On the origins of Science

Another thing I found whilst clearing out stuff recently was my BA dissertation. Usually I dislike things I’ve written. Often I develop a deep loathing of them within hours of submitting them and this one was no exception. However after leaving it for a few years there are elements of this that I like. If we were to re-write it, it would be a lot different, but the skeleton of the dissertation would be intact.

Aristotle. Photo from joaobambu.

What I initially planned to write about was the origin of science in Greece. My approach to my dissertation was quite mechanical. The word limit was 12,000 words, so that worked out at an Introduction, Conclusion and then four chapters with an average length of 2000 words each. I thought to write a biography of the birth of Natural Philosophy. Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes and finally Pythagoras would fill out the four central chapters and then conclusions, and possibly even a coherent argument might magically happen. To show the dissertation was feasible the university set us a task in the second year of writing a draft chapter for it. I wrote on Pythagoras which was both a very good and very bad idea. It was by writing this chapter that a research question magically happened. Yes I suppose I could have written about triangles and musical harmonies, but Pythagoras and his followers were much more interesting than that. The word followers really was a giveaway. Daniel Dennett or Peter Singer might be immensely influential, but they don’t have a secret society following their teachings. Or if they do then I don’t know about it, though I suppose if I did know about it it wouldn’t be much of a secret society…

Anyway, regardless of all that, Pythagoras did have people following philosophy and living together as a community. I think there’s an intriguing pop history book to be written on Pythagoreanism. The combination of mathematics and mysticism is a compelling background. In addition you have the tension between the secret teachings of Pythagoras and the silence around his sect and the rise of the Pythagoreans as a political bloc in the colonies of Magna Graecia. The draft chapter I handed in wasn’t so much the what of Pythagoras but more the why? For all the modern harking back the his theorem, could you even describe his philosophy as science? Why did people argue over this cosmology? How did it relate to the intensely superstitious ancient world? So it ended up being a bad starting point for the dissertation because it was plain that Pythagoras was far too late for some of the interesting questions I was pondering. Instead I ended up with a different layout, which I still like.

Chapters 1 and 6 were still the Introduction and Conclusion. However while most histories of pre-Socratic philosophy start with Thales, I started with Homer and Hesiod. I think the orthodox position has a tendency to over-emphasise that attitude that in 6th century BC Miletos BOOM! Philosophy starts and starts rolling onward to modern science. My later chapters on Anaximander and Anaximenes tried to show that there really wasn’t a relentless upward path. Anaximander was a genius comparable with Archimedes, Newton or Einstein. Anaximenes was good. He was intelligent, but he was never in the same league as Anaximander. It’s the questions in the earlier chapters of the dissertation, if not the answers, that I like.

Homer and Hesiod do not typically appear in discussions of ancient science. Homer’s work was usually about the interplay between Gods and men. Hesiod’s big cosmological statement, the Theogony, it a long family tree of personifications of forces as Gods. By referring back to the divine neither are remotely scientific, but I thought that they were essential to include because philosophy didn’t spring from nowhere. I did misrepresent the mainstream position slightly above. If you read recent articles, particularly stuff by GER Lloyd, then you do see that there is acknowledgement of the society that the first philosophers came from. It’s more the books that are dated. Nevertheless I’m am proud of Chapter three in my dissertation, the one before Anaximander, because it isn’t about Thales.

You’d expect it to be. Thales is the guy credited with inventing philosophy. None of his work survives directly but it’s possible to reconstruct some of what he said from references by later authors. It appears that he argued that the universe grew from a seed, or arche. This seed he said was water and everything else came from it. He also suggested that earthquakes were caused by the Earth shifted on it base of water. He didn’t remove Gods from the world. For most of the philosophers there remained a sense of the divine and its doubtful many argued that they didn’t exist. Yet what Thales did was for the first time set up a general cause for an effect. Earthquakes were no longer a matter of Poseidon having being annoyed by a particular town, but simply a natural event. So why not a chapter on Thales?

Because Thales wasn’t just a philosopher, he was also politician. He was one of the citizens of a Greek polis which was 50% community and 50% argument. So I wrote the third chapter on Thales and Solon.

Solon isn’t traditionally considered a philosopher in the same sense as Thales .He is known for his political reform of Athens rather than for any scientific speculation. That, I think, is an anachronistic view of the past. Anaximander considered justice to be a natural force, just like gravity. From the works of Homer and others, it’s clear that they saw justice as one of the workings of fate and something that could not be avoided. Political reorganisation was about order in the state, just as cosmology was about order in nature. As people lived within the world, there was perhaps less sense of a divide between the social and physical worlds than we have today.

Like many of my ideas it needs work, but this is something I’d like to return to. Examining the ancient past and awarding marks for how advanced societies were is rather dull and pointless. Examining the relationship between science and society, finding out why philosophy happened, I think is much more interesting. I won’t be putting the dissertation online, the answers I have are all varying shades of wrong, but at least some of the questions were interesting. —–