1.10 The Science

At the end of the fourth century, a Greek had an adequate vocabulary to describe a man as architect, mathematical, meteorologist, medical Botanist, but could not translate the modern word "scientist" than to say "philosopher" or "physical". If he knew Aristotle, he would have had a precise word for "science", ossia episteme, and a clear conception of what distinguished science from other forms of mental activities. A scientist does not know just because something is so, that is, as revealed by the experience, but he also knows why it is so. He has acquired through reason "the knowledge of the causes and first principles (Metaphysics,I,1). This is the wisdom, sophia, and therefore its possessor is a philosopher, one who loves wisdom. The philosopher and the scientist were identical in interests and objectives, most of the times also in people. In the first period this identity was complete, but with increasing knowledge increased specialists and a certain divergence of interests. There were philosophers, come Socrate, who rejected science as a lower employment; the other side were men of medicine or astronomy that showed little interest in the metaphysical and epistemological implications of their studies, oppure ethics or aesthetics. But among them there was never a real break.

At the end of the Archaic period, the Greeks had amassed a considerable body of knowledge in the field of agronomy, human anatomy and physiology, dell'ingegneria, metallurgy, mineralogy, astronomy and navigation. We ignore almost everything on account of the men who made the observations and the information conveyed, and also the way in which they worked, probably because they were craftsmen who learned the old way and taught to practice, not reading and writing. The material results, however, are widely attested in the ceramic, architecture, sculpture, in the set and in the variety of food, in the development of navigation, and although much had been inherited from previous civilizations, was certainly very creation of the Greek. But interjected a gap between theory and practice, namely, said in modern terms, a break between pure and applied science. Knowledge was a good, the wisdom of the supreme good, but its purpose was to know, not to do; understanding of man and nature by contemplative , rather than subdue and transform the nature, achieve greater efficiency in energy use or increase production.

The extreme position was taken up by Plato. Per lui, worldwide experience, essendo transient, imperfect, could not be the object of real knowledge, which was to be paid to the Ideas or Forms that were eternal and real. He then was fundamentally opposed to any science which is not reducible to mathematics, in particular geometry. Plutarch reports that he criticized those mathematicians who applied to the duplication of the cube building material models, because "it gets lost and destroys the good geometry, as it is reported back to the things of the senses instead of being directed to aim high and to things eternal and incorporeal ". The same Plato wrote in the Republic of those who are "looking upwards" to study the heavens: "If we want to address the innate intelligence of the soul to its proper use by means of a genuine use of astronomy, proceed as we do in geometry, by means of problems, and we will leave aside the starry sky ". It 'hard though Plato himself to take this warning letter. Of the Pythagoreans then we can say with certainty that they discovered the mathematical relationships between musical notes by pure contemplation or mystical revelation.

Not long before the birth of Plato had been established on the island of Cos the Hippocratic school of medicine, a research organization that in the half century from 440 to the 390 performed prodigies of observation and rigorous mathematical analysis of experimental, recorded in works such as epidemics or small treatise on the "sacred disease" (l’epilessia). In the next century, Aristotle and his disciples reached levels even higher, perhaps in the work of biology, petrology and physiological psychology. Astronomers and mathematicians continued to stay with the nose and to improve their math so that their instruments. Their conclusions, summarized and included in a book to which the Arabs later gave the name of Ptolemy's Almagest, an Alexandrian of the second century A.D., retained their decisive authority until the discoveries of Copernicus and Galileo did not do justice. The military engineers, especially those who worked under Philip and Alexander, and then the first Macedonian rulers of Egypt, invented weapons of siege and other mechanisms conducting systematic research on materials and physical processes. In experimental physics were made considerable progress, So that Hero of Alexandria, in his Pneumatics, probably written in the first century A.D., could describe nine different mechanical devices operated from the air heated by steam or.

The Hippocratic practice of auscultation of the heart beats, Euclid's Elements, the discovery of buoyancy in fluids, the treatise on conic sections written by his younger contemporary Apollonius of Perga, the evaluation of the diameter of the Earth, calculated by Eratosthenes with an error of a few hundred miles, the calculation of the precession of the equinoxes due to Hipparchus, toys steam due to Heron, All these achievements were not equaled in Europe for other 1500 age.

The ancient medicine did not progress and he remained at the level reached by the Hippocratic, as Galen of Pergamon, the last great figure of antiquity, which after five centuries later was not, while a lot of practical knowledge and many writings were forgotten by time.

It can be concluded that astronomy, theoretical physics and mathematics flourished much longer applied sciences, and that all the sciences experienced a lull while the ancient world still had many centuries of life in front of him. Perhaps, from the practical point of view, some really innovative ideas were beyond the technical capabilities spread of Greek society, and this may explain why Heron, with his knowledge of pneumatics, could not do more than build ingenious toys. And no one had the idea, much simpler, to transfer the well-known principle that was moving sailboats other essential uses, building, eg, a mulino a wind.

All this comes with the utmost with maximum clarity in the school of Aristotle. Although his debt to Plato is evident in all his work, Aristotle rejected the forms of the master in favor of a radical empiricism. What one needs to understand, according to Aristotle, is the world of experience, and it must start. He had an energy and intellectual curiosity never overcome and to which few men of his time came. He focused his greatest efforts on the biology, matter that occupies nearly a third of the Aristotelian corpus, and his researches were continued by Theophrastus, who succeeded him at the head of the Lyceum, as it was called the school he founded in Athens in 335 or immediately after. Theophrastus was followed by Strato whose interests had turned to physics rather than biology.

At the time of the death of Strato, around 268, Greek science had arrived at the threshold of modernity, particularly in the growing appreciation of experimentalism. But although the Greek science linger on the threshold of modernity for about three centuries (in Heron's Pneumatics there are direct quotes from Strato), it is not stepped through and in the end he left it completely. What was missing was a Baconian spirit that had driven regularly and consistently from speculation to empirical research, practical application. Aristotle and Theophrastus had a vast knowledge of animal nutrition and plant growth, but neither they nor their constituents drew the conclusions that would lead to selective breeding in agriculture and pastoralism. Their interest was satisfied when they had understood the purpose, function, the purposes of nature.

In the second half of the fifth century, Leucippus and Democritus had developed an atomic theory of matter, which was later adopted by Epicurus and found that in the long poem De Rerum Natura of Lucretius, in the first century BC, his best-known written expression. Ma l’atomismo, although debated for centuries, never entered the world of greek science. The science and Greek philosophy were "aristocratic" in the sense that developed among the upper classes for whom the only occupations were acceptable practices the art of war and government, poetry and oratory. When Aristotle was concerned with practical arts, he worked and studied his way habitual, empirical, systematic. However, they belonged to a lower order of studies, a techne because it could not be a science, an episteme. A techne was a quality to make rational direct practical, maybe owned by men also famous as a sculptor Phidias, or statuary Polyclitus. The fact remains that the Greek key technology was established at the beginning of the Archaic period, in agriculture as well as in manufacturing, and then there were few major changes. The list of scientific inventions Greek is very short. Evidently the society as a whole lacked the mentality and the necessary impetus for groped systematically to achieve greater efficiency and productivity. In fact, the central problem of the history of mankind, the energy to be used in manufacturing and construction civilian and military, problem solved scientifically that if he could give a great impetus to the technological and economic development of the ancient world, in fact he was never warned, due to the use of massive force-slave labor. Not even a handy man as Vitruvius, that was not a philosopher but an engineer and architect (someone is given to the following Caesar's conquest of Gaul in), reveals the slightest awareness of the possibility of technological progress. Nel suo De Architectura, written in Latin, probably at the very beginning of the Christian era, more or less at the time of Hero, summarizes the most advanced technical knowledge as well as the Greek they were handed down through the centuries in written texts and practice.