Technology and the origin of nature concepts: The impact of the built world on Aristotle and Galileo's concepts of motion

This dissertation begins with a pressing historical question. What lies behind the original formulation of the inertia principle, specifically, the idea of inertial motion, the scientific conclusion that motion for an earthen body may be ongoing and indefinite? What explains the varying cognitive fortunes of this epochal idea—its dismissal by Aristotle and its embrace two thousand years later by Galileo? Prompted in part by the work of Lynn White Jr., I offer evidence that the state of technology, or conditions within the built world, have a significant bearing on the issue. I argue first that Aristotle's well known refusal to admit inertial motion is tied up with the phenomenon of handwork, a particularly notable feature of ancient built world experience. Aristotle's basic concept of both process and local motion, with its stress on limits and completion, is informed at its core not by organic nature or human goal-directedness but by skilled manual artifact-use. I go on to argue that the spread of large continually rotating wheels and cylinders, beginning in very late Antiquity but accelerating during the late Middle Ages, sets the stage for inertial ideas. I try to show that the genesis of Galileo's inertia principle depends crucially on an analysis of continually rotated earthen bodies, or built world phenomena unavailable to Aristotle. What we see as a result of these two investigations is that conceptual foundations (Aristotelian, Galilean) can be reduced in complex ways to built terrain, the artifacts and work-forms available to us at a given point in history. In the course of the undertaking, a broader thesis emerges and is defended in the dissertation. I propose that built environments have had a greater role in the genesis of fundamental ideas about nature than previously suspected. The surrounding world of artifacts and work-experience offers up the explanatory schemes, the grounding concepts, the basic lines of visualization and insight, available to students of nature. If philosophy is concerned with the origin and limits of physical knowledge, as it used to be, then the built world should become one of its chief concerns.