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SOCRATES [
] Democritus was, indeed, the most suc cessful of the Greek natural philosophers in the uncanny accuracy of his ideas (at least from our present viewpoint), but he lived in the shadow of his contemporary, Socrates [21], whose disciples rejected Democritus’ notion of the universe. Al most none of Democritus’ work, some seventy-two books in all, has survived and we know of him entirely as a result of references (often unfriendly) in the works of others. Democritus was widely known as the Laughing Philosopher, either because his philosophy was an essentially cheerful one, or because he was viewed as laugh ing at the follies of mankind. He is best known for his atomic theory. He believed that all matter consisted of tiny particles, almost infini tesimally small, so small that nothing smaller was conceivable. Hence they were indivisible; the very word “atom” means “indivisible.” The atoms, he held, were eternal, unchangeable, inde structible. Besides themselves only the void—that is, the space between the atoms—existed. Even the human mind and the gods (if any) were made up of atom combinations. The atoms, said Democritus, differed from each other physically, and in this difference was to be found an explana tion for the properties of various sub stances. The atoms of water were smooth and round so that water flowed and had no permanent shape. The atoms of fire were thorny, which was what made bums so painful. The atoms of earth were rough and jagged, so that they held together to form a hard and stable substance. Apparent changes in the nature of substances consisted merely in the separation of joined atoms and their rejoining in a new pattern. These views were reminiscent of the apeiroti of Anaximander [4]. The motions and behavior of the atoms, according to Democritus, are im posed upon them by definite and un breakable laws of nature and are not the result of the whims of gods or demons. Democritus was thus one of the earliest of the thoroughgoing mechanists, believ ing that the workings of the universe were as mindless and determinate as those of a machine. To Democritus, even the creation of the universe was the blind result of swirling motions set up in great numbers of atoms. These motions ended in the clumping together of atoms, forming worlds. In all this, there is a recognizable simi larity to modern theories of the structure of matter and of cosmogony, but there is also a key difference. The conclusions of Democritus were bom of introspection and intuition. Modem theories which seem similar are based on quantitative experiment and on orderly mathematical reasoning. Democritus’ views, being merely intuitive, could be opposed by other views, equally intuitive, and the choice would then be a matter of per sonal predilection. The ancient philoso phers, by and large, chose to follow Socrates and his disciples rather than Democritus and his. That atomism did not die out com pletely was to the credit of Epicurus [35] who, over a century later, made use of atomism in his own popular teachings. [21] SOCRATES (sok'ruh-teez) Greek philosopher
ab o u t 470 b
c .
b .
. All that is known of Socrates is through the words of others, for he left no writings of his own. The man pic tured in those reports was a sort of pagan saint. In personal appearance he was ugly: short and stout with a broad face, prominent eyes, a wide pug nose. He won over nearly everyone, however, with his good humor, his wit, and the fascination of his conversation. He was fearless in battle and in poli tics. Neither an armed foe nor the Athe nian government could compel him to act against his judgment. He was inter ested only in his quest for knowledge, living a life of poverty in utter content, and scorning luxury, though he could be a bon vivant when it suited him. He is even renowned for his bad-tempered 12 [ 21 ]
HIPPOCRATES [
] wife, Xanthippe, who has become pro verbial as a shrew and whom he bore with patience (although, considering what a poor provider Socrates was, she had some reason for complaint). She had three children by Socrates, none of whom amounted to anything. Socrates in his discussions pretended a disarming ignorance (Socratic irony) and then by shrewd questioning forced his listeners, disciples, and opponents to admit their own ignorance and the wrongness of their casually accepted in tuitions. He was the gadfly of Athens, and no less an institution whom the oracle at Delphi proclaimed to be the wisest of the Greeks (to which Socrates replied that if he were the wisest it was only because he alone knew that he knew nothing). His methods also made him enemies, for no one actually likes to be proved wrong and least of all out of one’s own mouth. Although Socrates was trained in the rational science of Asia Minor (he may have been a pupil of Anaxagoras [14] or of one of Anaxagoras’ disciples) he questioned the importance of knowledge concerning the universe. He was far more interested in questions of ethics, in the right code of behavior. He wished to understand the workings of virtue rather than of the heavenly bodies. This had a profound effect on the his tory of science. It is rather surprising that the Greeks failed in science after having made such an excellent start with Thales [3], having available the as tonishing guesses of Democritus [20], the shrewd views of Eratosthenes [48] and Aristarchus [41] and the inventiveness of Archimedes [47], There are indeed many factors involved in the failure, but one, at least, lay in the views of Socra tes. The larger part of Greek intellect was, through admiration of him and of his chief disciple Plato [24], channeled into the field of moral philosophy, while natural philosophy (what we now call science) was allowed to wither. In the end Socrates was too sharp a gadfly to be left to himself. He was brought to trial in 399 u.c. on charges of atheism and treason—and, it seems, cor ruption of the young. Both charges were, in a sense, justified. He certainly did not believe in the Greek gods according to the ancient fashion (few of the Greek intellectuals of the time did). As for treason, he never approved of the Athe nian democracy and several of his favor ite pupils, notably Alcibiades and Critias, proved to be active traitors. Others, such as Xenophon and Plato, were an tidemocratic and pro-Spartan. Even so, Socrates would have been ac quitted if he had made the least attempt to defend himself rationally. He deliber ately goaded on the jury of five hundred men until they voted the death sentence in spite of themselves, and then only by a small majority of 280 to 220. Socrates spent a month between sen tence and execution, refusing to escape although escape could easily have been arranged. With utter calmness, dying as courageously as he had lived, he drank the poison hemlock. He was seventy years old and had lived what was in his own eyes a good life. [22] HIPPOCRATES (hih-pok'ruh-teez) Greek physician
460
b . c . Died: Larissa (now Larisa), Thes saly, about 370 b .
. Virtually nothing concrete is known about Hippocrates. He was, it was said, bom of a family who were members of a hereditary guild of magicians on the is land of Cos and who were reputedly de scended from Asklepios, the Greek god of medicine. According to tradition, he visited Egypt early in life, and there stud ied medical works attributed to Imhotep [1], Some traditions make him a student of Democritus [20]. Hippocrates is supposed to have taught at various places, including Athens, but eventually he founded a school of medicine on Cos that was the most rational the ancient world had to offer. It is because of his founding of this school, and not because he was the “first” physician, that he is properly 13 [2 2 ] HIPPOCRATES PLATO [24] known today as the father of medicine. As a matter of fact, he was not the first physician, for there were able individual students of the human body before his time, as, for instance, Alcmaeon [11], More than fifty books (called the Hip pocratic collection) have been attributed to him, but it is more than doubtful that these are really his. They are rather the collected works of several generations of his school, brought together at Alex andria in the third century B.C.,
and at tributed to him that they might be the more impressive. But the writings are certainly in his tradition, and in the best of them there is a high order of ra tionalism, careful observation, and hon orable standards of conduct. Among the rule-of-thumb comments in the Hip pocratic collection are a number that have become famous adages. Included are “desperate diseases require desperate remedies,” for instance, and “one man’s meat is another man’s poison.” The Hippocratic school believed in moderation of diet, in the efficacy of cleanliness and rest for a sick or wounded man (and cleanliness for the physician too). They thought that the physician should interfere as little as pos sible with the healing processes of nature (and in view of how little was then known about the human body and its disorders, this was excellent advice). Disease was looked upon as a purely physical phenomenon, something not to be ascribed to the arrows of Apollo or to possession by demons. Epilepsy, for in stance, was considered by the men of the times to be a “sacred disease” because the patient in a fit seemed to be in the grip of a god or demon. The Hippocratic school ascribed even epilepsy to natural causes and considered it curable by phys ical remedies, not exorcism. In general, the Hippocratic school believed disease to result from an imbalance of the vital fluids (“humors”) of the body, a notion first advanced by Empedocles [17]. These were eventually listed as four in number: blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile. As for Hippocratic ethics, this is reflected in the oath (ascribed to Hip pocrates) that is still taken by medical students upon completing their course of training. A statue discovered on Cos in 1933 is thought to be a representation of Hip pocrates. [23] METON (mee'ton) Greek astronomer
about
440 b . c .
Meton’s great achievement was his dis covery in 432 b .
. that 235 lunar months made up just about 19 years. This meant that if one arranged to have 12 years of 12 lunar months and 7 years of 13 lunar months, every 19 years, the lunar calen dar could be made to match the seasons. This is the Metonic cycle, named in the astronomer’s honor, although the cycle was undoubtedly known to the Babylon ian astronomers long before Meton’s time.
The Greek calendar was based on the Metonic cycle, since it had an arrange ment of lunar years that repeated itself every 19 years. This remained the calen dar of the ancient world until 46 b . c .,
when the Julian calendar was established by Julius Caesar with the help of Sosig enes [54], The Jews have retained the Greek calendar and so the Metonic cycle is in use even today for religious pur poses. In fact, there are traces in Chris tianity as well, for the date of Easter is calculated through the use of the Me tonic cycle. [24] PLATO Greek philosopher
B.C.
Died: Athens, about 347 B.c.
The original name of this Athenian aristocrat was Aristocles, but in his school days he received the nickname Platon (meaning “broad”) because of his broad shoulders. (He is not the only great man to be known universally by a nickname. The Roman orator Cicero is another. ) 14 [24] PLATO PLATO [24] In early life Plato saw war service and had political ambitions. However, he was never really sympathetic to the Athenian democracy and he could not join whole heartedly in its government. He was a devoted follower of Socrates [21] whose disciple he became in 409 B.C., and the execution of that philosopher by the dem ocrats in 399 b .
. w as a crushing blow. He left Athens, believing that until “kings were philosophers or philosophers were kings” things would never go well with the world. (He traced his descent from the early kings of Athens and per haps he had himself in mind.) For several years he visited the Greek cities of Africa and Italy, absorbing Pythagorean notions, and then in 387 b . c . he returned to Athens. (En route, he is supposed to have been captured by pirates and held for ransom.) There, for the second half of his long life, he de voted himself to philosophy. In the west ern suburbs he founded a school that might be termed the first university. Be cause it was on the grounds that had once belonged to a legendary Greek called Academus, it came to be called the Academy, and this term has been used for schools ever since. Plato remained at the Academy for the rest of his life, except for two brief periods in the 360s. At that time he visited Syracuse, the chief city of Greek Sicily, to serve as tutor for the new king, Dionysius II. Here was his chance to make a king a philosopher. It turned out very badly. The king insisted on behav ing like a king and of course made the Athenian democrats look good by com parison. Plato managed only with dif ficulty to return safely to Athens. His end was peaceful and happy, for he is supposed to have died in his sleep at the age of eighty after having attended the wedding feast of one of his students. Plato’s works, perhaps the most consis tently popular and influential philosophic writings ever published, consist of a series of dialogues in which the discus sions between Socrates and others are presented with infinite charm. Most of our knowledge of Socrates is from these dialogues, and which views are Socrates’ and which are Plato’s is anybody’s guess. (Plato cautiously never introduced him self into any of the dialogues.) Like Socrates, Plato was chiefly inter ested in moral philosophy and despised natural philosophy (that is, science) as an inferior and unworthy sort of knowl edge. There is a famous story (probably apocryphal and told also of Euclid [40]) of a student asking Plato the application of the knowledge he was being taught. Plato at once ordered a slave to give the student a small coin that he might not think he had gained knowledge for noth ing, then had him dismissed from school. To Plato, knowledge had no practical use; it existed for the abstract good of the soul. Plato was fond of mathematics be cause of its idealized abstractions and its separation from the merely material. Nowadays, of course, the purest mathe matics manages to be applied, sooner or later, to practical matters of science. In Plato’s day this was not so, and the mathematician could well consider him self as dealing only with the loftiest form of pure thought and as having nothing to do with the gross and imperfect every day world. And so above the doorway to the Academy was written, “Let no one ignorant of mathematics enter here.” Plato did, however, believe that math ematics in its ideal form could still be applied to the heavens. The heavenly bodies, he believed, exhibited perfect geometric form. This he expresses most clearly in a dialogue called Timaeus in which he presents his scheme of the uni verse. He describes the five (and only five) possible regular solids—that is, those with equivalent faces and with all lines and angles, formed by those faces, equal. These are the four-sided tetrahe dron, the six-sided hexahedron (or cube), the eight-sided octahedron, the twelve-sided dodecahedron, and the twenty-sided icosahedron. Four of the five regular solids, according to Plato, represented the four elements, while the dodecahedron represented the universe as a whole. (These solids were first dis covered by the Pythagoreans, but the fame of this dialogue has led to their
[24] PLATO ARCHYTAS [25] being called the Platonic solids ever since.) Plato decided also that since the heavens were perfect, the various heav enly bodies would have to move in exact circles (the perfect curve) along with the crystalline spheres (the perfect solid) that held them in place. The spheres were another Pythagorean notion, and the Pythagorean preoccupation with sound also shows itself in Philolaus’ [19] belief that the spheres of the various planets made celestial music as they turned—a belief that persisted even in the time of Kepler [169] two thousand years later. We still use the phrase “the music of the spheres” to epitomize heav enly sounds or the stark beauty of outer space.
This insistence that the heavens must reflect the perfection of abstract mathe matics in its simplest form held absolute sway over astronomical thought until Kepler’s time, even though compromises with reality had to be made constantly, beginning shortly after Plato’s death with Eudoxus [27] and Callippus [32]. In the dialogue Timaeus, by the way, Plato invented a moralistic tale about a thoroughly fictitious land he called Atlantis. If there is a Valhalla for philos ophers, Plato must be sitting there in endless chagrin, thinking of how many foolish thousands, in all the centuries since his time, down to the very present day—thousands who have never read his dialogue or absorbed a sentence of his serious teachings—nevertheless believed with all their hearts in the reality of Atlantis. (To be sure, recent evidence of an Aegean island that exploded vol canically in 1400 b . c . may have given rise to legends that inspired Plato’s fiction.) Plato’s influence extended long past his own life and, indeed, never died. The Academy remained a going institution until
a . d . 529, when the Eastern Roman Emperor, Justinian, ordered it closed. It was the last stronghold of paganism in a Christian world. Plato’s philosophy, even after that date, maintained a strong influence on the thinking of the Christian Church throughout the early Middle Ages. It was not until the thirteenth century that the views of Aristotle [29] gained domi nance.
[25] ARCHYTAS (ahr-ky'tus) Greek mathematician Born: Tarentum (now Taranto), Italy, about 420 b .
. Died: about 350 b . c . Archytas was a Pythagorean who lived in Tarentum when it was the last re maining center of Pythagoreanism. He labored, as a number of Greek scholars did in the fourth century b .
. to per
suade the Greek cities to unite against the increasing strength of the non-Greek world. As was true of all the others, Archytas failed, and the Greeks persisted in suicidal strife among themselves to the last possible moment. Archytas was interested in one of the three great problems of the Greek math ematical world; the duplication of the cube. Given a cube, in other words, the problem was to construct another cube with just twice the volume of the first, making use of a compass and straight edge only. Under those conditions, the solution is impossible (as was discovered in later times) but in making the effort, Archytas evolved theorems concerning means; that is, lines or values midway between two extremes. He solved the problem by means of an ingenious three dimensional construction, making use of somewhat more liberal devices than the strictest interpretations of the rules of the game would allow. He was the first Greek mathematician who tried to apply his pure art to me chanics, when he worked out a theory of sound and pitch based on his means. He invented the notion of harmonic progres sion (1, %, Vi, Vi . . .) as opposed to arithmetic progression (1, 2, 3, 4 . . .) and geometric progression (1, 2, 4, 8 . . .) and maintained that the pitch of sound depended on the speed of vibra tion of air. He was right, but he did not quite have the concept of wave motion. He believed that sounds of high pitch traveled faster through the air, bodily, Download 17.33 Mb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: 
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