The Origins of Greek Science Can Be Traced Back to the Philosopher

Greek science

The birth of natural philosophy

There seems to exist no expert reason why the Hellenes, clustered in isolated metropolis-states in a relatively poor and backward land, should have struck out into intellectual regions that were only dimly perceived, if at all, by the splendid civilizations of the Yangtze, Tigris and Euphrates, and Nile valleys. At that place were many differences between aboriginal Greece and the other civilizations, simply perhaps the most significant was religion. What is hit almost Greek organized religion, in dissimilarity to the religions of Mesopotamia and Egypt, is its puerility. Both of the great river civilizations evolved complex theologies that served to answer near, if not all, of the big questions about humankind's place and destiny. Greek faith did not. It was, in fact, little more than a collection of folk tales, more appropriate to the campfire than to the temple. Perhaps this was the result of the plummet of an earlier Greek civilisation, the Mycenaean, toward the end of the 2nd millennium bce, when the Dark Age descended upon Greece and lasted for three centuries. All that was preserved were stories of gods and men, passed along by poets, that dimly reflected Mycenaean values and events. Such were the great poems of Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey, in which heroes and gods mingled freely with i another. Indeed, they mingled too freely, for the gods appear in these tales equally little more immortal adolescents whose tricks and feats, when compared with the concerns of a Marduk or Jehovah, are infantile. There actually was no Greek theology in the sense that theology provides a coherent and profound explanation of the workings of both the cosmos and the homo heart. Hence, there were no like shooting fish in a barrel answers to inquiring Greek minds. The result was that ample room was left for a more penetrating and ultimately more satisfying manner of inquiry. Thus were philosophy and its oldest offspring, science, born.

The showtime natural philosopher, according to Hellenic tradition, was Thales of Miletus, who flourished in the 6th century bce. We know of him only through later on accounts, for nothing he wrote has survived. He is supposed to have predicted a solar eclipse in 585 bce and to have invented the formal written report of geometry in his demonstration of the bisecting of a circle by its diameter. Almost importantly, he tried to explain all observed natural phenomena in terms of the changes of a single substance, h2o, which can exist seen to exist in solid, liquid, and gaseous states. What for Thales guaranteed the regularity and rationality of the world was the innate divinity in all things that directed them to their divinely appointed ends. From these ideas there emerged two characteristics of classical Greek science. The first was the view of the universe as an ordered construction (the Greek kósmos means "guild"). The second was the conviction that this order was not that of a mechanical contrivance but that of an organism: all parts of the universe had purposes in the overall scheme of things, and objects moved naturally toward the ends they were blighted to serve. This motility toward ends is called teleology and, with but few exceptions, it permeated Greek as well equally much later science.

Britannica Quiz

Science: Fact or Fiction?

Exercise you become fired upwards about physics? Giddy nigh geology? Sort out science fact from fiction with these questions.

Thales inadvertently made 1 other cardinal contribution to the development of natural scientific discipline. Past naming a specific substance as the basic element of all matter, Thales opened himself to criticism, which was not long in coming. His own disciple, Anaximander, was quick to argue that water could not be the basic substance. His statement was unproblematic: water, if it is anything, is essentially wet; cipher can be its own contradiction. Hence, if Thales were right, the reverse of wet could non exist in a substance, and that would preclude all of the dry things that are observed in the world. Therefore, Thales was wrong. Here was the birth of the critical tradition that is fundamental to the advance of science.

Thales' conjectures set off an intellectual explosion, most of which was devoted to increasingly refined criticisms of his doctrine of central matter. Various unmarried substances were proposed and then rejected, ultimately in favour of a multiplicity of elements that could account for such opposite qualities as wet and dry out, hot and cold. 2 centuries after Thales, most natural philosophers accustomed a doctrine of four elements: earth (cold and dry out), burn (hot and dry out), water (cold and wet), and air (hot and moisture). All bodies were made from these four.

The presence of the elements only guaranteed the presence of their qualities in various proportions. What was not accounted for was the form these elements took, which served to differentiate natural objects from i another. The problem of course was offset attacked systematically by the philosopher and cult leader Pythagoras in the 6th century bce. Legend has it that Pythagoras became convinced of the primacy of number when he realized that the musical notes produced past a monochord were in simple ratio to the length of the string. Qualities (tones) were reduced to quantities (numbers in integral ratios). Thus was built-in mathematical physics, for this discovery provided the essential bridge between the world of physical feel and that of numerical relationships. Number provided the answer to the question of the origin of forms and qualities.

Aristotle and Archimedes

Hellenic scientific discipline was built upon the foundations laid by Thales and Pythagoras. It reached its zenith in the works of Aristotle and Archimedes. Aristotle represents the first tradition, that of qualitative forms and teleology. He was himself a biologist whose observations of marine organisms were unsurpassed until the 19th century. Biology is essentially teleological—the parts of a living organism are understood in terms of what they do in and for the organism—and Aristotle's biological works provided the framework for the science until the fourth dimension of Charles Darwin. In physics, teleology is not so obvious, and Aristotle had to impose information technology on the cosmos. From Plato, his instructor, he inherited the theological proposition that the heavenly bodies (stars and planets) are literally divine and, as such, perfect. They could, therefore, movement only in perfect, eternal, unchanging motion, which, by Plato's definition, meant perfect circles. The Earth, being obviously not divine, and inert, was at the centre. From the Earth to the sphere of the Moon, all things constantly changed, generating new forms and then decaying back into formlessness. Above the Moon the creation consisted of contiguous and concentric crystalline spheres moving on axes set at angles to one another (this deemed for the peculiar motions of the planets) and deriving their motion either from a fifth element that moved naturally in circles or from heavenly souls resident in the celestial bodies. The ultimate crusade of all motion was a prime, or unmoved, mover (God) that stood exterior the cosmos.

Aristotle was able to brand a great deal of sense of observed nature past asking of any object or process: what is the material involved, what is its form and how did it get that course, and, most important of all, what is its purpose? What should be noted is that, for Aristotle, all activity that occurred spontaneously was natural. Hence, the proper means of investigation was observation. Experiment, that is, altering natural conditions in society to throw light on the hidden properties and activities of objects, was unnatural and could not, therefore, be expected to reveal the essence of things. Experiment was thus not essential to Greek scientific discipline.

The problem of purpose did not arise in the areas in which Archimedes made his near important contributions. He was, first of all, a bright mathematician whose piece of work on conic sections and on the area of the circumvolve prepared the mode for the subsequently invention of the calculus. It was in mathematical physics, however, that he fabricated his greatest contributions to science. His mathematical demonstration of the law of the lever was as verbal as a Euclidean proof in geometry. Similarly, his piece of work on hydrostatics introduced and adult the method whereby physical characteristics, in this case specific gravity, which Archimedes discovered, are given mathematical shape and so manipulated by mathematical methods to yield mathematical conclusions that can be translated back into physical terms.

In i major area the Aristotelian and the Archimedean approaches were forced into a rather inconvenient matrimony. Astronomy was the dominant physical science throughout antiquity, but information technology had never been successfully reduced to a coherent organisation. The Platonic-Aristotelian astral religion required that planetary orbits be circles. But, particularly later the conquests of Alexander the Great had made the observations and mathematical methods of the Babylonians available to the Greeks, astronomers institute it impossible to reconcile theory and observation. Astronomy then split into two parts: one was physical and accepted Aristotelian theory in accounting for heavenly movement, and the other ignored causation and concentrated solely on the creation of a mathematical model that could exist used for computing planetary positions. Ptolemy, in the 2nd century ce, carried the latter tradition to its highest point in artifact in his Hē mathēmatikē syntaxis ("The Mathematical Collection," improve known under its Greek-Arabic championship, Almagest).

Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

Medicine

The Greeks not merely made substantial progress in understanding the cosmos but also went far beyond their predecessors in their knowledge of the human being trunk. Pre-Greek medicine had been almost entirely confined to religion and ritual. Disease was considered the result of divine disfavour and human being sin, to be dealt with past spells, prayers, and other propitiatory measures. In the 5th century bce a revolutionary modify came about that is associated with the name of Hippocrates. Information technology was Hippocrates and his school who, influenced by the ascension of natural philosophy, commencement insisted that affliction was a natural, not a supernatural, miracle. Even maladies as striking as epilepsy, whose seizures appeared to be divinely acquired, were held to originate in natural causes within the body.

The height of medical science in antiquity was reached belatedly in the Hellenistic period. Much work was done at the museum of Alexandria, a research plant set upwards under Greek influence in Egypt in the third century bce to sponsor learning in general. The heart and the vascular system were investigated, as were the nerves and the brain. The organs of the thoracic cavity were described, and attempts were fabricated to detect their functions. It was on these researches, and on his own dissections of apes and pigs, that the last cracking physician of antiquity, Galen of Pergamum, based his physiology. Information technology was, essentially, a tripartite system in which so-called spirits—natural, vital, and animal—passed respectively through the veins, the arteries, and the nerves to vitalize the body as a whole. Galen'due south attempts to correlate therapeutics with his physiology were non successful, and so medical exercise remained eclectic and a matter of the physician's selection. Usually the optimal option was that propounded by the Hippocratics, who relied primarily on simple, clean living and the ability of the trunk to heal itself.

pattersoncordes1977.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.britannica.com/science/history-of-science/Greek-science

Share this post