Archimedes’ &amp;amp;lt;Book&amp;amp;gt; to Eratosthenes in the Palimpsest and Archimedes in Heron’s Metrikon

Giuseppe Boscarino

doi:10.4236/ahs.2015.45025

Abstract

It is argued that even with some new readings made by the publication of the Letter to Eratosthenes in the Archimedes Palimpsest, with the wonderful discovery of his so-called “mechanical method” (a certain way of theorizing in mathematical things by means of mechanical entities) at the beginning of the twentieth century, some important historical-philological and philosophicalepistemological issues still remain, which have already discussed in part in my writings. We produce some important testimonies taken from Metrikon by Heron of Alexandria in favour of our translations and interpretations of Archimedes’ lexicon, not without placing under investigation at the same time the personality and the importance of Hero in the history of philosophical, scientific and technological Greek-Hellenistic thought in line with Archimedes and the tradition of Italic thought of science (The quotations of the Greek texts of Archimedes, Heron and Pappus are my translations).

Highlights

Archimedes died in 212 B.C. with the destruction of Syracuse and was born in 287 B.C., moving from ancient testimonies, according to historians.His scientific production is immense and extraordinary, but in the sixth century A.C., it is already almost entirely forgotten
We find in Heron what at the beginning of the scientific revolution in the sixteenth century Newton had advocated refer to Pappus, which among other things recognized in Heron him who had mixed well philosophy, mathematics and mechanics in his concept of science
For Aristotle, scientific rationality not mathematics must move in a circle; as the tradition, common sense with its words, which equals the real with the sensitive, and religion with its beliefs, attest, is found by the scientific and philosophical reason and vice versa

Summary

Introduction

Archimedes died in 212 B.C. with the destruction of Syracuse and was born in 287 B.C., moving from ancient testimonies, according to historians. You can read again in the proposition 12 on the so-called cylindrical nail, even after using the canonical according to the mechanical way, as Archimedes refers to it by saying: Proved these things we will come back to this proof geometrically.5 They argue that all these expressions are possible interpolations, as in contradiction with the expression, koris-apodeikseos!. Metrikon’s Heron, an ancient and authoritative witness of Archimedean things, seems not to corroborate the presumed epistemological dualism in the Archimedean production, dividing between works of simple discovery, heuristics works, and works of rigorous proofs When he quotes the Archimedean discoveries in his Metrikon, he uses the term

The punctum dolens of the Mechanical Propositions

Conclusions