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

On Similar Things (D. L. IV, 5), where
similarities and differences in the vegetable and the animal realms provided material
for a purely logical classification on the model of Plato’s diaeresis. See Tarán.
Speu-
sippus, 64f. and F 6–27.

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Chapter 4
The historiographical project of the Lyceum
1. Greek science in the late fourth century BC
Among the trends in Greek thought that we have already considered as sources
and/or precursors of the Peripatetic historiography of science, two main groups
of ideas can be discerned. Most ideas of the first, historical group – such as
heurematography, the early historiography of poetry and music, the theories on
the origin of culture by Presocratics, Sophists, and Hippocratic physicians, the
rudiments of doxography – date from the pre-Platonic period. To the second,
theoretical group belong the Sophistic theory of técnh and the Platonic notions
of técnh and ëpist2mh, which came to be integrated into the Aristotelian the-
ory of science. Let us now examine another factor that predetermined to a large
extent the forms in which the historiographical project of the Lyceum was real-
ized, namely, the concrete configuration of sciences that took shape in the late
fourth century and the related ideas of the scientists regarding the nature of
science (cf. 2.3).
The more rapid development of the exact sciences in comparison with the
natural ones doubtless played a decisive role in the fact that mathematics be-
came a model science for Plato and Aristotle. By that time it had grown into an
axiomatico-deductive system that guaranteed the truth of final conclusions de-
duced from indemonstrable and self-evident principles. Science, understood in
this way, determined parameters for the history of science as well. Since the
distinctive features of Greek geometry were the setting of problems in general
form and their deductive proof, Eudemus’
History of Geometry started with
Thales, the first Greek mathematician in whose work both of these qualities are
clearly apparent. Even at present, the history of science remains, indeed, the
history of those results whose significance is acknowledged by the contempor-
ary scientific community. In this sense, it depends directly on the expert knowl-
edge of scientists, in accordance with which the sorting out and the assessment
of the historical evidence normally takes place. This does not mean that the past
is rewritten each time science takes a step forward. This is impeded first and
foremost by the cumulative character of scientific development, which allows
the integration of old notions and long-acknowledged facts into new theories.
Nevertheless, any analysis of the science of the past cannot help relying on its
present condition as the specialists understand it. There is no reason to believe
that in the earliest period of the history of science the situation was substan-
tially different in this respect. To be sure, the first histories of geometry, arith-
metic, and astronomy were written by a Peripatetic philosopher, not a math-

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Chapter 4: The historiographical project of the Lyceum
118
ematician. Yet his idea of the exact sciences is almost wholly derived from the
professional milieu of his time.
1
In other words, the scientific disciplines con-
temporary to Eudemus were not a mere
subject of the history of science – in a
sense, they shaped that genre in itself. The situation was similar in physics. For
Theophrastus, the major expert in this area was Aristotle, so that Peripatetic do-
xography interpreted the theories of the Presocratics from the point of view and
in terms of Aristotelian physics.
Unfortunately, the sources of the classical period contain much more in-
formation about philosophical theories of science than about the views of
science held by mathematicians, astronomers, or natural scientists. Apart from
medical treatises, perhaps, these views were left outside the framework of
scientific writings. We should not, however, jump to conclusions and mistake
the scarcity of our sources for the lack of any general idea of science among
Greek scientists; and even less should we presume that philosophical theories
of science reflected a generally accepted attitude toward science within the
scientific community. Even the little we know about Archytas indicates that his
idea of mathematics was substantially different from that of Plato.
2
On the
contrary, neither Euclid’s