean
geometries and their later incorporation into
the non-Newtonian physics of relativity in
the early twentieth century.
Dougherty's project would be quite useful if the discussion addressed the really
difficult problems posed by science for any
Aristotelian philosophy. These problems
include the failure of the change paradigm
in Aristotle-substantial change does not
involve going down to prime matter and
renewing with a different form; the inadequacy of Aristotle's place theory of motion;
nonlocality in quantum systems (visible on
a macroscopic scale); and the probabilistic
nature of reality, which is fundamental and
not an artifact of our descriptions, to mention only a few. Instead the book seems to
be a critique of theories and ideas that few
if any practicing scientists now hold or ever
held, although some philosophers have advocated them from time to time. Most (in fact
virtually all) scientists are realists and believe
that what they are investigating is real, even
if it may behave in ways radically different
than objects in our day-to-day life. At the
subatomic level, for example, particles such
as quarks cannot be visualized, and interactions between particles must be understood
with the complicated and probabilistic
mathematical descriptions of quantum field
theory.
Mathematics indeed is a language for talking about nature that extends our ordinary
language and thus allows us to understand
these realms of reality to the degree that we
can do so; it is not a vacuous metaphor. The
author claims that "when physicists form a
pure abstract mathematical equivalent of a
given atomic structure, a structure that is
often unimaginable because it is devoid of
ontological content . . . the inferred structure
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Modern Age - Summer 2014

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