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

Ad Nic. 29, Euag. 81, Ad Dem. 12), education (Antid.
185, 267), maturity (
Ep. 4.10), and success in business affairs (Areop. 5); on the
social level they are wealth (
Nic. 32, 63, De pace 64, Paneg. 103), prosperity
(
De pace 20, Paneg. 37), the rise and strengthening of the state (Euag. 48,
Areop. 69, Archid. 104, De pace 140), etc. In this connection, the thesis that the
classical epoch understood progress mainly as the development of knowledge
146
On this, see Meier. Antikes Äquivalent, 291f., 297f.
147
Koselleck. Fortschritt, 376.
148
A limited notion of progress, with the future playing a negligible role in it, was typi-
cal e.g. of the Scottish thinkers of the 18
th
century (Spadafora,
op. cit., 301f.).
149
See e.g. on the author of
VM: “Es ist echt griechisch, dass sich ihm das Erkenntnis-
objekt nicht ins Unendliche verschiebt.” (Herter. Theorie, 172).
150
Meier. Antikes Äquivalent, 303ff.
151
So den Boer. Progress, 9f.

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Chapter 2: Science as técnh: theory and history
80
and skills needs a certain correction. To be sure, the frequent use of ëpídosi~
and other notions akin to it does not prove that Isocrates took a ‘progressivist’
view of things; limited to the past and the present,
152
his ‘progress’ is of a local,
rather than a universal and regular character. Even when he tries to formulate a
regularity, this comes down to the popular idea of the Wheel of Fortune (
Areop.
5, cf.
Archid. 103f.). It is not for the originality of his ideas, however, that Iso-
crates remains interesting for us, but for the wide acclaim they enjoyed among
his contemporaries. They testify that in the first part of the fourth century the
awareness of positive changes in private and social life was strong enough to
grow into a concept, dim as it may yet have remained. Considered apart from
this social background, philosophers’ discussions of the progress of scientific
and philosophical knowledge would look more isolated than they actually
were.
* * *
Numerous and obvious similarities between the Hippocratics’, Archytas’, and
Isocrates’ conceptions of what knowledge is, how it comes into being, is devel-
oped, and communicated, a certain kinship between their views on the cogni-
tive abilities of man, as well as the variety in their assessment of the degree of
certainty and utility of different kinds of knowledge – all this taken together
demonstrates that the philosophy and history of science, which originated in
the Academy and the Lyceum, respectively, stemmed from a lasting tradition.
Let us now sum up its principal stages and characteristics. In the last third of the
fifth century, frequent but isolated mentions of
pro¯toi heuretai are superseded
by more systematic attempts to consider culture from the historical point of
view – namely, as the
history of discoveries and inventions in the field of téc-
nai and, later, as the history of técnai themselves. The genre of heurema-
tography, then in process of formation, was but one of the branches of this tradi-
tion, oriented, at that, more toward systematic accounts of técnai than toward
the history of inventions. More important for the formation of the historical ap-
proach to culture are works by Glaucus, Hellanicus, and Hippias, where inter-
est in the development of técnai is combined with attempts to show this pro-
cess in chronological order. The methods of analysis of cultural phenomena
worked out in these works were later taken up by Peripatetic historiography,
which applied them to new branches of knowledge.
The assessment of man’s cognitive abilities, which is optimistic on the
whole, now starts to be differentiated according to the subject of knowledge
(mathematics, medicine, social sphere) and the degree of exactness attainable
in the particular field under discussion. Epistemological optimism leads to the
belief that in some fields knowledge can soon be brought to perfection. The
152
With reference to the future (the near future as a rule) only conditional clauses are
used: