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

artes and what to scientiae, we find,
rather than a clearly defined hierarchy, a field of overlapping meanings.
60
Scien-
tia, in the largest sense of the word, comprised every kind of knowledge, in-
cluding all practical fields, for example, medicine, which more properly should
be considered an
ars (though many physicians objected to this). Ars, on the
other hand, could denote both the trades and theoretical philosophy. The analy-
sis of more than a hundred university textbooks shows that this situation lasted
throughout the 16
th
–17
th
centuries.
61
As a rule, theoretical philosophy was sub-
divided into metaphysics, physics, and mathematics, so that the sciences of the
quadrivium, regarded as
scientiae, were part of philosophy and artes liberales
at the same time
.
At the end of the 17
th
century, Newton revealed the fundamental laws of the
new physics in his
Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica. It took one
and a half centuries for the
philosophia naturalis to transform itself into the
science of the 19
th
century. Throughout the whole of the 18
th
century, no one in
England or in Europe managed to understand clearly to which of the two
60
Mikkeli, H. The foundation of an autonomous natural philosophy: Zabarella on the
classification of arts and sciences,
Method and order in Renaissance philosophy of
nature, ed. by D. A. Di Lischia, Aldershot 1997, 211–228.
61
Freedman, J. S. Classifications of philosophy, the sciences and the arts in sixteenth-
and seventeenth-century Europe,
The Modern Schoolman 72 (1994) 37–65.

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Introduction: Greek science and its historiography
22
groups –
arts or sciences – each particular discipline belonged.
62
In his article
‘Art’ for the
Encyclopaedia, Diderot still followed the Aristotelian division be-
tween ‘active’ art and ‘contemplative’ science, thus leaving out of consider-
ation the growing number of applied sciences that did not fit into either cat-
egory. Some contemporary dictionaries noted that the notions of ‘art’ and
‘science’ were often used indiscriminately, the same discipline figuring among
liberal arts as well as among liberal sciences; others identified science with
“any art or kind of knowledge”.
The German word
Wissenschaft also acquired its modern meaning on the
threshold of the 19
th
century, while some of its earlier meanings remained very
close to técnh.
63
Thus,
Kunst and Wissenschaft were, as a rule, used as syn-
onyms; to specify the particular field in question, one needed to have recourse
to adjectives:
schöne, nützliche, ernste Wissenschaften. Schöne Wissenschaften
denoted letters, while
schöne Künste meant fine arts. It is only by the end of the
18
th
century that
Wissenschaft (in the singular) began to embrace the sum total
of sciences; at the same time it separated from philosophy, with which it was in-
itially identified.
It is obvious that discrepancies and contradictions between the actual con-
figuration of sciences at a given epoch and the way it is comprehended by con-
temporaries is no less characteristic of the modern period than it was of classi-
cal Antiquity.
64
In the course of our study, we will try to record these contradic-
tions and trace the fate of certain ancient classifications of sciences. Let us note
finally that interest in the classification of various fields of knowledge was
growing at the close of the Hellenistic period, when the development of Greek
science slowed down and eventually came to a standstill. Commentators
eagerly studied classifications of sciences and their philosophical foundations
in late Antiquity. Inherited by medieval encyclopaedias,
65
these classifications
remained among the few vestiges of ancient science, which had by that time
long ceased to exist.
62
Spadafora, D.