Greek Science After Aristotle


Book Description

In his previous volume in this series, Early Greek Science: Thales to Aristotle, G. E. R. Lloyd pointed out that although there is no exact equivalent to our term ‘science’ in Greek, Western science may still be said to originate with the Greeks. In this second volume, Greek Science after Aristotle, the author continues his discussion of the fundamental Greek contributions to science, drawing on the richer literary and archaeological sources for the period after Aristotle. Particular attention is paid to the Greeks’ conception of the inquiries they were engaged in, and to the interrelations of science and technology. In the first part of the book the author considers the two hundred years after the death of Aristotle, devoting separate chapters to mathematics, astronomy and biology. He goes on to deal with Ptolemy and Galen and concludes with a discussion of later writers and of the problems raised by the question of the decline of ancient science.




Early Greek Science


Book Description

In this new series leading classical scholars interpret afresh the ancient world for the modern reader. They stress those questions and institutions that most concern us today: the interplay between economic factors and politics, the struggle to find a balance between the state and the individual, the role of the intellectual. Most of the books in this series centre on the great focal periods, those of great literature and art: the world of Herodotus and the tragedians, Plato and Aristotle, Cicero and Caesar, Virgil, Horace and Tacitus. This study traces Greek science through the work of the Pythagoreans, the Presocratic natural philosophers, the Hippocratic writers, Plato, the fourth-century B.C. astronomers and Aristotle. G. E. R. Lloyd also investigates the relationships between science and philosophy and science and medicine; he discusses the social and economic setting of Greek science; he analyses the motives and incentives of the different groups of writers.




Aristotle on Earlier Greek Psychology


Book Description

This volume is the first in English to provide a full, systematic investigation into Aristotle's criticisms of earlier Greek theories of the soul from the perspective of his theory of scientific explanation. Some interpreters of the De Anima have seen Aristotle's criticisms of Presocratic, Platonic, and other views about the soul as unfair or dialectical, but Jason W. Carter argues that Aristotle's criticisms are in fact a justified attempt to test the adequacy of earlier theories in terms of the theory of scientific knowledge he advances in the Posterior Analytics. Carter proposes a new interpretation of Aristotle's confrontations with earlier psychology, showing how his reception of other Greek philosophers shaped his own hylomorphic psychology and led him to adopt a novel dualist theory of the soul–body relation. His book will be important for students and scholars of Aristotle, ancient Greek psychology, and the history of the mind–body problem.







A Guide to Greek Thought


Book Description

The philosophers, historians and scientists of ancient Greece inaugurated and nourished the tradition of Western thought. This volume, drawn from the reference work Greek Thought: A Guide to Classical Knowledge, gives fresh insight into the originality of major figures and the legacy of important currents of thought. Aristotle, Democritus, Empedocles, Epicurus, Euclid, Galen, Heraclitus, Herodotus, Hippocrates, Parmenides, Plato, Plotinus, Plutarch, Polybius, Protagoras, Ptolemy, Pyrrhon, Socrates, Thucydides, Xenophon and Zeno. The currents of thoughts include: the Academy, Aristotelianism, cynicism, Hellenism and Christianity, Hellenism and Judaism, the Milesians, Platonism, Pythagoreanism, scepticism, Sophists and stoicism.




The Greek Pursuit of Knowledge


Book Description

Ancient Greek thought is the essential wellspring from which the intellectual, ethical, and political civilization of the West draws and to which, even today, we repeatedly return. In this volume drawn from the reference work Greek Thought: A Guide to Classical Knowledge, major scholars take up basic topics in philosophy and science, offering an account of the extraordinary explosion of desire for knowledge in the classical Greek world.




Greek Thought


Book Description

In more than 60 essays by an international team of scholars, this volume explores the full breadth and reach of Greek thought, investigating what the Greeks knew as well as what they thought they knew, and what they believed, invented, and understood about the possibilities of knowing. 65 color illustrations. Maps.




Greek and Roman Philosophy After Aristotle


Book Description

A concise selection from the standard philosophical works written after the death of Aristotle to the close of the third century, which includes the writings of seminal figures from early Christian thought. Eminent scholar Jason Saunders shows how philosophers from the Hellenistic Age greatly influenced early Christian teachings.




Greek Science of the Hellenistic Era


Book Description

We all want to understand the world around us, and the ancient Greeks were the first to try and do so in a way we can properly call scientific. Their thought and writings laid the essential foundations for the revivals of science in medieval Baghdad and renaissance Europe. Now their work is accessible to all, with this invaluable introduction to c.100 scientific authors active from 320 BCE to 230 CE. The book begins with an outline of a new socio-political model for the development and decline of Greek science, followed by eleven chapters that cover the main disciplines: * the science which the Greeks saw as fundamental - mathematics * astronomy * astrology and geography * mechanics * optics and pneumatics * the non-mathematical sciences of alchemy, biology, medicine and 'psychology'. Each chapter contains an accessible introduction on the origins and development of the topic in question, and all the authors are set in context with brief biographies.




The Origins of Ancient Greek Science


Book Description

This book examines the origins of ancient Greek science using the vehicles of blood, blood vessels, and the heart. Careful attention to biomedical writers in the ancient world, as well as to the philosophical and literary work of writers prior to the Hippocratic authors, produce an interesting story of how science progressed and the critical context in which important methodological questions were addressed. The end result is an account that arises from debates that are engaged in and "solved" by different writers. These stopping points form the foundation for Harvey and for modern philosophy of biology. Author Michael Boylan sets out the history of science as well as a critical evaluation based upon principles in the contemporary canon of the philosophy of science—particularly those dealing with the philosophy of biology.