Fragments of History and Science

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Previous articleNext article FreeSecond Look: Samuel Sambursky, Physics of the StoicsFragments of History and ScienceOrly LewisOrly Lewis Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreI have a vivid memory of the first time I read Samuel Sambursky’s Physics of the Stoics.1 It was late on a summer evening almost ten years ago, and I had sat out in the garden to read the slim hardback. I remember repeatedly lowering the book in order to stare into thin air and think about what I had just read, the way one does when reading a particularly good book, unconsciously stopping in order to savor the moment and prolong the experience.I had read most of the first two chapters when a close friend rang me for a chat. I remember telling her about what I had just read, particularly about the Stoic theory of sense perception, hearing included. I told her about an invisible airy substance moving back and forth as the means for transmitting sounds. My friend knew nothing of the Stoics, but she knew a lot about hearing. She had just completed her studies in speech therapy and audiology and had started work at a clinic specializing in hearing tests and aids. After listening for a while and asking several questions, she said, quite simply: “But this is what we think today!” She then went on to qualify her statement slightly, explaining about air and sound waves and their path through the ear. I was intrigued by what she told me and excited about her reaction to the ancient theories—and about the fact that we were able to discuss ancient ideas in the same breath as modern scientific theory. This incident stayed with me over the years, resurfacing whenever I discussed ancient theories of sense perception.When I was asked to write a short piece about my (past and present) impressions of Physics of the Stoics, memories of that night came rushing back. I was, however, slightly apprehensive. When I first read Sambursky that summer I was a graduate student, taking my first, tentative steps in the history of science and ideas.2 I was studying classics, with training in history as well, but with only sporadic ventures into ancient philosophy. I was interested in the Stoics for my graduate work on the physician Praxagoras of Cos (late fourth–early third centuries b.c.e.). The minimal scholarship available on Praxagoras stressed his role as a forerunner of the Stoic theory of pneuma, and I wanted to understand what that theory actually was.3 Sambursky’s book was one of the means for doing so.4 At the time, I found the book revealing, exciting, coherent. But how would I feel now, after working intensively on fragments and forming rather strong opinions regarding the methodology of using them to reconstruct ancient theories and ideas? Moreover, in recent years I have become rather critical of anachronistic and teleological readings and interpretations, which impose later concepts and expectations on the earlier sources. Yet another practice from which historians of science and ideas have generally moved away is the eager attempt to trace epistemological influences connecting different ancient thinkers or schools. Sambursky’s work raises concerns in all these respects.5It was with mixed feelings, therefore, that I sat down to read the book again. I was wondering how to fulfill my task of explaining, inter alia, the importance and utility of the study for current research. My apprehension was soon dispelled, however. To be sure, there is much to criticize. There is, nevertheless, much to say in the book’s favor as well. Despite its faults, it offers valuable interpretations and articulations of particular Stoic ideas, which are woven together to produce a lucid and coherent account of Stoic theory. Sambursky is aware of the limitations imposed by the fragmentary nature of the sources, but he nevertheless sets out a straightforward narrative, which one can easily follow and understand and then accept or reject. In so doing, Sambursky stands up to one of the main challenges in any attempt to reconstruct the ideas of ancient authors from fragmentary citations and reports: presenting a fluent and coherent exposition of the ideas and theories while also flagging the gaps—as well as filling them, when possible, by means of well-founded inductions and conjectures; and at the same time making the inductive process apparent and transparent. Sambursky often goes beyond the texts, but he usually makes clear to the reader that he is doing so. The decision to print the relevant sources at the end of the book reflects his method: it allows him to offer a clear and concise presentation of his interpretation and thesis while making the sources easily available for the reader to assess independently.The result remains invaluable not only for the study of Stoic theories as such but also for the broader study of the history of ideas related to causation, pneuma, and tonos (tone, tension, force). These were key concepts not only in Greek and Roman philosophy but also in medical and mechanical theories of the time.6 Sambursky’s study proves itself particularly useful in our attempt to understand the ways in which Greek and Roman philosophers and physicians conceptualized pneuma and tonos and incorporated these notions into their explanations of the world, various natural phenomena, the human body, and health and disease. An example is the important distinction between a pneuma pervading the material construction of the body and acting inside it on the compositional level and a pneuma conceived as a vapor contained and percolating through hollow cavities and passages of the body.What did I make of the prominent and commonly criticized presence of modern physics in the book? I was frustrated that Sambursky neglected to explain modern technical terms he refers to (e.g., “field of force,” “standing wave,” and “stationary vibration” [pp. 30–31]) and thus to clarify their utility in explaining Stoic theory; but such terms (once one acquires a layperson’s grasp of them) are nonetheless helpful for understanding some of the Stoic ideas concerning the actions and motion of pneuma in matter. Some changes in rhetoric and presentation are perhaps all that is needed to make (some of) Sambursky’s claims in this regard more agreeable. I do not find it historically useful to think of the Stoic ideas as forerunners of modern physics (the question as such is somewhat redundant, in my opinion), but I still found the analogy to modern terms revealing and helpful.7In recent decades, scholarship on the history of ancient science has limited its engagement with modern science and scientists—if not shunning such engagement entirely. This has been, to a large extent, a natural reaction to the overtly “scientific” (un)historical method of prominent scholars of the late nineteenth and early to mid-twentieth centuries.8 Often scientists or physicians themselves, these scholars imposed much of contemporary science on the ancient sources and their interpretation of them. This is not the place to discuss the contours and implications of this change in method. Nevertheless, reflecting on Sambursky’s work is a good opportunity to ask whether some consideration and dialogue with modern science and scientists should not be explicitly and systematically encouraged in the study of the history of ancient science and ideas.9 The contents of such interactions can then be digested through current, more “cautious,” historical methods and tools.10Indeed, one wonders at times whether modern scientists are, in some respects, closer to our historical objects of research than we historians are.11 True, we know much about the epistemological as well as the cultural and social contexts in which authors such as Aristotle, Cleanthes, Chrysippus, and Galen were working. However, these authors were not only Greeks and Romans living in a particular historical, cultural, and epistemological setting, which must be taken into account in our study of them; they were also scientists (or mathematicians, natural philosophers, anatomists, and so forth). They were interested in explaining the cosmos and matter, what bodies are made of and how they change, function, and interact. We historians, for the most part, have no practical experience in the methods and mind-set entailed in such investigations of the natural world, matter, or the human body. Contemporary natural and life scientists, however, have plenty of that. Their methods, and certainly their tools, are often different from those applied in antiquity, but their aims, interests, and concerns are often similar. I have lost sleep over a difficult passage in Galen or the formulation of a particular point I wanted to convey; but I have not lost sleep over how to go about understanding neural conduction, dementia, or the effects of light and matter. These concerns, our sources indicate, did keep Aristotle, Cleanthes, Chrysippus, and Galen preoccupied.Sambursky’s intimate acquaintance with physics as a science—that is, as a practical and theoretical framework for investigating certain aspects of nature—facilitated a particular perspective that is different from the one encouraged today but that enabled him, nonetheless, to produce a lucid and constructive distillation of Stoic ideas. True, this at times led him to betray some principles of historical methodology, and anyone using his study must remain sensitive and alert to such problems. But Sambursky’s Physics of the Stoics is nonetheless essential to our efforts to reconstruct Stoic thought: its articulation of key ideas is pivotal, and, considered as a whole, it offers students of Stoicism and of ancient philosophy and science an illuminating and instructive framework through which to consider Stoic natural philosophy.NotesOrly Lewis, who received her Ph.D. in 2014 from the Humboldt University of Berlin, is a Martin Buber Research Fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She has published on ancient anatomy, physiology, and diagnosis. She is the author of Praxagoras of Cos on Arteries, Pulse, and Pneuma: Fragments and Interpretation (Brill, 2017) and coeditor of a forthcoming volume on the concept of pneuma. Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Mandel School for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, Martin Buber Society of Fellows in the Humanities and Social Sciences, Mt. Scopus, Jerusalem 9190501, Israel; [email protected].Acknowledgments. I am grateful to the Martin Buber Society of Fellows in the Humanities and Social Sciences for ongoing funding and support.1 Samuel Sambursky, Physics of the Stoics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1959) (hereafter references to this book will appear in the text in parentheses).2 I use the term “science,” for practical reasons, to refer to ancient investigations, discourses, theories, and practices concerned with questions and issues that are today considered part of the natural, exact, and life sciences. On using this term with reference to antiquity see, e.g., Geoffrey E. R. Lloyd, Ancient Worlds, Modern Reflections (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2004), pp. 12–23; and the papers in the special section “The Cultures of Ancient Science,” Isis, 1992, 83:547–607.3 I have since argued against this depiction of the relation between Praxagoras and Stoic theory: Orly Lewis, Praxagoras of Cos on Arteries, Pulse, and Pneuma: Fragments and Interpretation (Leiden: Brill, 2017), pp. 265, 293–294.4 Looking back at my notes from the time, I see that I read Josiah Gould’s The Philosophy of Chrysippus (Albany: SUNY Press, 1970) before turning to Sambursky and moved thereafter to David Hahm’s The Origins of Stoic Cosmology (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1977).5 Such concerns were already raised, with greater or lesser tolerance, shortly after the publication of the book. See, e.g., I. G. Kidd, rev. of Samuel Sambursky, Physics of the Stoics, Philosophical Quarterly, 1961, 11:374–375; Anton D. Leeman, rev. of Samuel Sambursky, Physics of the Stoics, Gnomon, 1960, 32:575–576; and A. Wasserstein, rev. of Samuel Sambursky, Physics of the Stoics, Journal of Hellenic Studies, 1963, 83:186–190.6 In particular, the so-called Pneumatist physicians (who emerged during the first century b.c.e.) incorporated the notion of a cohesive pervading pneuma into their medical theory and practice, alongside the “traditional” pneuma percolating through the vessels. Ctesibius’s water pump is one of the illustrative and commonly discussed examples in ancient mechanics.7 Admittedly, Sambursky was writing in a context in which ancient Atomism had been attracting greater attention in light of its (in many ways superficial) similarities to modern Atomism; he thus felt required to promote the significance and relevance of Stoic physics with respect to modern theories.8 A seminal discussion of the problem is Sabetai Unguru, “On the Need to Rewrite the History of Greek Mathematics,” Archive for History of Exact Sciences, 1975, 15:67–114.9 The means and degree of doing so, which will presumably vary from one field to another, must be discussed elsewhere. My own recent experience in dissection labs of medical and veterinary schools has certainly enriched my ongoing work on ancient investigations of the body. It sharpened, for instance, my understanding of the complexities and challenges of studying the inside of human and animal bodies. The substantial cultural, epistemological, and technical differences between modern and ancient investigations did not mask the common difficulties.10 Some recent examples from the study of ancient ideas of body and soul prove the value of such epistemological interaction and cooperation. See, e.g., Julius Rocca, Galen on the Brain: Anatomical Knowledge and Physiological Speculation in the Second Century A.D. (Leiden: Brill, 2003) (Rocca had studied philosophy and history of science while working as a physician); Pavel Gregoric and Martin Kuhar, “Aristotle’s Physiology of Animal Motion: On Neura and Muscles,” Apeiron, 2014, 47:94–115 (a collaboration between a philosopher/classicist and a trained physician); and Chiara Thumiger, A History of the Mind and Mental Health in Classical Greek Medical Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2017) (which uses modern discourse as one of the frameworks for discussing the ancient sources, while clearly delimiting the modern from the ancient).11 For a discussion of the difficulty of understanding ancient societies (not just ancient science) from a modern perspective see Lloyd, Ancient Worlds, Modern Reflections (cit. n. 2), pp. 1–11. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Isis Volume 109, Number 1March 2018 Publication of the History of Science Society Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/697065 © 2018 by The History of Science Society. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article: Isis Current Bibliography of the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences 2020, Isis 111, no.S1S1 (Jan 2021): 1–317.https://doi.org/10.1086/713361