Ancient Greek Science

(Cristian Violatti)

The achievements of ancient Greek science  were amongst the finest in

antiquity. Building on Egyptian and Babylonian knowledge, figures such as Thales of
Miletus, Pythagoras, and Aristotle developed ideas in mathematics, astronomy, and
logic that would influence Western thought, science, and philosophy for centuries to
come. Aristotle was the first philosopher who developed a systematic study of logic, an
early form of evolution was taught by such figures of Greek
philosophy as Anaximander and Empedocles, and Pythagoras' mathematical theorem
is still used today. 

However, besides its great achievements, Greek science had its flaws. Observation was
undervalued by the Greeks in favour of the deductive process, where knowledge is
built by means of pure thought. This method is key in mathematics, and the Greeks put
such an emphasis on it that they falsely believed that deduction was the way to obtain
the highest knowledge.

Early Achievements

During the 26th Dynasty of Egypt (c. 685–525 BCE), the ports of the Nile were opened
for the first time to Greek trade. Important Greek figures such as Thales and
Pythagoras visited Egypt, and brought with them new skills and knowledge. Ionia, in
addition to Egyptian influence, was exposed to the culture and ideas
of Mesopotamia through its neighbour, the kingdom of Lydia.

THE ASTRONOMICAL KNOWLEDGE THAT THALES GOT FROM THE EGYPTIANS &
BABYLONIANS LIKELY ALLOWED HIM TO PREDICT A SOLAR ECLIPSE ON 28 MAY 585
BCE.

According to Greek tradition, the process of replacing the notion of supernatural

explanation with the concept of a universe that is governed by laws of nature begins in
Ionia. Thales of Miletus, c. 600 BCE first developed the idea that the world can be
explained without resorting to supernatural explanations. It is likely that the
astronomical knowledge that Thales got from Egyptian and Babylonian astronomy
allowed him to predict a solar eclipse which took place on 28 May 585 BCE.

Anaximander, another Ionian, argued that since human infants are helpless at birth, if
the first human had somehow appeared on earth as an infant, it would not have
survived. Anaximander reasoned that people must, therefore, have evolved from other
animals whose young are hardier. It was Empedocles who first taught an early form of
evolution and survival of the fittest. He believed that originally “countless tribes of
mortal creatures were scattered abroad endowed with all manner of forms, a wonder
to behold”, but in the end, only certain forms were able to survive.

The Influence of Mathematics

The Greek achievements in mathematics and astronomy were one of the finest in
antiquity. Mathematics developed first, aided by the influence of Egyptian
mathematics; astronomy flourished later during the Hellenistic Period after Alexander
the Great (356 BCE - 323 BCE) conquered the East, aided by the influence of Babylon.

A powerful aspect of science is that it aims to detach itself from notions with specific
use and looks for general principles with broad applications. The more general science
becomes the more abstract it is and has more applications. What the Greeks derived
from Egyptian mathematics were mainly rules of thumbs with specific applications.
Egyptians knew, for example, that a triangle whose sides are in a 3:4:5 ratio is a right
triangle. Pythagoras took this concept and stretched it to its limit by deducting a
mathematical theorem that bears his name: that, in a right triangle, the square on the
opposite side of the right angle (the hypotenuse) is equal to the sum of the squares on
the other two sides. This was true not only for the 3:4:5 triangle, but it was a principle
applicable to any other right triangle, regardless of its dimensions.

Pythagoras was the founder and leader of a sect where Greek philosophy, religion, art,
and mysticism were all fused together. In ancient times, Greeks did not make a clear
distinction between science and non-scientific disciplines. There is a widespread
argument which states that the coexistence of Greek art, philosophy, mysticism, and
other non-scientific disciplines interacting together with science has interfered with
the development of scientific ideas. This seems to show a misconception of how the
human spirit works. It is true that in the past moral and mystic bias has either delayed
or led some knowledge up a blind alley and that the sharp limits of scientific
knowledge were not clear. However, it is equally true that non-scientific disciplines
have enhanced the imagination of the human mind, provided inspiration to approach
problems that seemed impossible to solve and triggered human creativity to consider
counterintuitive possibilities (such as a spherical earth in motion) that time proved to
be true. The human spirit has found plenty of motivation for scientific progress in non-
scientific disciplines and it is likely that without the driving force of art, mysticism and
philosophy, scientific progress would have lacked much of its impetus.

The Deductive Process

By discovering mathematical theorems, the Greeks came across the art of deductive
reasoning. In order to build their mathematical knowledge they came to conclusions by
reasoning deductively from what appeared to be self-evident. This approach proved to
be powerful, and its success in mathematics encouraged its application in many other
disciplines. The Greeks eventually came to believe that the only acceptable way of
obtaining knowledge was the use of deduction.

However, this way of doing science had serious limitations when it was applied to
other areas of knowledge, but from the standpoint of the Greeks, it was hard to notice.
In antiquity, the starting point to discover principles was always an idea in the mind of
the philosopher: sometimes observations were undervalued and some other times the
Greeks were not able to make a sharp distinction between empirical observations and
logical arguments. Modern scientific method no longer relies on this technique; today
science seeks to discover principles based on observations as a starting point. Likewise,
the logical method of science today favours induction over deduction: instead of
building conclusions on an assumed set of self-evident generalizations, induction starts
with observations of particular facts and derives generalizations from them.

ANCIENT GREEK SCIENCE USED EXPERIMENTATION TO HELP THEORETICAL

UNDERSTANDING WHILE MODERN SCIENCE USES THEORY TO PURSUE PRACTICAL
RESULTS.

Deduction did not work for some kind of knowledge. “What is the distance
from Athens to Chios?”  In this case, the answer cannot be derived from abstract
principles; we have to actually measure it. The Greeks, when necessary, looked at
nature to get the answers they were looking for, but they still considered that the
highest type of knowledge was the one derived directly from the intellect. It is
interesting to note that when observations were taken in consideration, it tended to
be subordinated to the theoretical knowledge. An example of this could be one of the
surviving works of Archimedes, The Method, which explains how mechanical
experiments can help the understanding of geometry. In general, ancient science used
experimentation to help theoretical understanding while modern science uses theory
to pursue practical results.

The undervaluing of empirical observation and the emphasis on pure thought as a

reliable starting point for building knowledge can also be reflected in the famous
account (in all probability apocryphal) of the Greek philosopher Democritus who
removed his own eyes so the sight would not distract him from his speculations. There
is also a story about a student of Plato who asked with irritation during a mathematics
class “But what is the use of all this?” Plato called a slave, ordered him to give the
student a coin, and said, “Now you need not feel your instruction has been entirely to
no purpose” With these words, the student was expelled.

Aristotelian Logic

Aristotle was the first philosopher who developed a systematic study of logic. His
framework would become an authority in deductive reasoning for over two thousand
years. Although he repeatedly admitted the importance of induction, he prioritized the
use of deduction to build knowledge. It eventually turned out that his influence
strengthened the overestimation of deduction in science and of syllogisms in logic.
The doctrine of syllogism is his most influential contribution to logic. He defined the
syllogism as a discourse in which certain things having been stated, something else
follows of necesity from their being so. A well-known example is:

1. All men are mortal.  (major premise)

2. Socrates is a man.  (minor premise)
3. Socrates is mortal.  (conclusion)

This argument cannot be logically challenged, nor can we challenge its conclusion.
However, this way of doing science has, at least, two failures. In the first place, the way
the major premise works. Why should we accept the major premise without question?
The only way that a major premise can be accepted is to present an obvious
statement, such as “all men are mortal”, which is considered self-evident. This means
that the conclusion of this argument is not a new insight but rather, something that
was already implied either directly or indirectly within the major premise. Secondly, it
does not seem to be necessary to go through all this in order to prove logically that
Socrates is mortal.

Another problem of this way of building knowledge is that if we want to deal with
areas of knowledge beyond the ordinary everyday life, there is a great risk of choosing
wrong self-evident generalizations as a starting point of reasoning. An example could
be two of the axioms upon which all Greek astronomy was built:

1. The earth is resting motionless at the centre of the universe.

2. The earth is corrupt and imperfect, while the heavens are eternal, changeless,
and perfect.

These two axioms appear to be self-evident and they are supported by our intuitive
experience. However, scientific ideas can be counterintuitive. Today we know that
intuition alone should never be the guide for knowledge and that all intuition should
be sceptically tested. The errors in the way of reasoning are sometimes hard to detect,
and the Greeks were not able to notice anything wrong with their way of doing
science. There is a very lucid example of this by Isaac Asimov:

...if brandy and water, whiskey and water, vodka and water, and rum and water are all
intoxicating beverages, one may jump to the conclusion that the intoxicating factor
must be the ingredient these drinks hold in common-namely, water. There is
something wrong with this reasoning, but the fault in the logic is not immediately
obvious; and in more subtle cases, the error may be hard indeed to discover. (Asimov,
7)

Aristotle’s logic system was recorded in five treatises known as the Organon, and
although it does not exhaust all logic, it was a pioneering one, revered for centuries
and regarded as the ultimate solution to logic and reference for science.
 Legacy

Aristotle’s contribution to logic and science became an authority and remained

unchallenged as late as the modern age. It took many centuries to notice the flaws of
Aristotle’s approach to science. Platonic influence also contributed to undervalue
inference and experimentation: Plato’s philosophy considered the world to be only an
imperfect representation of the ideal truth sitting in the world of ideas.

Another obstacle for Greek science was the notion of an 'ultimate truth'. After the
Greeks worked out all the implications of their axioms, further progress seemed
impossible. Some aspects of knowledge seemed to them 'complete' and some of their
notions were turned into dogmas not open to further analysis. Today we understand
that there are never enough observations that could turn a notion into 'ultimate'. No
amount of inductive testing can tell us that a generalization is completely and
absolutely valid. A single observation that contradicts a theory forces the theory to be
reviewed.

Many important scholars have blamed Plato and Aristotle for delaying scientific
progress, since their ideas were turned into dogmas and, especially during medieval
times, nobody could challenge their work while keeping their reputation intact. It is
highly likely that science would have reached its modern state a lot earlier if these
ideas had been open to review, but this by no means questions the genius of these two
talented Greeks. The mistakes of a gifted mind can appear to be legitimate and remain
accepted for centuries. The errors of a fool become evident sooner rather than later.

Bibliography
 Science - Ancient History Encyclopedia definition
 Asimov, I. Asimov's New Guide to Science. (Penguin Books, Limited (UK), 1993).
 Durant, W. The Life of Greece. (Fine Communications, 1997).
 Honderich, T. The Oxford Companion to Philosophy New Edition.  (Oxford
University Press, USA, 2005).
 Russell, B. A History of Western Philosophy. (Simon & Schuster/Touchstone,
1967).

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Greek science
The birth of natural philosophy
There seems to be no good reason why the Hellenes, clustered in isolated city-states in
a relatively poor and backward land, should have struck out into intellectual regions
that were only dimly perceived, if at all, by the splendid civilizations of the Yangtze,
Tigris and Euphrates, and Nile valleys. There were many differences between ancient
Greece and the other civilizations, but perhaps the most significant was religion. What
is striking about Greek religion, in contrast to the religions of Mesopotamia and Egypt,
is its puerility. Both of the great river civilizations evolved complex theologies that
served to answer most, if not all, of the large questions about humankind’s place and
destiny. Greek religion did not. It was, in fact, little more than a collection of folk tales,
more appropriate to the campfire than to the temple. Perhaps this was the result of
the collapse of an earlier Greek civilization, the Mycenaean, toward the end of the 2nd
millennium BCE, when the Dark Age descended upon Greece and lasted for three
centuries. All that was preserved were stories of gods and men, passed along by poets,
that dimly reflected Mycenaean values and events. Such were the great poems
of Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey, in which heroes and gods mingled freely with one
another. Indeed, they mingled too freely, for the gods appear in these tales as little
more than immortal adolescents whose tricks and feats, when compared with the
concerns of a Marduk or Jehovah, are infantile. There really was no Greek theology in
the sense that theology provides a coherent and profound explanation of the workings
of both the cosmos and the human heart. Hence, there were no easy answers to
inquiring Greek minds. The result was that ample room was left for a more penetrating
and ultimately more satisfying mode of inquiry. Thus were philosophy and its oldest
offspring, science, born.
The history of all the branches of learning has always been a part of intellectual
history, but the history of science has had a peculiarly…

The first natural philosopher, according to Hellenic tradition, was Thales of Miletus,

who flourished in the 6th century BCE. We know of him only through later accounts,
for nothing he wrote has survived. He is supposed to have predicted a solar eclipse in
585 BCE and to have invented the formal study of geometry in his demonstration of
the bisecting of a circle by its diameter. Most importantly, he tried to explain all
observed natural phenomena in terms of the changes of a single substance, water,
which can be seen to exist in solid, liquid, and gaseous states. What for Thales
guaranteed the regularity and rationality of the world was the innate divinity in all
things that directed them to their divinely appointed ends. From these ideas there
emerged two characteristics of classical Greek science. The first was the view of the
universe as an ordered structure (the Greek kósmos means “order”). The second was
the conviction that this order was not that of a mechanical contrivance but that of an
organism: all parts of the universe had purposes in the overall scheme of things, and
objects moved naturally toward the ends they were fated to serve. This motion toward
ends is called teleology and, with but few exceptions, it permeated Greek as well as
much later science.
Thales inadvertently made one other fundamental contribution to the development of
natural science. By naming a specific substance as the basic element of all matter,
Thales opened himself to criticism, which was not long in coming. His
own disciple, Anaximander, was quick to argue that water could not be the basic
substance. His argument was simple: water, if it is anything, is essentially wet; nothing
can be its own contradiction. Hence, if Thales were correct, the opposite of wet could
not exist in a substance, and that would preclude all of the dry things that are
observed in the world. Therefore, Thales was wrong. Here was the birth of the critical
tradition that is fundamental to the advance of science.
Thales’ conjectures set off an intellectual explosion, most of which was devoted to
increasingly refined criticisms of his doctrine of fundamental matter. Various single
substances were proposed and then rejected, ultimately in favour of a multiplicity of
elements that could account for such opposite qualities as wet and dry, hot and cold.
Two centuries after Thales, most natural philosophers accepted a doctrine of four
elements: earth (cold and dry), fire (hot and dry), water (cold and wet), and air (hot
and wet). All bodies were made from these four.
The presence of the elements only guaranteed the presence of their qualities in
various proportions. What was not accounted for was the form these elements took,
which served to differentiate natural objects from one another. The problem of form
was first attacked systematically by the philosopher and cult leader Pythagoras in the
6th century BCE. Legend has it that Pythagoras became convinced of the primacy
of number when he realized that the musical notes produced by a monochord were in
simple ratio to the length of the string. Qualities (tones) were reduced to quantities
(numbers in integral ratios). Thus was born mathematical physics, for this discovery
provided the essential bridge between the world of physical experience and that of
numerical relationships. Number provided the answer to the question of the origin of
forms and qualities.
Aristotle and Archimedes
Hellenic science was built upon the foundations laid by Thales and Pythagoras. It
reached its zenith in the works of Aristotle and Archimedes. Aristotle represents the
first tradition, that of qualitative forms and teleology. He was himself a biologist whose
observations of marine organisms were unsurpassed until the 19th century. Biology is
essentially teleological—the parts of a living organism are understood in terms of what
they do in and for the organism—and Aristotle’s biological works provided the
framework for the science until the time of Charles Darwin. In physics, teleology is not
so obvious, and Aristotle had to impose it on the cosmos. From Plato, his teacher, he
inherited the theological proposition that the heavenly bodies (stars and planets) are
literally divine and, as such, perfect. They could, therefore, move only in perfect,
eternal, unchanging motion, which, by Plato’s definition, meant perfect circles. The
Earth, being obviously not divine, and inert, was at the centre. From the Earth to the
sphere of the Moon, all things constantly changed, generating new forms and then
decaying back into formlessness. Above the Moon the cosmos consisted
of contiguous and concentric crystalline spheres moving on axes set at angles to one
another (this accounted for the peculiar motions of the planets) and deriving their
motion either from a fifth element that moved naturally in circles or from heavenly
souls resident in the celestial bodies. The ultimate cause of all motion was a prime, or
unmoved, mover (God) that stood outside the cosmos.
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Aristotle was able to make a great deal of sense of observed nature by asking of any
object or process: what is the material involved, what is its form and how did it get
that form, and, most important of all, what is its purpose? What should be noted is
that, for Aristotle, all activity that occurred spontaneously was natural. Hence, the
proper means of investigation was observation. Experiment, that is, altering natural
conditions in order to throw light on the hidden properties and activities of objects,
was unnatural and could not, therefore, be expected to reveal the essence of things.
Experiment was thus not essential to Greek science.
The problem of purpose did not arise in the areas in which Archimedes made his most
important contributions. He was, first of all, a brilliant mathematician whose work on
conic sections and on the area of the circle prepared the way for the later invention of
the calculus. It was in mathematical physics, however, that he made his greatest
contributions to science. His mathematical demonstration of the law of the lever was
as exact as a Euclidean proof in geometry. Similarly, his work on hydrostatics
introduced and developed the method whereby physical characteristics, in this
case specific gravity, which Archimedes discovered, are given mathematical shape and
then manipulated by mathematical methods to yield mathematical conclusions that
can be translated back into physical terms.
In one major area the Aristotelian and the Archimedean approaches were forced into a
rather inconvenient marriage. Astronomy was the dominant physical
science throughout antiquity, but it had never been successfully reduced to a coherent
system. The Platonic-Aristotelian astral religion required that planetary orbits be
circles. But, particularly after the conquests of Alexander the Great had made the
observations and mathematical methods of the Babylonians available to the Greeks,
astronomers found it impossible to reconcile theory and observation. Astronomy then
split into two parts: one was physical and accepted Aristotelian theory in accounting
for heavenly motion, and the other ignored causation and concentrated solely on the
creation of a mathematical model that could be used for computing planetary
positions. Ptolemy, in the 2nd century CE, carried the latter tradition to its highest
point in antiquity in his Hē mathēmatikē syntaxis (“The Mathematical Collection,”
better known under its Greek-Arabic title, Almagest).

Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

Medicine
The Greeks not only made substantial progress in understanding the cosmos but also
went far beyond their predecessors in their knowledge of the human body. Pre-Greek
medicine had been almost entirely confined to religion and ritual. Disease was
considered the result of divine disfavour and human sin, to be dealt with by spells,
prayers, and other propitiatory measures. In the 5th century BCE a revolutionary
change came about that is associated with the name of Hippocrates. It was
Hippocrates and his school who, influenced by the rise of natural philosophy, first
insisted that disease was a natural, not a supernatural, phenomenon. Even maladies as
striking as epilepsy, whose seizures appeared to be divinely caused, were held to
originate in natural causes within the body.
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The height of medical science in antiquity was reached late in the Hellenistic period.
Much work was done at the museum of Alexandria, a research institute set up under
Greek influence in Egypt in the 3rd century BCE to sponsor learning in general. The
heart and the vascular system were investigated, as were the nerves and the brain.
The organs of the thoracic cavity were described, and attempts were made to discover
their functions. It was on these researches, and on his own dissections of apes and
pigs, that the last great physician of antiquity, Galen of Pergamum, based
his physiology. It was, essentially, a tripartite system in which so-called spirits—
natural, vital, and animal—passed respectively through the veins, the arteries, and the
nerves to vitalize the body as a whole. Galen’s attempts to correlate therapeutics with
his physiology were not successful, and so medical practice remained eclectic and a
matter of the physician’s choice. Usually the optimal choice was that propounded by
the Hippocratics, who relied primarily on simple, clean living and the ability of the body
to heal itself.