You are not going to believe this but we still live in a Aristotelian world. In the West they lost Plato and all they had was Aristotle’s class notes up until the Renaissance. The Renaissance was the re-entry of Plato into the Western tradition after a long absence. And they forgot Greek so they were reading Aristotle in Latin translation. The point here is that because Aristotle was never lost, as Plato was, that he is more central to our Western Roman tradition than Plato and that Science for all its difference in detail from Aristotle’s opinions about natural phenomena, is still basically Aristotelian in its approach.

Latin had degenerated a lot during the middle ages. So in the Renaissance there was a resurgence in Latin, but also a relearning of Greek, and the reintroduction of the Greek originals of both Aristotle and Plato. So the West had lost touch with the Greek Foundations of the Roman empire that were preserved in Constantinople  but when that fell then the West basically re-invented itself as the inheritor of the Roman Empire despite the Barbarians having taken over, and the population crisis that occurred in Europe.

When Modern Empirical Science came along it was Aristotelian Science together with its infusion into Christianity that was being rebelled against. But everyone was still getting a classical education, so everyone was still steeped in Aristotle primarily and Plato secondarily, and then one might read the new works of science written in French, or Italian or German or English. What ever you fight against you become like.

So the fact that Modern Science came out of Aristotelian Science through a struggle means that Modern Science is just a variation on Aristotelian science, not a genuine departure. Since we no longer get classical educations we are just unaware of the similarity. But it is impossible to really get away from hundreds of years of Scholasticism. It is there beneath the surface informing our outlook in myriad ways.

Culture appears as archaeological deposits, we never jettison anything we merely build over the rubble of what went before. Alexander established the Greek civilization worldwide in his campaigns, and then this was replaced by the Roman Empire, which then split in two, and in the Western half we inherited the Latin with Aristotle being the basis of thought about everything. Plato and Greek texts came back in during the Renaissance, and then after that slowly the modern period arose in which we tried to disengage from the worst offenses of dogmatic science, but we did not cease to consider Aristotle right about everything else.

Basically what ever is the question we start off with Aristotle’s opinion and then start comparing that to Plato and then to others. The reason for that is that Aristotle had thought things out extensively and it is very difficult to come up with something different from what he had to say that carries equal weight. Basically modern science merely learned to query nature itself and to give authority of what nature said over what Aristotle said, but for everything else we just continue to stick to Aristotle as the first source.

Or in some cases we substitute Plato when there is a clear reason to do so. Plato tends to be much harder to understand and more sophisticated and so it is much more difficult to appeal to Plato than Aristotle. So the answer is that the whole of Aristotle is still relevant, even if you are someone like me who prefers Plato. Modern Science is merely a set of variations on Aristotle. Aristotle thought that nature acted like people and had intentions, but this turned out to be false, and so those parts of Aristotle’s work relating to Physics has been superseded

But he still defined what Physics was and separated it from Metaphysics. He founded Theology, and Politics, and Literary Criticism. You name it and it probably had some source in Aristotle or in his successors. We are all just late successors of this main predecessor within our culture.

For instance, we now know that Being and Time by Heidegger is basically his going back to Aristotle and treating his work as if it was phenomenological. It is very hard to get away from Aristotle in our tradition. For instance he set up the Excluded middle and the Law of Non-Contradiction that made our culture dualistic. This is one of the most profound moves made by any thinker in our tradition, and one if the most far reaching in its consequence. We still hold to that principle despite all the evidence from Quantum Mechanics that dualism is not the way nature works.

Ok, given the answer of Toni Shuma which is excellent, I can see what this Question could mean. The point is that life itself is messy in all its manifestations. The idea that much of anything can be neat in life is an illusion. But much of what we do is driven by trying to make that illusion as true as possible.

I normally have a hugh stack of books that I want to read so that is not a problem normally. The problem is to decide which one out of the stack has the highest priority, and I guess the answer to that is whim.

What is so great about Homer is the depth of his poetry in the Iliad and Odyssey. We take Homer as just the name instead of Anonymous that History gave to whoever came up with the epics being one or many people. There are just a few writers like Homer in our tradition which include Plato, Dante, and Shakespeare and a few others whom it is almost impossible to understand how a human being could do what they did. Their work opens up almost infinite horizons of meaning. Without them our tradition would be much more impoverished than it is, they give the tradition almost infinite depth. And this is no mean accomplishment. Other writers have a finite depth, they are fathomable. But there are a handful of writers that are unfathomable, and they appear as founders in many ways of their traditions. Many of the greatest of these deeper fathomable ones appear in All Things Shining by Kelly and Dreyfus along with some of the unfathomable ones. Heidegger talks about their works in The Origin of the Work of Art, which when he says creates worlds. It is this quality of infinite depth of meaning that creates the world for us. Other fathomable works fill that world, but it is the unfathomable ones that produce the infinite horizon of the world itself. Harold Bloom says that Shakespeare teaches us what it is to be human. Homer did that for the Greeks in the Mythopoietic Era and Plato did it for them in the early Metaphysical Era. Dante did it in the Renaissance and Shakespeare did it for us just before the modern era in the later Renaissance. Homer gives us a peak inside the mythopoietic era and makes it coherent for us as a way of worlding the world prior to the onslaught of reason. This is tremendously valuable as it gives us some perspective on the effects of reason once it became the primary criteria for comprehending experience  Kelly and Dreyfus say we do not get back out of it until Herman Mellvile’s Moby Dick. Melville wrote against the Cristian Onto-Theological (defined by Heidegger) viewpoint prior to Nietzsche.

There is something interesting here. Being and Having are the most fragmented roots in the English language. They share that characteristic. This implies that Having and Being are both artificial constructs in Indo-European Languages. If you look at ontologies you will note that Is..a… and Has..a… relations are quite different. Isa means that it is part of the object, but hasa means it comes under the object, i.e. that the object references the possessed object, but it is not part of itself. Having gives you distance from something that Is..a.. relations do not give you. But that distance is not very great, because we think of our possessions as being close to us.

We talk about beng in a state, or having a state, but we do not talk about Being a state.

Thus we say ‘there is a state of being’, but ‘we have that state’. This suggests that ‘states have being’, but when ‘we have a state it’ is different from ourselves. On the other hand we say we ARE excited. ‘We have excitement’ sounds strange. This suggests that the difference between Having and Being runs deep. But I can’t explain why there is the strange kinship yet difference between Having and Being. I have not studied it. Many languages have words for “Have”, it is not like Being an anomaly.

Perhaps it is because we ave phrases like “has been” that talk about the past that are different than “was”. But you would think that ‘will” of “will be” would have a broken root too. I find it mysterious that “have” is a broken root along with Being.

I do not think Habermas’ philosophy is all that great so it is pretty hard for me to defend it. In fact I see no redeeming qualities in it at all which is unusual for me, because normally canonical philosophers are given the benefit of the doubt. All I can do is throw up my arms and say “What has Critical Theory come to? This?” Adorno, Benjamin and Horkheimer each have interesting things to say. I am not sure what happened to Habermas. I have never heard anything about his philosophy that is the least bit interesting. Even Analytical Philosophy holds more interest that does the philosophy of Habermas for me.

Ayn Rand’s work is pseudo-philosophy, really a capitalist ideology raised to the nth degree. Perfect example of dogma which like Sartre’s work very propagandist in tone, in other words the characters only are there to express the ideas, and have no coherence of their own, a kind of pilgrims progress for the selfish individual in a capitalist society and justification for sociopaths which many CEOs really are. But this is old style capitalism, and today we have moved on to corporatism that is a hodge-podge of fascism, communism and capitalism all mixed together to form a monstrous brew, of the type that the three witches in MacBeth could not even dream up. Where is the new Ayn Rand for today’s corporatist globalism that the Republicans have sold their soul to? Surely there is a need for a new propagandist to update this worn out doctrine that sees corporations as emanations of selfish individual egos. They are in truth imaginary persons without soul or even any responsibility acting out on a global stage and destroying the planet while they are at it. In Ayn Rand’s day there seemed no limits for people like Hearst who as portrayed in Citizen Kane by Orsen Wells. Today there are only faceless company men bowing to these new gods with no egos of there own who justify the ravaging of the earth dividing everyone into shareholders, customers and employees who are many times the same people torn into these different roles. The time when there were individuals who became wealthy and then expressed their own will to power through that is over. It is like the American middle class, a thing of the past.

I suggest reading the book by Robert Rosen Life Itself to learn about functionalism. I have the beginnings of a tutorial on it at http://systemsradio.net

There is a wonderful book on exactly this point. It is The Wrath of Athena: Gods and Men in the Odyssey by Jenny Strauss Clay. If you read this book along with the book Oedipus, Philosopher by Jean-Joseph Goux and Catherine Porter you can get a lot of insight into what drives the epic. The epic begins when Athena stops being angry at Odysseus for the violation of her shrine during sack of Troy. In the violation the three taboos are broken which with sexual, intellectual and sacred violations of the dignity of Athena due to the Hubris of the Greeks. Goux specifies these rituals of initiation and how Oedipus fails these tests, while the hero succeeds in them. But the “sin” which angers Athena gives Odysseus signals responsibility for violating the honor of the gods at Troy by the hubris of the Acheans when they sack the city. This causes Menelaus to flee but Agamemnon stays to make sacrifices on the beach before leaving. Odysseus first decides to flee with Menelaus but then returns to do the Sacrifice with Agamemnon but misses it. Odysseus gets lost between the two brothers who are both kings. The one who stays back to sacrifice gets home first. The one who leaves first without sacrificing has his journey delayed. The one who gets lost between these alternate reactions gets the most lost and is delayed the longest, which is Odysseus. It must be understood that these epics are continually giving us nihilistic opposites and showing how the hero both charts his own course between them, but also may bet lost between the opposite reactions as Odysseus does. Odysseus is always by implication being compared to Achilles. Achilles withdraws from battle and then goes berserk when Petroclous is killed He overreacts by withdrawing from the battle and then overreacts by plunging into it in a berserker mode. Thus Achilles reaction to a nihilistic situation (both Trojans and Acheans take women who are not theirs) is itself nihilistic (withdrawal and overreaction). But both of these reactions are decisive when taken. Odysseus is instead indecisive first deciding to leave with Menelaus and then abandoning that at then returning to be with Agamemnon but missing the sacrifice. So Odysseus is literally lost in the nowhere between these two decisive courses of actions and from there things only get worse as he gets more and more lost until he is on a island in the middle of the sea resigned to being lost in oblivion hidden as a prisoner with Calypso.

http://ontomythology.posterous.com/why-was-athena-angry-at-odysseus-and-his-men

I think this question needs to be clarified.

I think it is now pretty certain that there is a mutiverse that somehow gives rise to our universe in the Big Bang and we can consider the fact that the universe is still accelerating in its expansion due to dark energy pouring in from somewhere as the greatest evidence for that. But whatever the multiverse is it is not spacetime as we understand it in our universe, and no one knows what it might be, and the chances of ever finding out are somewhat slim.

Now the thing about the Universe that we do know is that the whole thing is entangled because it all had an origin together at the Big Bang. The fact that everything is entangled lends credence to the idea that everything interpenetrates within the universe which is held for instance by Fa Tsang in Hua Yen Buddhism where emptiness is equated with interpenetration. This interpenetration is now thought about in Physics as the Holographic principle and the idea that the universe as three dimensional may be a projection off of a domain wall and that the dimensionality of our universe may ultimately be an illusion.

What we are discovering slowly is that Quantum Mechanical phenomena is not restricted to the micro world and that there are quantum mechanical states in macro phenomena that actually affect macro outcomes. For instance it was recently seen that there is quantum moment in photosynthesis. I am fairly certain that we are going to find that Life itself is based on these quantum phase shifts at the macro level in and out of entangled and superpositioned states.

If that is true, and we find more phenomena like that where Quantum Mechanics counts as having macro effects as Penrose suggested it might for Consciousness in the brain then there is a good chance that quantum mechanical phenomena will end up being linked to evolution in some way.

According to Deutsch in The Fabric of The Universe the multiverse is actually manifest as interference in Quantum Phenomena.

And we know from Kauffman At Home in the Universe that we are dependent on Order arising from nowhere to create life via Negative Entropy.

So, given these sources and what they have said I could envisage a theory that says that the multiverse is seen in our universe as Quantum interference, and Quantum interference occurs even on the macro level, and that somehow speciation is linked to that quantum phase shifts at the macro level, because Evolution has this strange punctuation that was incorporated into the theory by Gould. We do not know how punctuation works when lots of different species are suddenly created, many of which die out, but these speciation events leave their mark on evolutionary history.

For a long time they said that snowball earth was impossible because if it ever occurred the planet could never get out of it. But now we know it has occurred twice. Before they found out that the universe was still accelerating in its expansion physicists would have thought that was impossible. Even the researchers who discovered it couldn’t believe it at first. So there are many strange and hard to believe things about our universe that we are finding. For instance it was only when we found the microwave background radiation that the Big Bang became the dominate theory. It is discovery of the unexpected that drives science. Occasionally we get something like the Higgs particle that was predicted, but the real drivers is not what is predicted by theory but what we discover exists that we would never have guessed like Super Conductivity that took twenty years to explain convincingly. So I would not rule out the idea that there may ultimately be a connection between the Multiverse and Evolution of Species. But as someone else expressed it is hard to think what that might be at this point when thoughts about the Multiverse itself are so new, and since like string theory we won’t be doing experiments any time soon where we can test the various ideas that are being developed. But the very fact that we are taking seriously the idea of the multiverse is a wonderful expansion of the reach of our imagination in science as was string theory itself.

I predict that what we will find is that there are quantum moments all over the place in life, where life takes advantage of some quirk at the quantum level to increase its efficiency and effectiveness of its negative entropy order production. And if more of those quantum shifts are found like the one recently reported in photosynthesis then macro quantum states are going to become more and  more important for explaining now inexplicable things like life, consciousness and social phenomena in species. And the more QM takes on this role in things like Biology and if it turns out that D. Deutsch is right about Quantum interference being multiverses interacting in the substrate of our universe, then the more people may talk about the role of the multiverse in shaping macro phenomena such as evolution within our universe.