In general, there were two ways of conceiving man, knowledge and law, based on two cosmologies or worldviews: ancient cosmology (Greek) and Christian cosmology (to some extent, Latin).
Greek cosmology, in short, understood that the world (the cosmos) was a whole organized by several beings that were part of that whole. All beings, including man, would be subject to an immutable natural law. Thus, all beings were transitory, had a beginning and an end, except for the whole or the composite, that is, the cosmos in general, which was immortal and eternal. Nature with its laws and limits imposes itself on things and human beings, these laws being a set of superior, immutable, stable, permanent principles or ideas. Authority, then, comes from nature and not from man's will to be inserted into nature.
On the other hand, we also have Christian cosmology, in which man is placed at the center of the world (anthropocentrism) because he is considered immortal. This condition allows man to differentiate himself from other beings, being, therefore, superior to them. Man was made in the image and likeness of God and his soul will remain alive after death and the final judgment. Theology considers the principles of knowledge and law also as natural, since they are immutable and permanent. However, its source is revealed religion. The Christian God gives man the power to rule the world according to his revealed laws.
The notion that the world (universe) is finite prevails in both conceptions, that is, it corresponds to a closed system in which the cause of movement and existence of beings is due either to imitating the perfection of the prime mover (in the case of the Greeks) or to a voluntary act of a God who loves his creatures (for the Christians). Thus, with the exception of Plato and the Pythagoreans who conceived the world in mathematical characters, the understanding of sensible, anti-mathematical reality did not allow to understand that the Earth revolved around the sun, but that it was stationary at the center of the universe and that, on the contrary, the sun and the other stars revolved around her. The movement, taken not only as displacement and translation, but also alteration and transformation qualitative, implied a way of conceiving beings as affected by the movement caused by forces external. Thus, a seed turns into a tree, as it is the power it has to update itself if it wants to reach perfection (thus imitating perfection). God is, then, the cause of beings and it is in him or from him that all truth comes.
However, due to a series of economic, political, religious and cultural factors, many contradictions led men to a certain skepticism. These, in confrontation with the dogmatists, occupied the stage of the predominant philosophical discussion in the newly created universities (official educational establishments). There it seemed possible to talk about all things having as guiding authorities the Bible, the saints (canonized priests) or the philosophers who served as support to justify the faith. The debates held seemed to contain something really intelligible; however, man therefore began to move away from himself, from God and from the world in which he lived, because the conclusions of the reasonings often clashed with reality (just like Greek mythology!). It was necessary for man to challenge the laws and authorities in order to try to rebuild his frame of reference, aiming to replace or transform his concepts about the world and about himself.
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The first of these transformations came with the Copernican revolution. Nicolaus Copernicus had imagined that the earth was not at the center of the universe, but that the sun had to be. This transfer of models (from geocentric to heliocentric) was still conceived by understanding the universe as a closed system. But already here, astronomical calculations diverged from mere opinion based on sensations.
Another important researcher, Francis Bacon, believed that we should get generalizations from induction, that is, by collecting particular facts, we would abstract the universal and this would allow men to know the reality of objects. For this, he created what we call an experimental scientific method in which the hypotheses are not based on an adequacy. qualitative between word and thing (subject and predicate), but in the quantitative value attributed to the experience of objects (empiricism).
However, the definitive change of investigative posture only gained the contours of science with Galileo Galilei. This had thought that the world was written in mathematical characters and that it was up to man to unravel the mysteries of nature. For this, it was necessary to think that mathematical knowledge applies to things, that is, we know things before experiencing them. It means to say that it is possible to do deductive science of hypotheses (hypothetical-deductive method).
Galileo first conceived of the principle of inertia. This principle understands that a body only moves because of an external force that moves it in space according to a reference. Likewise, this body remains at rest if the set of forces acting on a body result, also in relation to the referential, a displacement of 0 (zero). This means, in addition to the replacement of the concept of substance (Aristotelian) by that of body (Galileo), that there is no final cause of movement (or at least that it cannot be known). What can be done is to describe the translation of bodies in relation to a reference point, which makes the movement relative. A body, by itself, does not act by internal force. Movement is always carried out by an external force that makes it move in geometric space. And for that, it is necessary to conceive the universe as being an open or infinite system of forces.
But even this application of mathematics to the experimental model was not enough to justify the relationship between subject and object, a relationship that would guarantee the certainty of scientific truth. Galileo's practice was not enough, Descartes' theory was necessary.
By João Francisco P. Cabral
Brazil School Collaborator
Graduated in Philosophy from the Federal University of Uberlândia - UFU
Master's student in Philosophy at the State University of Campinas - UNICAMP
Philosophy - Brazil School
