The Revolutions of Wisdom: Studies in the Claims and Practice of Ancient Greek Science (Sather Classical Lectures, 52, Band 52) - Softcover

Lloyd, G. E. R.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0520067428 ISBN 13: 9780520067424

Verlag: University of California Press, 1989

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G. E. R. Lloyd is Professor of Ancient Philosophy and Science at Cambridge University and Master of Darwin College.

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The Revolutions of Wisdom: Studies in the Claims and Practice of Ancient Greek Science

By G.E.R. Lloyd

University of California Press

Copyright 1989 G.E.R. Lloyd
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0520067428
Chapter One
The Displacements of Mythology

Jane Harrison thrilled to the dark shapes she thought she could discern behind the bright splendours of the masterpieces of Greek literature.1 E. R. Dodds, in his preeminently distinguished contribution to the Sather series, began from the puzzlement that the Greeks had been thought to lack something of "the awareness of mystery" and "the ability to penetrate to the deeper, less conscious levels of human experience."2 The irrational then and subsequently has been much pursuedin classical studies, in social anthropology, in philosophy, and in psychologybut has proved, predictably, an elusive quarry, escaping clear characterisation, let alone elucidation.

I shall certainly not attempt, in this set of studies, to reopen the whole of this vast and ill-defined dossier. My aim is a more limited one, with a narrower focus, though it is still perhaps ambitious enough,

J. E. Harrison 1925, pp. 86f: "I mention these ritual dances, this ritual drama, this bridge between art and life, because it is things like these that I was all my life blindly seeking. A thing has little charm for me unless it has on it the patina of age. Great things in literature, Greek plays for example, I most enjoy when behind their bright splendours I see moving darker and older shapes. That must be my apologia pro vita mea ."

On p. 1 of his 1951 Dodds wrote: "To a generation whose sensibilities have been trained on African and Aztec art, and on the work of such men as Modigliani and Henry Moore, the art of the Greeks, and Greek culture in general, is apt to appear lacking in the awareness of mystery and in the ability to penetrate to the deeper, less conscious levels of human experience."

since it concerns the invention of the categorythe ancient Greek categoryof the rational. Acknowledging, but leaving to one side, much of the material that Dodds and others collected to illustrate the irrational in Greek culture at every period, I wish to focus attention on one of the citadels of presumed Greek rationality (presumed by many of them, as well as by some of us), namely, what they called the "inquiry concerning nature." My plan, broadly, is to investigate where, or if, it may be said to break new ground in the understanding of the world, and where, on the contrary, what it shares with its antecedents is more impressive than the points at which it diverges from them. The character of the "science" on offer in the ancient world is one of our targets, then, though less with a view to matching their science against ours (to vindicate or to undermine the claim that they were doing science ) than to explore the complexities of ancient disputes and confrontations. We shall try to make some sense of some highly perplexing and challenging phenomena, though the perplexities and challenges are ones that the anthropologists, used to dealing with problems concerning the nature of "primitive thought," probably appreciate more fully than the majority of classicists.

We may take heart for the assault on Greek science from the realisation that scientific thought as a whole and, especially, the nature of scientific inventiveness have latterly come increasingly to be recognised as less translucent, more complex, puzzling, and problematic, than many of Dodds' generation and before took them to be.3 But while that realisation makes our inquiry easier in one respect, in that it releases us from one set of preconceptions concerning the purity of the scientific enterprise, in another it makes it harder, since the very criteria of science are now more highly contested than ever. My chief concern in

Among the fundamental contributions to this debate have been Popper 1935/1968, 1963, Quine 1953/1961, 1960, 1969, Kuhn 1962/1970, 1977, 1983, Feyerabend 1962, 1975, 1978, 1981a, 1981b, Habermas 1968/1978, 1971/1974, Hesse 1974, 1980, S. B. Barnes 1974, 1977, Putnam 1975a, 1975b, 1981, 1983, Lakatos 1976, 1978a, 1978b, Bloor 1976, Laudan 1977, Holton 1978, Van Fraassen 1980a, Newton-Smith 1981, Hollis and Lukes, edd., 1982, Hacking 1983.

what follows is not directly with those current controversies in the philosophy of science, though I shall have occasion to join battle where they impinge on the assessment of ancient investigations. Rather, my main problem is the characterisation of those ancient investigations themselves, particularly in relation to their background. For while those who engage in them often make extravagant claims on their behalf (as also do some modern commentators), just how far such claims can be sustained and just how far the principles and ideals they stated were implemented in practice will be among our major preoccupations. To put our problem in its most general terms: Was there a revolution of wisdom with regard to the understanding of nature? What kind of revolution was there?

In the chapters that follow I shall address some very general questions concerning the nature of Greek inquiry and speculation about the physical world, where I have chosen to concentrate not on such traditional topics as the experimental method but, rather, on certain characteristics that relate to, and reveal, the ancient investigators' own aims and ambitions, even their self-image, their theory of what they were doing and their actual practice and the matches and mismatches between the two. We shall consider the tension between tradition and authority on the one hand, and innovativeness on the other, broaching here issues in the wider social background to the intellectual changes with which we are concerned. We shall study the aggressions and bluff of dogmatism, but alsoto set against thatthe scrupulous avoidance of the dogmatic and the willingness to acknowledge failures and ignorance, and then again the turning of the anti-dogmatic into a conventional stance or even pose. We shall discuss the development, indeed the invention, of the category of the metaphorical, and again the tension between the desire to exclude this from, and its continued use in, the inquiry concerning nature. We shall examine the extent to which Greek science remained purely qualitative in characterwhere we shall discuss both the use of measurement and its abuse, that is, the mystifications involved in some appeals to it and to the quantitative. Finally we shall tackle the use of idealisations and simplifications, and again their abuse in the discounting or eliding of parts of what is there to be explained.

In this opening chapter I want to take certain concrete topics which will provide test-cases to illuminate the nature and the strength of the challenge, from the side of logos , to some traditional attitudes and patterns of belief. If we consider some phenomena that lie at or near the centre of most naive or sophisticated configurations of the irrational, we may be able to see to what extent the inquiry concerning nature offered an alternative to what had long been accepted. It is not that that inquiry was necessarily obliged to present any such alternative in relation to those phenomena; it may not even have been well advised to try to do so. Yet in the controversy between would-be science...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of California Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1989
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0520067428
• ISBN 13: 9780520067424
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 484
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Akademie; orders-books@degruyter.com; ; Genthinerstr. 13; Berlin; 10785; Deutschland