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Science, Philosophy, and Technology in the Greco-Roman World II1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2009

Desmond Lee
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Extract

In very general terms, the physical scientist is concerned to identify and define certain regularities in the material world, and to embody them in laws or theories which both furnish an explanation of them and enable him to predict and to some extent to control particular kinds of future event. It is noticeable at once that the elements of prediction and control are largely absent from Greek speculation, and this is due partly to certain of its inherent characteristics (to which I return in a moment), and partly to its lack of three further particular features which are an essential part of the natural sciences today. These are briefly that they are experimental, quantitative, and laboratory-based. This generalization is, of course, at once too wide and too narrow. Not all scientific theories rely on experiment in the narrow sense or on laboratory operations; the observations of the astronomer and the activities of the field-biologist can, up to a point, dispense with both. But it remains true that the experimental test and the laboratory and its instruments are essential elements in modern science, and neither the astronomer nor the biologist can in the last resort dispense with them. Similarly, quantitative measurement plays an indispensable role in the physical sciences and is the basis on which they have been built up, even though the theoretical physicist may spend little time measuring or experimenting and be mainly concerned with the mathematical analysis which is so vital an element in modern physical theory.

Type
Research Article
Information
Greece & Rome , Volume 20 , Issue 2 , October 1973 , pp. 180 - 193
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1973

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References

page 181 note 1 Cf. Heidel, W. A., Hippocratic Medicine (New York, 1941), 103Google Scholar: the ‘thorough going application of the experimental method is of recent growth.’

page 181 note 2 The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley, 1951), ch. 1.Google Scholar

page 182 note 1 Cf. Heidel, , The Heroic Age of Science (Baltimore, 1933), 1Google Scholar: ‘we are prone to forget that even a generation ago it was customary to give the name of Natural Philosophy to textbooks which would now be entitled treatises on physics.’

page 183 note 1 Hesse, M. B., Forces and Fields (London, 1961), 53.Google Scholar

page 183 note 2 Hesse, , op. cit. 110.Google Scholar

page 184 note 1 Cf. Lloyd, G. E. R., Polarity and Analogy (Cambridge, 1966), 315.Google Scholar

page 184 note 2 Hesse, , op. cit. 101.Google Scholar

page 185 note 1 Hesse, , op. cit. 109.Google Scholar

page 185 note 2 Lloyd, , op. cit. 208 and 292.Google Scholar

page 185 note 3 The Demiurge mixes the soul-stuff, like a cook, rolls it out, as a cook rolls pastry, cuts it into strips, bends these strips into circles and fastens them together.

page 185 note 4 Cf. Lloyd, , op. cit. 285.Google Scholar

page 185 note 5 Cf. Lloyd, , op. cit. 285 for detail.Google Scholar

page 185 note 6 But see Lloyd, , op. cit. 287Google Scholar; Hesse, , op. cit. 63.Google Scholar

page 186 note 1 Hesse, , op. cit. iii.Google Scholar

page 187 note 1 Steele, David (ed.), The History of Scientific Ideas (London, 1970), 112.Google Scholar

page 187 note 2 The Heroic Age of Science, 193.Google Scholar

page 187 note 3 Lloyd, , PCPhS cxc (1964), 55.Google Scholar

page 187 note 4 The Heroic Age of Science, 71.Google Scholar

page 189 note 1 Arist. Meteor. 358b34 ff., 358b16 ff.Google Scholar; cf. Lloyd, , PCPhS, loc. cit. 64–5.Google Scholar

page 190 note 1 Professor Farrington does not strengthen his case by citing examples that are definitely erroneous. To argue that Anaximander's account of the heavenly bodies was suggested by the ‘bellows in the blast furnace’ (Head and Hand in Ancient Greece, 10)Google Scholar is hardly convincing; the blast furnace was not invented until the Middle Ages, the bellows do not in fact emit fire, and the passage in question probably does not refer to bellows at all (see Hall, J. J., JHS lxxxix (1969), 57 f.).CrossRefGoogle Scholar On early Greek philosophy and techniques see Edelstein, L., Ancient Medicine, 417 f.Google Scholar

page 191 note 1 The Physical World of the Greeks, 232.Google Scholar

page 191 note 2 Lloyd, , PCPhS, loc. cit. 55.Google Scholar

page 191 note 3 Drachmann, A. G., Klesibios, Philon and Heron, 161.Google Scholar

page 191 note 4 Principium Sapientiae (Cambridge, 1952), 7.Google Scholar

page 192 note 1 Op. cit. 9.