Greek Philosophy and the Rise of Western Science
The first thinkers ever to ask, in anything
like their modern form, such radical and demythologised questions as ‘what is
the world made of?’ and ‘how does it change?’ were the Pre-Socratic
philosophers of Ancient Greece (operating between roughly 600 and 400BCE).
Their intellectual ingenuity and daring remains one of the great landmarks in
human achievement. It gave rise to an atomic theory, Pythagoras’ Theorem, and
geometric techniques good enough to obtain a reasonable estimate of the
circumference of a (spherical) Earth.
Nevertheless
the Greeks did not go on to invent experimental science. This is partly because their philosophy became dominated by two
patterns of thinking both extremely ingenious, but neither propitious for
science:
-
Plato’s idealism, the conviction that
the perfect abstraction is more real and worthier of study than a physical
entity which may crudely imitate the abstraction, and
-
Aristotle’s theory of causation, which
included not only material causes (what things are made of) and efficient
causes (what past events affected them) but also formal causes (to what pattern
the matter in them conforms) and final causes (towards what purpose or end are
things being attracted).
To say that Plato and Aristotle of
themselves do not lead to experimental science is not however to deny their
enormous contribution in framing and training the patterns of thought of the
Western world from their own time until now. For instance, Aristotle’s texts on
logic, metaphysics and the structure of the world were a major spur to intellectual development in
the late Middle Ages. Importantly, these great Aristotelian texts entered Western Europe through the work of
Islamic commentators.
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link | Feedback | Contributed by: Dr. Christopher Southgate
Source: God, Humanity and the Cosmos (T&T Clark, 1999)
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