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

Elements, nor the program of ‘saving the phenom-
ena’, formulated by Eudoxus, show any traces of Aristotle’s or Plato’s definite
influence.
3
Let us take an example from a later epoch. Ptolemy, being versed in
philosophy, held an eclectic view of science (as nearly every scientist does).
From the theories familiar to him, he used to choose those more in keeping with
his own scientific views. Turning in the preface to
Almagest to the division of
theoretical knowledge into theology (metaphysics), physics, and mathematics,
a division traditional since Aristotle, Ptolemy notes:
The first two divisions of theoretical philosophy should rather be called guess-
work than knowledge: theology because of its completely invisible and ungrasp-
able nature, physics because of the unstable and unclear nature of the matter …
only mathematics can provide sure and unshakable knowledge to its devotees,
provided one approaches it rigorously. For its kind of proof proceeds by indisput-
able methods, namely arithmetic and geometry.
4
This evaluation contradicts the views of Aristotle himself, who believed theol-
ogy to be the highest and the most valuable kind of knowledge, with physics
coming second.
5
Ptolemy may have been influenced by Plato’s ideas that physi-
cal reality cannot be fully known, but he shared them only insofar as they
1
See below, 168f. Aristotle and Eudemus obviously followed the opinion of the pro-
fessionals in considering unscientific the attempts of Antiphon and Bryson to square
the circle (see below, 178 n. 50).
2
See above, 94 n. 59, 110.
3
See above, 101 n. 97, and below, 271ff.
4
Alm., 6.11–21, transl. by G. Toomer.
5
Met. 1026b 24f., 1064b 1–4. Still, mathematics is the most exact of sciences (Cael.
306a 27).

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1. Greek science in the late fourth century BC
119
agreed with his own conviction that the main science is mathematics, and not
Platonic dialectic or Aristotelian metaphysics.
The expert knowledge the Peripatetics relied on is accessible to us mostly in
its objectivised form, i.e., in the form of scientific treatises contemporary to
them. What was Greek science at the end of the fourth and the beginning of the
third century like? The earliest of the surviving works in mathematics, astron-
omy, harmonics, optics, and mechanics are not numerous: Autolycus of Pit-
ane’s
 On the Moving Sphere and On Risings and Settings, Euclid’s Elements,
Sectio canonis, and Phaenomena. Adding to them Euclid’s Optics and the Ar-
istotelian
Mechanical Problems,
6
we get an almost exhaustive list of the surviv-
ing texts that allow us to judge the achievements of the exact sciences in Greece
in the first three centuries of their development.
7
The early Greek natural
sciences are represented by a larger number of texts, yet their distribution in
time is similar to that in the domain of exact sciences. At our disposal are Ar-
istotle’s treatises on biology and physics, as well as Theophrastus’ research on
botany, mineralogy, and other natural sciences. Theophrastus is also the author
of the first doxographical compendium on the problems of natural philosophy,
Physiko¯n doxai. Finally, early Greek medicine reached us in the form of the nu-
merous treatises of the Hippocratic corpus, dated mostly to the late fifth and the
fourth centuries, and its selective doxography was compiled by Meno, a col-
league of Eudemus and Theophrastus in the Lyceum.
The bulk of the information on the first three centuries of Greek science
dates to the end of the fourth century. No wonder we know this period much
better than earlier ones. An analysis of scientific texts of this time shows that, in
the majority of cases, we are dealing with scientific disciplines that took shape
after a long period of formation. The level achieved by this time in different
fields was disproportionate, of course: whereas mathematics and mathematical
astronomy fully satisfied the major scientific criteria, the natural sciences, let
alone medicine, were still far from this standard. Still, Greek science of this
period can be regarded as formed, at least in the sense that its conceptual foun-
dations had already been laid down, its basic methods worked out, and the
priority of its problems set. In the following centuries, each of the sciences
went its own individual way, some of them branching out into completely new
directions, such as Archimedes’ statics and hydrostatics, or spherical trigonom-
etry, or Diophantus’ ‘algebra’. It is revealing, however, that not a single new
science appeared in Antiquity after the fourth century.
8
This means that the
6
See above, 97 n. 82–83.
7
Euclid also wrote two other small treatises,