To help make my own ends meet and help you understand the ancient origins of modern science better than Christians would ever let you if they had their way, each season I shall post a selection of books from my long-standing recommendations list on ancient science, and review and discuss their value.
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Last time I recommended what to start with to get your footing in ancient science, the best “introductions.” Today I sample three essential classics in the field, each of which expanding on Rihll’s and my introductions. The first two are by one of the most legendary historians of ancient science of all time, G.E.R. Lloyd: first is Early Greek Science: Thales to Aristotle (1970), and second, Greek Science After Aristotle (1974). The third is a lengthier expansion of all these books into a new direction: The Forgotten Revolution: How Science Was Born in 300 BC and Why it Had to Be Reborn (2004) by Lucio Russo.
Why these?
The first two are as brief as Rihll’s survey but split between the first decisive phases of ancient science: pre-Aristototle, and post-Aristotle. Because Aristotle essentially established what we mean by modern science, in the same way that Freud established what we mean now by psychology (and Galileo, mechanics; and Gilbert, electromagnetics; and Boyle, thermodynamics; and so on).
Aristotle systematized science, formalized it into branches, and advanced an empirical method for filling it out. This made recognizable progress in science possible, which characterized the post-Aristotelian phase. But before Aristotle science was quasi-empirical but unsystematic and half-assed, a kind of transitional mix of scientific naturalism and armchair spitballing. But that phase is crucial to understand. It is more commonly referred to as the era of “the pre-Socratics” by those who place the intellectual pivot with Socrates (Aristotle’s ideological grandfather), on a different basis: before Socrates philosophers were focused almost entirely on physics (and that mostly speculatively); Socrates pulled that focus almost entirely onto semantics and ethics instead. His most famous and influential pupil was Plato, who kept that up (diverging away from real science). But Plato’s most famous and influential pupil was Aristotle, who would (in characteristic Aristotelian fashion) balance those two missions into a golden mean: emphasizing neither, but also not downplaying the importance of either.
The pre-Aristotelian era helps you understand how Aristotle came to this historically world-changing moment. It shows the transitional phase, a blend, between mythological explanatory paradigms and scientific, and hence between a magic-and-god-centric worldview and a more skeptical, naturalistic one. It was this phase that needs to be explained, in order to explain how someone like Aristotle could come along and create the foundations of modern science as we know it. Aristotle himself is often misunderstood, because he is “understood” too commonly through the lens of bumbling Medieval Christian nutheads who never got Aristotle right, but who created in place of the real Aristotle the mythic framework of what everyone now “thinks” was Aristotelian (see my discussions in Thomism: The Bogus Science and Why A Neo-Aristotelian Naturalism Is Probably True; as well as my survey of what Aristotle actually said and did in The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire). As to what built Aristotle, I made a stab once at explaining this phase transition, though how well my hypothesis holds up I don’t know. But Lloyd’s survey of the period is one of the easiest to follow and most important to understand.
Lloyd concludes this survey of the pre-Socratic era with Aristotle. And you have to understand Aristotle to understand what came after. Which was the subject of Lloyd’s second brief survey. Most people ignore what came after—thanks to those Christian Medieval nutheads who did not even know anything came after. It was all lost or forgotten in the Dark Ages in the West, and buried in antiquarian libraries in the East—a civilization that, like the West, had lost any real interest in the subject. The Byzantines were the ones literally scraping science off the page and replacing it with hymns to God—something I’ll get to in a future recommendation article! But for the present, Lloyd will get you up to speed on the changes and developments after Aristotle and relate it back to his achievements and changes (which Lloyd covers in the first book). These two books will thus supplement what you learn from Rihll and me, by coming at it from a different and developmental perspective. And they are short, easy reads.
The third book I am recommending today takes an entirely different approach, but one that is equally important to explore. Russo is an eccentric, and he advances many theories in Forgotten Revolution that I do not think are likely to be true, but they are plausible, which is what makes them important to nevertheless understand. Once you grasp why are they plausible, and why are they nevertheless still (probably) wrong, you will understand a great deal more about ancient science than you can get from mere surveys like Rihll’s or Lloyd’s. And Russo does a good job of contextualizing his theories in actual evidence. Hence in the process of developing these theories, he teaches you a lot of things about ancient science that most people overlook or ignore.
So despite having a few fanciful false theories in it, I still consider this a must-read on ancient science. Despite its flaws, there is nothing that comes at all close to it as a comprehensive, accessible, and up-to-date survey of ancient science (other than my own book The Scientist which I wrote to fill that very gap), especially as it corrects a lot of tired old myths—and like all my recommendations so far, it is a good read. It’s a meaty book full of data and information, and most accurately covers the Hellenistic period, between Aristotle and the rise of the Roman Empire, when most of Aristotle’s mistakes were actually corrected by subsequent Aristotelians faithfully applying his own recommended methods, on questions Aristotle himself believed and expected could and should be overthrown by future research. In short, the Hellenistic Aristotelians were following Aristotle’s own advice to “fact check” and “correct” him, a concept that is itself essential to the scientific enterprise, being the opposite of the authoritarian model of never questioning The Great Man or The Scriptures, whatever they may be.
And yet Medieval Christians didn’t like any of this progressive stuff, and so almost all of it was destroyed or thrown in the trash (or scraped off the page). So we only have access to it from scattered clues in other works, and the chance survival of but a scant few of the studies that then revolutionized the sciences. I have written on the impact of this upon our loss of the biomedical sciences of that era (see The Sociology of Ancient Scientists Cannot Be Based on Medieval Source Selection). Russo focuses on physics, especially astrophysics and laws of motion. He carries this too far I believe, arguing that Hipparchus and Archimedes were heliocentrists (which is entirely possible) who had achieved a complete Newtonian dynamics (which is at best only plausible) that was rapidly forgotten before the Roman era (which is effectively impossible). This is all untenable because it relies on that ancillary hypothesis about a massive loss of prior scientific books before the Romans that is easily refuted (see my discussion in Was Roman Science in Decline?). But the rest is not untenable conceptually. Because they were undeniably getting close to all that (they were talking about heliocentrism and they were doing sophisticated work in ballistics and gravity and elliptical trajectories and they were connecting the two: see Ancient Theories of Gravity: What Was Lost?). So when you read Russo you must separate his own unique theories (which are rarely sound) from the facts and scholarship he presents in support of them (which are usually sound).
That’s the main theme of Russo’s book. But his side-roads are just as interesting and valuable to go down, such as his attempt to argue that the Roman engineer Hero invented motion pictures (pp. 139-41). The texts he relies on for this do not support it (I think they plainly refute it), but the data is educating, and that what he argues, though false, is still plausible in light of that evidence is what you can learn the most from. Likewise in his attempt to argue they had actual telescopes (pp. 271-72 and 343-49): in fact Romans were experimenting with lenses, and thus were close to telescopes and microscopes (and were indeed using glass and mirror magnifiers), but there is no evidence anyone (then or before them) got there already. Nevertheless, Russo makes his case without any fabricated or bogus evidence. Everything he presents is real. It’s only his inferences that don’t hold up. But the data he presents is the kind of stuff that is often ignored or even denied. So it is an important corrective to the opposite error, which is declaring that they had no idea of magnification or lenses and the like. They totally did.
But for all that, you can’t rely on Russo when he discusses the Roman era. Much of what he says about that is wrong. But you can find better treatments of that period in my book and others I recommend. And there remains nothing better in coverage of the Hellenistic period in between Aristotle and the Romans. So it’s definitely a must-read. Indeed, even where it fails is a must-read, precisely to understand what it takes to be wrong about ancient science when all your data is right. Most authors who get ancient science wrong do so because their data is all wrong—not only often false, but more often simply missing, because they didn’t actually check. I wrote my own book in large part to correct this oversight. And Russo’s study was an invaluable part of that.
Thanks for the recommendations. I’ve studied the history of science from Copernicus onwards since I was a child, but I’m not so well-versed on ancient science.
There’s so much more about it than most people realize.
It’s too often reduced to somewhat incorrect accounts of Aristotle’s mistakes or eye-rolling at Ptolemy’s “epicycles.” Never mind that he knew they were equivalent to elliptical orbits and that he invented the first albeit slightly wrong law of planetary motion, “equal angles in equal times,” which Kepler simply notched up with “equal areas in equal times,” thus realizing Ptolemy was far closer to getting it than Copernicus. Who fatally rejected inconstant velocities and noncircular orbits, and thus actually abandoned everything Ptolemy got right and thus was in fact setting the field back rather than forward. Kepler combined Ptolemy with Copernicus and got it all right.
This is what leads Russo to point out that they had all the pieces to get all the way to Newton on this, not just Kepler (they had ideas of universal gravitation, inertial and elliptical orbits, advanced conics, and, of course, heliocentrism). They didn’t (IMO). But they could have (indeed might have, had the empire not collapsed in the very next century after Ptolemy and ended up a superstitious anti-intellectual right-wing juggernaut headed for complete destruction). And that’s what makes this all much more interesting than the stories you usually hear. And that’s the gift Russo gives his readers. You just have to be aware that he goes just a little too optimistically far with his theories; but his facts are all in line.
We have many well-documented examples of whole region-wide, even multi-national civilizations developing and then abandoning and forgetting advanced scientific and technological achievement: India, Europe, Persia, arguably China; and poorly-known American cases. India might have done it several times. We mostly have only lower bounds on how far each got first. Some advances may not have been matched, in ways, since. I don’t know any reason it couldn’t all happen again, worldwide.
I actually think that’s an incorrect narrative. It equivocates on the meaning of “science.”
No culture (not India, China, any, not even the British Empire) got as far as Aristotle on its own. So in terms of what we mean by modern science, no culture ever had it. They had craft-science (just like what the Greeks and Egyptians had before Aristotle). But never more. None developed an effective epistemology (“the scientific method”) or even properly formalized mathematics (with theorems and proofs and thus not just systems of calculation but a complete meta-understanding of why they work) or logics (the “logical” writings of China and India, and Europe before the Renaissance, are quite comparatively poor, even when they glimmer with hope that is never realized).
Except as a recovered Greek tradition.
China got as far as a brilliant industrialization that rivaled Rome, but it wasn’t based on anything more that presocratic-style science. So it wasn’t that they “had it” and lost it. They never even had it. Hence there was no scientific decline in China. It just chugged along same-same from Han Dynasty to Boxer Rebellion. Likewise India, Persia, or anywhere else.
Even Islam (which encompasses more than Persia), which had its 9th-11th century Renaissance, only got that far: the recovery of those same intellectual Hellenistic findings and methods. All “Islamic science” was just translated and redone Greek science, and it was all based on a full knowledge of that: it was borrowed, not invented. Just like our Renaissance, which was all borrowed, not invented—a (partial) recovery of the same Greek achievement that had been lost. The tragedy is that Islamic extremism then shut that down (and were more successful at that than the Vatican, who also tried to shut-down our Renaissance, but the Reformation screwed up their ability to project power and they lost control).
But had that not happened, “modern science” today (Gilbert, Galileo, Boyle, Newton, Maxwell, Lavoisier) would have been Islamic, not Christian, and the British Empire might never have arisen, but a Global Caliphate with pretty much the same genteel ideas about the compatibility of religion and science as the British had. And yet that would not have been an independent invention of it. It would be just the same story of recovering the same singular invention of it, from the Hellenistic Miracle. That makes the event of Aristotle’s invention of modernist science unique and clearly very hard to replicate.
What part of Aristotle’s scientific practice was empirical or not half-assed? I’m not saying there aren’t examples, but I’m just wondering, because I know that a lot of his claims were incredibly half-assed and non-empirical. I also think it’s not so simple that pre-Aristotelian science was as poor as is sometimes portrayed. First of all, almost all of what we have from before Aristotle is gone so it’s hard to even know, but secondly, consider the medical practices of Hippocrates, which were based in observation, or the scientific practices of the Pythagoreans, or Xenophanes, who also based many of his claims in practical observation and empiricism. He has even been called ‘the first empiricist’, and he predates Aristotle by over a hundred years. Some have even argued that someone as early as Anaximanes first laid the foundations for science and that him and Anaximander laid the groundwork for rationalist critique of their ideas. I’m doubtful that the atomists wouldn’t have practiced empiricism as well. Ultimately, coming from a non-expert, perhaps Aristotle heralding some new age of science might be a bit of a post-facto construct of Christian historians to justify Aristotle’s primacy in the curriculum more than the reality?
I discuss this in my book The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire. I have whole sections on Aristotle, because the Hellenistic advances can’t be understood without understanding that that was just continuing to do what Aristotle said to do. And I have an appendix there on the presocratics (including Hippocrates) and how they weren’t “quite there yet” but were transitional. Indeed, the scattered and unsystematic achievements and ideas of Hippocrates are among those Aristotle cites as the building blocks of his systematized empiricism.
So don’t mistake me as having said Aristotle was the first “empiricist.” That’s not in this article. Rather, he is the first to formalize a universal empirical methodology, and indeed the halting and imperfect efforts of the presocratics were exactly what gave him the idea to do that, and the tools to do it with. That’s why understanding that period is as important to understanding Aristotle as understanding Aristotle is important to understanding all the Hellenistic and Roman science that followed him.
As far as his failures, it helps to be reminded that Aristotle was a biologist, not a physicist. And people tend to harp on his physics. But his most sterling science was in biology. As a philosopher, anything he hadn’t empirically studied (with experiments and painstaking observations like in his zoological and physiological treatises) he “gave his best guess.” But he actually said that’s what he was doing: he never claimed to have “solved physics.” His refrain was always about how more observations were needed, others after him needed to check his facts and expand his program into other domains of study. And so they did.
Thus, his blunders came from where he didn’t do science but was filling gaps in science (I’m counting only his actual blunders here; some of his mistakes are not real, like the claim that he got the number of teeth in human women wrong, but that looks like a scribal error of a transposed sentence from his section on swine, and thus isn’t really anything he said). For example, in biology, he mistook the role of the brain (as a cooling organ, locating thought in the heart, due to mistaking somatopsychic phenomena for localization of function); but following Aristotle’s advocated methods and expectations of improvement, Herophilus just a century later not only corrected that but got all the way to localizing specific mental functions in the brain (and correctly; we still use all his terminology for the components of the human brain).
Likewise, Aristotle wasn’t as wrong about gravity, for example, as people think (nor all that unempirical, e.g. objects dropped in a water tank almost follow his law of fall, and it is impossible that he could know falling objects accelerate without empirical observation), and he was corrected just a century later by the physical experiments of his direct successor Strato (see my link on gravity in the article above).
We can similarly find enormous blunders in even our scientific heroes. Newton was an obsessed numerologist. And Galileo, for example, put way too much confidence in his belief that lunisolar tide theory could prove heliocentrism, and he got a lot of other physics wrong yet with the same unwarranted confidence. See Galileo’s Goofs: Lessons We Can Learn from Failure. Pretty much every great scientist was wrong a lot; we just “forget” all their blunders and dead ends and only “remember” their greatest hits. Aristotle looks no different in that light. Only (for some reason) people do the opposite and remember all his blunders and forget all his greatest hits (I suspect because that plays into the revisionist narrative of Christian Imperialism, as many historians have argued and documented, as noted in my book).
Sorry if I came off aggressive in my initial comment. I suppose my main question is: are there many contemporaries or near contemporaries of Aristotle that speak of him as this epoch-changing figure, or is this from later sources, and if so, who?
We don’t have any ancient historians “of science” simpliciter. Those books are all lost. But modern historians can reconstruct the sequence of events in hindsight from comments and discussions in what we do have. For example, all discussions we do have of the development of any science pass through Aristotle as the first systematizer without whom we would not have had any of the great achievements of the Hellenistic and Roman eras. Indeed, they all (to a man; and even woman, though women scientist’s books are lost, we have descriptions of them) replicate the methodology and system of grounding assumptions of Aristotle.
The only close competitor was the atomist tradition, which developed separately (from Democritus to Epicurus to Philodemus and so on), but was less empirical and more metaphysical, it just had the right metaphysical intuitions (we now know in hindsight). But even that was subsumed by Aristotelianism almost immediately after Aristotle (the evidence indicates: due to the synthesis of the third Aristotelian, Strato). This became what modern science historians call ancient “eclecticism” (discussed in my book). No real empirical science (better than the shaky presocratic style) was ever done by any atomists—only by eclectics who applied Aristotelian methodologies and grounding assumptions to an atomist framework.
Which describes every great scientist we have any substantive material from to judge by (Hero, Ptolemy, and Galen all combined Aristotle’s methods and basic ontology with atomist ontologies and ideas) and probably ever other (all remaining evidence suggests this was also where everyone else landed, like Archimedes, Seleucus, Herophilus, Hipparchus, Posidonius, Dioscorides, Menelaus, Marinus, etc.). Some went more atomist than others (e.g. Erasistratus pushed a more atomist ontology than Galen, and their schools of thought often debated this distinction) but all “did science” using Aristotle’s framework.
Enjoyed this blog extensively. I have put your recommendations on my book wish list. Thank you so much for your time and hard work!
I’m glad to hear that! I love ancient science yet rarely get the chance to talk about it. I worry too many people are too disinterested to get into it!