Gknotes

Given that there are very few appropriate readings for the first part of the course on the history of early Greek science, I thought it might be helpful if I provided you with some (rudimentary) notes on this material. Please be clear about the nature of these notes: they are notes only, not in-depth analysis. At most, they will allow you, (1) to follow more easily some of the early lectures (and, thus, to participate more easily in discussions of this material), and (2) to focus more clearly on the main issues of these lectures in preparation for your tests. The notes are a substitute for neither reflective thought nor class participation.

It is widely believed that scientific thought began, in the Western world, with a 6th century B.C. thinker by the name of Thales. Given that the existence of human beings preceded this date by several millennia, this fact raises several questions. What is a scientific explanation? How does a scientific explanation differ from other kinds of explanation's Did humans attempt to explain their surroundings before the 6th century B.C? If so, what sort of explanation did they provide of their surroundings' Etc. The claim I shall be advancing is that peoples before (and, for that matter, after) the 6th century B.C. did indeed attempt to explain their surroundings, but the explanations were mythopoeic rather than scientific ' A mythopoeic explanation employs myths and poetry and has several features: (1) a preoccupation of intelligence with the practical needs of action in dealing with the world, and (2) the belief in unseen, supernatural powers/forces within the objects of the world which control those objects. In simpler terms, mythopoeic peoples, because their existence was so tenuous, were preoccupied merely with staying alive: their intellectual curiosity, as a result, was practical. Moreover, they believed in animism, the belief that spirits inhabit all objects of the world. To explain objects, then, meant explaining the supernatural spirits that controlled the objects. For this reason, mythopoeic explanations tend to be mystical and/or religious. Scientific explanations differ from these by attempting to explain the world in natural - - as opposed to supernatural -- terms. This is what Thales attempted to do when he maintained that "Everything is made of water."

We will examine, if only briefly, a series of early Greek scientist/philosophers. The easiest way to get a handle on what they said and why they said it is to think of scientific progression in this period as a story. The story revolves around different people attempting to answer two basic questions: (1) What are things made of, and (2) How does change occur? Thales offers the first scientific answer to these questions (well, actually, he provides only a scientific answer to the first question, but these subtleties will be dealt with in class). However, his answers raise problems. Subsequent thinkers pointed out these problems, and then attempted to construct better answers. What follows, them, is a list of Greek scientists, the answers they gave to the two questions listed above, and an indication of what the problems were with their answers. (Of course, this will not make a great deal of sense to you now -- and the names can be a bit of a problem -- but this will all be clarified in time.)

Name	Answer to (1)	Answer to (2)	Problems
Thales	Water	Spirits	(1) Can't explain dry things (2) Non-scientific
Anaximenes	Indefinite	Condensation Rarefaction	(1) nebulous idea (2) logical difficulties
Parmenides	"Logic"	Change does Not occur	(1) and (2) affront to sense-experience
Empedocles	Air, Earth Fire, Water	Love/hate	(1) logical difficulties (2) Non-scientific
Hippocrates	Blood, phlegm yellow/black bile	?	(1) empirical evidence (2) low success/cure rate
Democritus	atoms	self-moving	determinism

The above named thinkers are classified as pre-Socratics, that is, thinkers who preceded Socrates. The reason they have been classified together has less to do with chronology than with common concerns and, despite the wide variety of responses to the two questions mentioned above, a common kind of interest. In general, the pre-Socratics were almost exclusively interested to explain the external world. Socrates, however, was interested almost exclusively with understanding the (non-biological) internal life of individuals: for example, Socrates' primary focus was what we today call ethics, the study of morally correct and incorrect behaviour. In this sense, then, Socrates is not a scientist per se. Indeed, in a sense, Socrates rejected science since he , quite correctly, saw that if Democritus was right about the nature of the world, including the nature of human beings, then ethics could not exist, at least as we normally understand it. This calls for some explanation. According to Democritus, everything -- including human beings -- was simply a certain combination of atoms. The behaviour of these atoms was controlled entirely -- or determined -- by certain mechanical laws. This is the philosophical doctrine of determinism, which we will study in some detail a bit later. The point to remember here is that if all our actions are determined, then we have no control over our actions. (We hear this sort of thing being said frequently in law courts: "He couldn't help doing what he did because he is insane." or "The fact that she is a thief is entirely the result of her upbringing." and so on. The point is that if you can't help doing what you do, then you can't be held responsible for your actions. (Imagine if someone were to hold a gun to your head and instruct you to do some action: if you do not, you will be killed. In cases such as this, some/many/all would claim that you are not responsible for the action because you could not help or avoid doing it.) Ethics, however, appears at least to assume that you do have choices (free-will); that you have the option to do the morally correct or incorrect thing and that you deserve to be praised or blamed for your actions as a result. Since Socrates wanted to discuss these issues, in a sense, he simply rejected science. This raises the question of why we would bother discussing him in a course dealing with the nature of science. The answer is twofold: (1) because he raises concerns with the scientific outlook -- in this case, determinism -- which we shall be dealing with later, and (2) because his student, Plato, did incorporate Socratic thought into a scientific (or, some would say, quasi-scientific) view of the world.

Plato wrote a number of "dialogues." In many of them, Socrates appears as the main speaker, and as the spokesperson for Plato's views. One of your readings is a short selection from his most famous work, the Republic. In this selection, Plato tells us three ... stories," all of which outline, in general terms, his theories of metaphysics (the study of what things essentially are) and epistemology (the study of what we know and how we can know it). These three stories are: (1) the Analogy of the Sun to the Form of the Good, (2) the Image of the Divided line, and (3) the Allegory of the Cave. In many respects, Plato is diametrically opposed to the pre-Socratics we have studied thus far (with the exception of Parmenides). Besides being determinists, the pre-Socratics, as represented by Democritus, were also materialists, mechanists, and reductionists. (All of these terms will be explained in class.) That is, Democritus believed that the most real thing in the universe -- the "basic stuff of reality" -- was something physical whose actions were completely determined by mechanical laws. And, moreover, he felt that to understand all the individual parts of something would explain fully the whole entity. (Think of the universe as analogous to a clock: all its parts are physical or material, and its behaviour is determined by the mechanical operations of its parts; its gears, levers, etc.) Plato disagreed on every single aspect of this view. According to Plato, the basic stuff of the universe was something non-material, an idea -- a definition really -- which Plato referred to as Forms, the most basic one being the Form of the Good. All three stories he relays in this selection from the Republic attempt to explain this idea. In (1) he says that, just as the Sun, by its light in the physical realm, is necessary for vision or sight, so the Form of the Good, by its reason in the invisible/non-physical realm, is necessary for knowledge. In (2) he describes different levels of knowledge and reality. This is explained in the following diagram. The point is that as you go further "up" the line, things get more and mpre real and knowable.

The third story, the Allegory of the Cave, attempts to explain the Divided line in less abstract terms. The people chained in the cave, and looking at the wall actually see nothing but images which they mistakenly think are real. The person who breaks free (a reference to Socrates) begins the arduous process of attaining knowledge as he goes through all the various levels of cognition and reality. When he sees the things producing the images, he is at level B, still a long way from both reality and knowledge. As he ascends out of the cave (symbolizing his progression out of the physical, visible realm to the transcendent, non-physical, non- visible realm) he is blinded by the brightness of reality and has to adjust himself slowly: that is, he must first engage in hypothetical thinking about thought images before he can "view directly" the Sun (once again symbolically representing the Form of the Good), thus attaining both knowledge and reality. One (moral) point which is added in this story in the moral obligation of the person who has attained knowledge to share that vision with the rest of humankind, even though they will not appreciate it. Indeed, the person of knowledge is likely to be persecuted, just as Socrates himself was persecuted by being prosecuted, convicted, and put to death by his fellow Athenians.

One of the main things to remember about Aristotle is that he was a synthesizer of thought. Indeed, this is clear even in the short (very difficult) selection you had to read. Aristotle's method is to begin by considering what others have said on the subject. Thus, he begins this part of the Physics by considering what the pre- Socratics and Plato had to say about the nature of reality. He points out that the pre-Socratics took reality to be something material, while Plato took it to be something completely non- material. Aristotle continues by arguing that while both views have an element of truth -- and that Plato's view is more correct than the pre-Socratic's view -- both are incorrect. Reality, according to Aristotle, is neither just matter nor just form; it is actually a combination of form and matter. That is, reality is just that which you perceive, this person, that chair, and so on, all of which are a combination of some material (out of which it is made) and some form (the particular shape it has). This is why, when explaining the mature of causation -- and according to Aristotle, to know something is to be able to specify its causes -- we have to speak both of a material cause and a formal cause. Consider the example of a bronze statue of Zeus. The material cause will be bronze, and the formal cause will be its Zeus-like shape. But this is not the whole causation story. We also want to know who (or what) made the statue; this is what Aristotle calls the efficient cause. This, of course, will be the sculptor. However, this is not the whole picture either, according to Aristotle, for the above account leaves out an integral feature of things. Namely, to understand fully the cause of something, we need to know not only what material it is made of, what form it has and who made it, but why it was made. Presumably, the sculptor has some reason for constructing a bronze statue of Zeus, e.g., to pay homage to him. Not to account for this feature of the object is, according to Aristotle, to miss something vitally important. Aristotle calls this the final cause, that for the sake of which something is done. Now, it is not at all odd to explain human action in these terms. Indeed, it is often one of the first questions we ask people when the have committed some action (e.g., 'Why didn't you study for your exam?'). In this sense, then, Aristotle's theory seems pretty commonplace. What takes his theory into the realm of the novel is that Aristotle believed that all events, not just human action, were teleological (telos = final end or purpose); that is, everything in nature has a final cause. This belief had a tremendous impact on the history of scientific thought. As we shall see, when we discuss the early history of astronomy, a teleological view of nature shaped scientific thought. Or, rather, it did shape scientific thought until the time of the "Scientific Revolution" when people such as Galileo rejected final cause, thus rejecting a teleological view of nature. Indeed, the formation of "modern" science," as opposed to "ancient science," is, in large part, the struggle to reject an Aristotelian view of teleological nature.