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

. Infinity and continuity:
The interaction of mathematics and philosophy in Antiquity,
Infinity and continuity
in ancient and medieval thought, ed. by N. Kretzmann, Ithaca 1982, 112).

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Introduction: Greek science and its historiography
20
became a science. Nevertheless, in some fields of physics the Greeks succeeded
in isolating the particular problems that they were equipped to solve and raised
their research to the scientific level. As a rule, these were fields in which ex-
perimentation proved comparatively simple and its results could be expressed
in mathematical form: acoustics, optics, mechanics, statics, and hydrostatics.
58
Interestingly, the Greeks themselves related these fields not to physics (≈ phil-
osophy), but to
mathe¯mata (≈ science). In spite of the great number of dis-
coveries and the wealth of accumulated material, other branches of natural
science were not able to cross the boundary between pre-science and science
until the modern epoch.
These remarks are not meant to deny the obvious fact that the ancient divi-
sion of the cognitive and – in a larger sense – the cultural space is often remark-
ably different from that accepted at present. In the classical period that particu-
larly concerns us now, culture was usually understood as the sum total of
pãsai técnai, while the word técnh itself could equally refer to mathematics
and poetry, medicine and pottery. The term ëpist2mh meant ‘firm knowledge’
and was, hence, the closest to the notion of science in the modern sense. It was
far, however, from embracing all kinds of scientific knowledge: according to
Plato, it did not include Presocratic fusiología and metewrología. The term
ëpist2mh, on the other hand, could denote not only astronomy, but also rhet-
oric and even ironwork. According to Aristotle, theoretical sciences included
theology (first philosophy), physics, and mathematics, and each of them could
be indiscriminately referred to as ëpist2mh or filosofía. Mathe¯mata, which
numbered originally among técnai, in the fourth century came to include
mechanics and optics (which passed in the modern period into the domain of
physics) and were normally referred to as ëpist4mai. At the same time, the
four
mathe¯mata entered the educational canon (ëgkúklio~ paideía, artes lib-
erales), formed by the time of Hellenism, the other three parts of which – rhe-
toric, grammar, and dialectic – were usually related to as técnai.
59
There is no need to multiply these examples. It is obvious enough that the
problem cannot be reduced to a trivial terminological discrepancy, for instance,
that in the early period astronomy bore the name of @strología, while the as-
trologers of late Antiquity were called maqhmatikoí. What we face here is a
different configuration of forms and results of creative and, in particular, cog-
nitive activity deeply rooted in linguistic, cultural, and philosophical tradition.
Having assimilated and modified this tradition, the Academics and later the
Peripatetics failed to eliminate most of the contradictions inherent in it. As a re-
sult, they often indiscriminately applied the same notion to different fields and
denoted the same field by different notions, and the fields themselves tended to
58
Lloyd, G. E. R.
Early Greek science: Thales to Aristotle, London 1970, 30f., 139f.
59
Fuchs, H. Enkyklios paideia,
RLAC 5 (1962) 365–398; Hadot, I. Arts libéraux et
philosophie dans la pensée antique, Paris 1984. Hadot’s dating of this canon in the
Imperial age seems too late to me.

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3. Greek notions of science and progress
21
overlap. But here, as in the case of the syncretism of philosophy and science,
we should not exaggerate the importance of differences between ancient and
modern terminology and the classification of sciences, reducing the history of
ideas to a superficially understood history of terms. The fact that in the epoch of
Plato and Aristotle and much later, geometry and ironwork were both denoted
by the word técnh, does not at all mean that the Greeks had difficulties distin-
guishing between them. When necessary, language always finds means to dis-
tinguish between things called by the same words: thus, ironwork was related
to bánausoi técnai and geometry to logikaì técnai.
Comparing the ancient classification of arts and sciences (ëpist2mh –
técnh, scientia – ars) with the modern one, we should bear in mind that the
latter took its final shape only during the 19
th
century, after more than three cen-
turies of rapid scientific progress. Earlier it was the ancient, basically Aristote-
lian, canon that everywhere remained in use. It is to this canon that we owe
much of the confusion, both in ancient and modern languages, about what be-
longs to the ‘sciences’ and what to the ‘arts’. Reflections on the general cat-
egory under which sciences ought to be considered, as well as on distinctions
between sciences, arts, and philosophy, fell considerably behind the progress of
science itself and even tended to slow it down.
Zabarella, a Paduan philosopher of the 16
th
century, like most of his contem-
poraries, based his classification on Aristotle: heading the list of sciences are
metaphysics, natural philosophy, and mathematics. Looking closer, however, at
what at that time was regarded as related to