(Jessy Jordan) What Was Lost with the Rejection of Aristotelian Physics...

Jessy Jordan, Professor of philosophy at Mount St. Mary’s, will present his lecture, What Was Lost with the Rejection of Aristotelian Physics: On Motion and Moral Philosophy. He offers this description: The way one thinks about and explains motion has surprising consequences for how one thinks about moral philosophy. Thus, the early modern rejection of Aristotelian physics and its replacement by the mechanical philosophy of some of the most renowned natural philosophers of the 17th century had profound consequences for what appeared to be a legitimate account of moral evaluations. In this lecture I attempt to highlight the fundamental conceptual shift that occurs in the early modern account of motion by contrasting Aristotelian physics with that of the 17th century defenders of the corpuscularian or mechanical philosophy. I then try to lay bare the way in which this shift eclipses a way of thinking about moral judgments that is as objective and descriptive as the evaluation that “Hoots, the owl, is defective if it lacks sharp night vision.” I conclude by suggesting that although a wholesale retrieval of Aristotelian physics is not possible for us, we 21st century people are and must be Aristotelian enough to justify a certain set of evaluative judgments, namely, judgments of natural soundness and natural defect.