Unfortunately not preserved. Sinks my heart every time.

(1)

This is very different from post-Aristotelian thought in Greek times, where there is no evidence that any mathematician paid any attention to Aristotle’s mechanics.

That is false. All subsequent advances in mechanics were built on Aristotle. Most were made within two generations (e.g. Strato’s mechanics revised Aristotle’s to become the foundation of Hero’s and Ptolemy’s, and Archimedes was working from an Aristotelian foundation methodologically and even in his assumptions of physics).

(2)

It was obviously Archimedes’s program, except, unlike Clavius, he proved his point by actually carrying it out…

Note: so did Aristotle. This author is confusing Aristotle’s actual scientific field (biology, where Aristotle conducted tons of good experiments and observational studies) with his casual thoughts on other fields like physics. Yet even that was not without observational basis, e.g. he knew objects accelerate in free fall and reach a terminal velocity, which is impossible without careful observation, and Aristotle’s mechanics do approximate falling objects in oil or water (see Ancient Theories of Gravity: What Was Lost?), in fact these observations formed the basis of Archimedes’ study of object-fall in water leading to his discoveries in hydrostatics, so Aristotle wasn’t working solely from the armchair. But his work wasn’t as detailed in physics. His successor Strato took that in hand. Likewise Archimedes, Hero, Ptolemy, etc.

The significance of Aristotle is to science as Freud is to psychology, or Maxwell to Quantum Mechanics, or Boyle to quantitative chemistry: all were wrong about a bunch of stuff, and right about some stuff, and all launched their respective fields by building the framework on which all subsequent progress would build. Neither mathematics nor logic nor science nor any branch of philosophy was formalized until, and by, Aristotle. The first guy isn’t going to get everything right. But when they build the framework but for which no progress would even have been made, they deserve credit.

What do you think of this critique of Aristotle?: https://intellectualmathematics.com/blog/historiography-of-galileos-relation-to-antiquity-and-middle-ages/

“why should Aristotle be accepted as the default opinion? Aristotle was one particular philosopher who was a nobody in mathematics and lived well before the golden age of Greek science. Medieval and renaissance thinkers indeed mustered up the courage to challenge isolated claims of his teachings almost two thousand years later, while mostly retaining his overall outlook. This does not constitute great open-mindedness and progress. Rather it is a sign of small-mindedness that these people paid so much attention to Aristotle at all in the first place. In my view, it is not so much impressive that they deviated a bit from Aristotle as it is deplorable that they framed so much of what they did relative to Aristotle, even when they disagreed with him. This is very different from post-Aristotelian thought in Greek times, where there is no evidence that any mathematician paid any attention to Aristotle’s mechanics.”

Some quotes from the text:

“It was obviously Archimedes’s program, except, unlike Clavius, he proved his point by actually carrying it out instead of sermonising about what one ought to do in philosophical prose. Philosophers (ancient and modern alike) have a tendency to place disproportionate value on explaining something conceptually as opposed to actually doing it. After all, that is virtually the definition of philosophy. Hence they praise certain Aristotelians for explaining some supposedly profound principles of scientific method even when “it is quite clear that [none of them] ever applied his advocated methods to actual scientific problems.”
Descartes—a mathematically creative person—knew better: “we ought not to believe an alchemist who boasts he has the technique of making gold, unless he is extremely wealthy; and by the same token we should not believe the learned writer who promises new sciences, unless he demonstrates that he has discovered many things that have been unknown up till now.” Unfortunately, such basic common sense is often lacking among historians and philosophers assigning credit for basic principles of the scientific method.”

You need to cite a peer-reviewed source on that Sanskrit claim.

As to the general point, we aren’t choosing one over the other. Craft knowledge advances alongside scientific even now (as the entire existence of patent offices as a thing establishes). The distinction between the two is not over whether they count as knowledge or make progress, but how they work (methodology) and what knowledge those methods can uniquely access (complex cumulative theoretical results).

We can only guess whether Amazonian developments (of which we know very few) are just craft knowledge, and not products of a more systematic method. We have only a lower bound on how far the Islamic world got before losing interest, delimited by surviving records. An example of almost-lost progress we have learned of is the understanding of grammar productions fundamental to modern computation theory, rediscovered in the early-20th century and subsequently noticed in 5th-century BC Sanskrit writings. Before the rediscovery it would have been seen, if pointed out, as only an esoteric religious curiosity.

The point is that we are biased to count discoveries in our own tradition as inherently most important. But as productive as modern science has been, adjacent methods might have yielded results whose importance we do not even understand, leaving us impoverished, maybe permanently as the social milieu that fostered them is gone. And, of course, any society could over a few centuries converge on a close analog of our methods without leaving durable artifacts. We will never know.

There is nothing much original in Al-Haytham. It’s all in Ptolemy. Even the idea of abandoning visual ray theory (as Ptolemy discusses and is thus aware of reflection-particle models, he just doesn’t use them himself because they were harder for him to do the math on; but evidently they already had those models, and there is more evidence of that too, which I discuss in my book).

That Bacon didn’t know this is what I mean by medievals having forgotten everything. And this is why modern historians gullibly trusting medievals to explain ancient science to them has created a massive error rate in the field today (that actual historians of ancient science have been trying to correct for decades now).

And “Amazonians evolved stable mixes of domesticated food tree species, and developed the ayahuasca and curare recipes” is not science in the sense here meant.

That’s craft knowledge. You can call it craft-science. But it’s like woo and lore: some of it is correct, some of it is not, and none of it has been subject to systematic epistemology or laddering, i.e. getting at a theoretical understanding of why something works (like “tree reproduction” and “recipes”) and then building higher levels of understanding on top of that making layered scientific progress (like localizing brain function, dissecting tree reproductive organs, or running properly controlled and mathematically-measured dosing experiments for a drug, all of which was happening in the Hellenistic or Roman periods).

This does not mean craft and industrial knowledge is not impressive or important or that other cultures didn’t have lots of that. But stopping at that is why no culture on Earth reached a Scientific Revolution (and hence a modern Industrial Revolution) but the West, and even it would never have done so without the prior revolution in Greece, which no other culture independently replicated, not even after thousands of years of impressive knowledge building across six continents.

China is the most advanced example that came anywhere near, but still never got there, until Greco-Roman science was imported there by Europeans (see Rome vs. China: What Made the Difference?). And the Arab world had the first shot at recovering Greek knowledge and advancing it to a Scientific and Industrial Revolution (four hundred years before the West took its shot), and only failed because of internal anti-intellectualism shutting it down. Which was the same problem in the West; the West did not succeed by “lacking” that kill switch, but by its wielders, by happenstance, having just around then lost sufficient power to succeed at flipping it. So the coin flipped the other way. And that’s really the only reason the West got there first and then brutally dominated the world with it. That could have been Arabs, had the happenstances gone the other way.

Thanks. I get that Islam was able to start from records of Greek and Roman advances, but Islamic mathematics did break new ground, and Al-Haytham invented modern empirical science for his Optics, as acknowledged by Francis Bacon centuries after Islam lost interest. We can trace a line of development through certain efflorescences to our own.

But in other cases we don’t know how far people got before losing interest, because the records are wholly lost. We have bare hints. Amazonians evolved stable mixes of domesticated food tree species, and developed the ayahuasca and curare recipes. North America is dotted with stone and earth works with features implying detailed astronomical awareness. India retains disciplines to study the nature of consciousness.

Scientific epistemology has been so fantastically productive, it is tempting to think nothing important is beyond its reach, and to claim for ourselvess the pinnacle of achievement in all subjects. But other cultures have had worthy interests we may not even recognize, taking them places we do not today understand. It is impossible to say what has been lost, but it would be arrogant to assume none of it is tragic.

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!

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.