Leonid Zhmud The Origin of the History of Science in Classical Antiquity
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The Origin of the History of Science in
Kleine Schriften zur Geschichte
der Mathematik, Vol. 2, Stuttgart 1988, 556–562; Schneider, I. Hintergrund und Formen der Mathematikgeschichte des 18. Jahrhunderts, AIHS 42 (1992) 64–75; Laudan, R. Histories of the sciences and their uses: A review to 1913, HS 31 (1993) 1–33; Vitrac, B. Mythes (et realités) dans l’histoire des mathématiques grecques an- Introduction: Greek science and its historiography 2 Arabic historiography of science, the field remains almost untouched. The Re- naissance historiography of science has only recently come to be studied. As a matter of fact, there is nothing surprising about this. The object of the history of science is, in the first place, science itself. Historiography, whether rightfully or not, has always remained in the background. For a historian of science, the works of Euclid, Ptolemy, or Newton are of greater importance than the historico-scientific literature contemporary to them. To be sure, some- times this literature may prove to be a valuable source, for example, when the original scientific writings have been lost. The first histories of science were written by the Peripatetic Eudemus of Rhodes even before Euclid’s Elements summed up the first three centuries of Greek mathematics. Whereas from Eu- clid we learn what was discovered during this period, it is Eudemus who tells us who made these discoveries and when, also adding some material not included in the Elements. Similarly, the history of early Greek astronomy is known mainly from Eudemus and from the doxographical work of Theophrastus, his colleague in the Lyceum. This is what actually accounts for the pragmatic in- terest shown by historians of Greek science in the surviving fragments of Eude- mus and other Peripatetics. Yet outside Antiquity and after the invention of printing in particular, the purely pragmatic approach to the historiography of science is hardly justified. Those who study the science of the 16 th –18 th cen- turies turn, as a rule, to primary sources, not to the historico-scientific literature of the epoch, which was mostly antiquarian in character and did not aim to cover the latest discoveries. As a result, the interest in this literature as a source is still smaller than that enjoyed by the historico-scientific tradition of An- tiquity. Our subject is the ancient historiography of science. ‘Pre-modern’ histori- ography of science interests us only insofar as it reveals a marked continuity with the ancient tradition, both on the formal and the thematic level. If the his- tory of science revived in Europe as the history of Greek science, it was because the science of the 15 th –17 th centuries was itself oriented toward assimilating the classical heritage. In this period, the interests of scientists and historians of ciennes, L’Europe mathématique: histoires, mythes, identités, ed. by C. Goldstein et al., Paris 1996, 31–51. 2 Smith, W. D. Notes on ancient medical historiography, BHM 63 (1989) 73–109; Staden, H. von. Galen as historian, Galeno: Obra, pensamiento e influencia, ed. by J. A. López Férez, Madrid 1991, 205–222; Pigeaud, J. La médicine et ses origins, Canadian Bulletin of Medical History 9 (1992) 219–240. The collection Ancient his- tories of medicine. Essays in medical doxography and historiography in classical Antiquity, ed. by Ph. J. van der Eijk, Leiden 1999, constitutes the first attempt at sys- tematic approach to this subject. For the earlier literature, see Heischkel, E. Die Medizinhistoriographie im XVIII Jh., Download 1.41 Mb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
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