Natural Law Essay

Franklin Leyva Jimenez
Allison Kavey
His 131
10/23/14

The way we understand the universe has been widely accredited by the discoveries and theories by philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle And Isaac Newton who all took place in allowing us to see how the our world is composed and its Natural law. They do this through experimentation and improve by looking at previous theories and trying to prove or disprove their understanding of them, which ultimately ends up being the basis for the Scientific method used today. First Plato was a Greek philosopher who lived around 400 BCE along side Socrates and his student Aristotle applied the fundamentals of Western Philosophy. Plato believed that the world is 5 elements, which included water, fire, air, and earth, and lastly ether, which was all of them into one. Plato suggests that the elements are related and arranges the elements proportionally, Fire is to air, and air is to water: as air is to water, water is to earth. (Kavey, 10/2/14) The next thing that Plato believed was that bodies are composed of elementary right triangles and that all bodies are 3 dimensional and say that every right triangle is either isosceles or scalene and that all bodies can be constructed out of isosceles and scalene right triangles. He assigns different figures to different elements for example; the Cube is earth because it’s the “ Most immobile of the four kinds and the most malleable of bodies, and these are characteristics that of necessity belong to the figure with the most stable faces” (Plato, p 50e). He then goes on to assign air to the octahedron, fire to the tetrahedron (Pyramid) and water to the isohedron. Plato was able to say that the universe was mathematical just like Pythagoras had before him but instead of thinking that everything was made of numbers he was able to use geometrical figures which were the triangles. Plato showed us how he believed the natural was and how by theorizing certain things and being very knowledgeable us as humans have a superior mental capacity and also believed in a harmonious society. Because of his thoughts I think that in relation to todays scientific method Plato would be seen as a master hypothesis creator but would rather observe than actually experiment and conclude based on the observations only which are later elaborated on by other philosophers such as Aristotle. Next Aristotle was another Greek philosopher/scientist who was taught by Plato but really did not agree with what Plato had theorized and therefore believed that things could be disproved and ultimately become the first person to experiments theorizes and creates an experiment. Aristotle writes a series of books and a particular one called Physics book number 4 is one that he includes the idea that starts off with him introducing us to his understanding of the poly exclusionary principle, which states that 2 things cannot be in the same place at the same time by. Later he continues to talk about place and how Plato tied to say what it was but that Aristotle cannot determine it he just knows that it can be either matter or form but that both are closely related. He continues to make points about what place is and that it has to be something although it may affect the natural law. Aristotle’s way of experimenting and finding things out were just as important as Just being wise and theorizing like Plato would do, and therefore insisted that knowledge was not just there it had to be learned through experience through observation with the senses. Because of this elevated thought of trying to prove and disprove he laid down the fundamentals for what will later be the scientific method.
Third Isaac Newton was a 17th century philosopher who was working with other great natural philosophers such as Robert Boyle, Francis bacon, Robert hook, and William Harvey. Newton was responsible for the discovery of the scientific method and because of this was able to come up with various discoveries

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