Science and Culture

Abstract

Thales lived in Miletus, a Greek colony, in the seventh century BCE. According to Herodotus, he predicted an eclipse; according to Aristotle, he declared that water was the first principle of all things. Herodotus was almost certainly mistaken, and Aristotle's attribution is not a compliment but a criticism. But to judge these two statements thus is to miss their point. They may or may not be facts about Thales; they are most assuredly facts about Herodotus and Aristotle, whose conceptual taxonomies include, significantly, the investigation of the causal structures of physical events and of matter. With these categories in place, science had begun: you start with eclipse prediction; you end with Kepler's and Newton's laws; you start with water; you end with the periodic table of the elements. The principled investigation of the causal structures of physical events and matter just is science, then as now. Unfortunately, the conceptual continuity between Greek science and our own is not also a historical continuity. Despite an impressive roll call-Aristotle, Archimedes, Ptolemy, Galen-the inquiring spirit of ancient Greek science didn't really catch on in the West. As a consequence, a second birth of science was necessary. It occurred in the late Middle Ages, this time in Western Europe. The results were not trivial, as the historical scholarship of the last half century has established. These achievements did not, however, approach the Greek achievement. Nevertheless, as with the Greek achievement, the science of the Middle Ages sank virtually without a trace; for most, Grosseteste, Buridan, and Oresme are only names. In neither ancient Greece nor medieval Europe did science succeed in becoming a well-established cultural practice like military engineering, schoolmastering, or midwifery. American Literature and Science