The presocratic origins of modern science

Abstract

Not satisfied with identifying the origins of modern science in the workings of Renaissance natural philosophers, some historians in the mid twentieth century searched for the roots of modern scientific practice amongst the writings of the presocratic thinkers. During the 1950s and 1960s, Marshall Claggett, George Sarton, W.K.C. Guthrie and Giorgio de Santillana wrote highly celebrated works on ancient scientific thought with the aim of identifying when human knowledge of natural structures and motions began. These authors considered the Ionian presocratic Greeks to be the first to construct a science of nature that would lay the seeds for Western early modern and modern thought. During the past 40 years, there have been very few studies of the presocratics. One might be tempted to think, therefore, that Vamvacas could embrace the opportunity in this book to revise and refresh the historiography of ancient natural philosophy. However, this is not his objective. Instead, Vamvacas, a physicist, does not approach the topic from the point of view of an historian, but that of a scientist wishing to provide an empirical account of the lives and thoughts of the presocratics with the intention of reminding his scientific colleagues of the intellectual origins of their field. More specifically, Vamvacas aims to show that the presocratics worked on a unified world-view that drew upon physics, cosmology, biology, chemistry and philosophy. This, he argues in the book’s preface, should serve as an example to modern scientists who find themselves trapped in their narrow fields of specialisation and unable to comment on the interdisciplinarity of natural knowledge. As Vamvacas puts it, the purpose of this book is to remind scientists of the ‘‘interdisciplinary philosophic-scientific presentation of the presocratic tradition’’ (p. viii) that supposedly serves as an example to modern science. So, this book does not claim to break any new ground in the historiography of presocratic natural philosophy. As a result, it does not contest or add to any claims