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

Filodemo, 127.5; see below, 87), figuring in the Second Analytics as ac-
complished scientific disciplines. Aristotle sometimes referred mechanics to the
técnai (Mech. 847a 18f.) and sometimes to the ëpist4mai (APo 78b 37); in Archy-
tas, maq2mata are still a part of técnai (see below, 61f.).
12
See above, 34f.
13
According to Democritus, people learned weaving from spiders, house building
from swallows, and singing from songbirds (68 B 154). Aristotle wrote that the best

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Chapter 2: Science as técnh: theory and history
48
teaching ensured the handing on of knowledge (máqhsi~) from teachers to
their disciples. This model allowed a move from sundry mentions of the
pro¯toi
heuretai to the systematic analysis of the origin and development of arts and
sciences, both being conceived as a history of discoveries. Later, when técnh
and ëpist2mh gradually separate and ëpist2mh turns from ‘knowledge’ func-
tioning as the cognitive aspect of técnh into independent theoretical ‘sci-
ence’,
14
some of the characteristics peculiar to técnh are transferred to ëpist2-
mh. Aristotle, for example, considered it characteristic of ëpist2mh that it can
be transferred by teaching (
EN 1139b 25, cf. Met. 981b 7–10). Another import-
ant feature of ëpist2mh, its usefulness (cr2simon, åfélimon), figured as a
standard rubric not only in manuals of rhetoric, medicine, and tactics,
15
but also
in the ‘introductions’ to exact sciences, in mathematical and astronomical treat-
ises, in commentaries on them, etc.
16
The development of historical views on técnh follows two main courses.
The interest in how the técnai, emerging in succession have fashioned modern
civilization gives birth to a teaching on the origin of culture (
Kulturentstehungs-
lehre). This teaching, dealing as a rule with the remote past, i.e., with the pre-
literate and hence prehistoric period, is not to be identified with the history of
culture (
Kulturgeschichte), the latter starting with the first dated events and
(quasi-)historic personages. To be sure, the chronology of the ‘heroic’ epoch
was quite artificial and its heroes belonged to the realm of legend, but since the
Greeks themselves had always considered the events of the Trojan War to be
their early history, this period can be regarded as a conventional chronological
boundary between
Kulturentstehungslehre and Kulturgeschichte. Democritus’
theory of the origins of culture, for example, ended with the epoch preceding
the Trojan War. The invention of writing marks the boundary between history
and prehistory, so that the further development of music and other técnai be-
tools, such as the compass and the ruler, were discovered by observing nature and
imitating it (
Protr. fr. 47–48 Düring). In the treatise On Diet (11–24), this theory is
brought to the point of absurdity: each técnh appeared in imitation of human nature
(Joly, R.
Recherches sur le traité pseudo-hippocratique Du régime, Paris 1960,
52f.).
14
In Plato the two notions are still, as a rule, synonymous (see below, 125).
15
See Heinimann,
op. cit., 117 n. 58.
16
Archimedes’ book
On Measuring the Circle, as his biographer Heraclides claims, is
“indispensable for the necessities of life” (
FGrHist 1108 F 1); see below, 294. For a
vivid defense of the utility of
mathe¯mata, see e.g. Iambl. De comm. math. sc., 79.1ff.
Utility was often understood not in a practical sense, as e.g. the usefulness of mech-
anics (Papp.
Coll. VIII, 1022.1ff.), but in a merely formal one: such a text is useful
for understanding the theory of conic sections. Ptolemy considered mathematics to
be useful for studying theology and physics (