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

pro¯toi heuretai and the emergence of philosophical theories
on the origin of culture. Less than a century separates Xenophanes, who first
openly questioned the divine origin of discoveries, from the
VM that presents
original and profound insights into the history and methodology of science. The
changes in the search for first discoverers are as obvious as they are drastic. But
are we justified to consider all of them changes in
one and the same phenom-
enon, i.e., in heurematography? Such an approach seems to me legitimate only
to the degree that the question of ‘who discovered what?’, formulated in early
heurematography, remains valid both for the author of
VM and for those who
created the history of science in the fourth century. Still, we should keep in mind
that the evidence of
Phoronis on the Idaean Dactyls lies on the same plane as the
material of both the earliest and the latest Greek catalogues of discoveries.
89
The
character of the questions raised and the answers offered within heurema-
tography practically did not change through the centuries of its existence.
Meanwhile, in the history and theory of culture and, later, in the Peripatetic his-
tory of science, each of the initial question’s elements – the ‘who’, the ‘what’
and the ‘discovered’ – becomes part of new conceptual fields, serves to express
new ideas, and, accordingly, takes on different meanings. Each of these el-
ements could, depending on the context, become prominent or sink into the
background. The personality of
pro¯tos heurete¯s was of far greater importance
for the history of poetry than for theory on the origin of culture, preoccupied as
the latter was with the driving forces of civilization. The history of science dis-
carded some of the variants of the answer to ‘who?’ and added a new question –
‘how?’ – to the traditional ‘what?’ Thus, in a wider perspective, the history of
science proves to be not the direct descendant of the tradition on first discover-
ers, but rather the offspring of several trends of Greek thought working together.
89
On Roman and Christian catalogues of discoveries, see Thraede. Erfinder, 1232f.,
1247f.

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Chapter 2
Science as técnh: theory and history
1. The invention of técnh
In the second half of the fifth century, most activities involving skills based on
knowledge and experience were subsumed under the notion of técnh. Initially
a term used in handicraft, this notion was thoroughly practical. The purpose of
técnh was to help people, either by improving their life (agriculture, medicine,
house building) or by embellishing it (music, poetry).
1
With the Sophists, too,
who appeared on the intellectual scene at this period, knowledge was, as a rule,
looked upon as purely utilitarian. Apart from rare exceptions – for example,
Hippias of Elis, who taught mathematical sciences – most Sophists taught
things presumed to be helpful in making a career. For sofistik3 técnh that as-
pired to make people wise and happy, such disciplines as geometry and astron-
omy were of no use.
2
The same common-sense attitude toward theoretical
mathematics was characteristic both of Socrates, who did not much differ in
this respect from the majority of the Sophists,
3
and of Isocrates, their rightful
successor.
4
Similar, though more differentiated, was the Sophists’ attitude to
natural philosophy. For those who conceived of their occupation as técnh, the
metewrología of the Presocratics was synonymous with fruitless discussions
on idle subjects (@dolescía) that do not result in any kind of firm knowledge.
5
1
The division of arts into ‘useful’ and ‘pleasurable’ is first found in Democritus (68 B
144).
2
Protagoras criticized the proposition that a tangent touches a circle at one point (80 B
7). Antiphon and Bryson, using sophistic rather than geometrical methods, at-
tempted unsuccessfully to solve the problem of squaring the circle (Arist.