Leonid Zhmud The Origin of the History of Science in Classical Antiquity

The idea of progress in classical Antiquity, Baltimore 1967.
47
The notions of progress that reappeared in the 16
th
–17
th
centuries were chiefly based
on the same two components (Edelstein,
op. cit., XIX n. 24; Koselleck, R. Fort-
schritt,
Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, ed. by O. Brunner et al., Vol.2, Stuttgart 1975,
392).
48
Thraede, K. Fortschritt,
RLAC 7 (1965) 162; Meier, C. ‘Fortschritt’ in der Antike,
Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, 354.
49
The 20
th
century is characterized by a notable decline of the progressivist ideology:
Nisbet, R.
History of the idea of progress, New York 1980, 317ff.
50
Bodin, J.
Method for the easy comprehension of history, New York 1945, 296ff.
51
Meier, C. Ein antikes Äquivalent des Fortschrittsgedankens: das “Könnens-Be-
wusstsein” des 5. Jh.s v. Chr.,
HZ 226 (1978) 265–316.
52
See Edelstein,
op. cit., XX n. 27; Boer, W. den. Progress in the Greece of Thucy-
dides,
MKNAdW 40.2 (1977).

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Introduction: Greek science and its historiography
18
of progress was most often denoted by the word ëpídosi~; emerging later was
the notion prokop2, whose Latin analogue, progressus, has entered all mod-
ern European languages.
53
The idea of the progressive growth of knowledge (as well as many others)
can well be expressed without being labeled with a specific term.
54
The lack in
Greek of a special term for science as a whole, as distinguished from its indi-
vidual branches, is hardly crucial, either. Considering this fact, some scholars
still argue that, in Antiquity, science in the modern sense of the word did not
exist; others, that, in the early period at least, it was not distinguished from phil-
osophy, both having been denoted by the same term, ëpist2mh. Even after their
separation, which is believed to have taken place at the end of the classical peri-
od or even later, philosophy continued to exert on science, including mathemat-
ics, a much greater influence than it has in modern times, and (according to this
view) the differences between them went unnoticed by the Greeks.
An ancient language’s possession of a term denoting a field of creative ac-
tivity as precisely as a modern term is hardly indispensable for the flourishing
of this field. The Greeks did not have such terms for, say, art and literature. The
absence of minimally elaborated terminology could, indeed, constitute a seri-
ous obstacle for the
analysis of science, for its methodology and histori-
ography. Yet the corresponding Greek terms for the well-ordered areas of
knowledge appeared by the early fourth century at the latest;
55
some of them are
of much earlier date. In the second half of the fifth century, the educational cur-
riculum in mathematics starts to include arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and
harmonics, which were termed maq2mata, branches of learning or areas of
knowledge. In the late fifth to early fourth centuries this term came to mean
mathematics as such. That ëpist2mh could denote both mathe¯mata and philos-
ophy did not in the least identify the latter with mathematics.
The idea of the original syncretism of philosophy and science stems partly
from terminological confusion: physics, pursued, according to Aristotle, by the
Presocratics, is indiscriminately termed both
natural philosophy and natural
science(s). But this confusion apart, such syncretism seems to me hardly plaus-
ible because of the fundamental epistemological heterogeneity between philos-
ophy and science, which in the final analysis can be reduced to the following.
56
53
Edelstein,