The origin of the history of science in classical antiquity

Leonid Zhmud3-11-017966-0, 978-3-11-017966-8

This is the first comprehensive study of what remains of the writings of Aristotle’s student Eudemus of Rhodes on the history of the exact sciences. These fragments are crucial to our understanding of the content, form, and goal of the Peripatetic historiography of science.
The first part of the book presents an analysis of those trends in Presocratic, Sophistic and Platonic thought that contributed to the development of the history of science. The second part provides a detailed study of Eudemus’ writings in their relationship with the scientific literature of his time, Aristotelian philosophy and the other historiographic genres practiced at the Lyceum: biography, medical and natural-philosophical doxography. Although Peripatetic historiography of science failed in establishing itself as a continuous genre, it greatly contributed both to the birth of the Arabic medieval historiography of science and to the development of this genre in Europe in the 16th-18th centuries.

---

Table of contents :
Contents……Page 10
Works, quoted by the abbreviated title……Page 12
1. The historiography of science in the 16th–18th centuries……Page 14
2. The historiography of science in Antiquity……Page 23
3. Greek notions of science and progress……Page 29
1. Prõtoi eûretaí: gods, heroes, men……Page 36
2. Heurematography and the ‘Greek miracle’……Page 42
3. Inventors and imitators. Greece and the Orient……Page 47
1. The invention of técnh……Page 58
2. The theory of the origin of medicine……Page 67
3. Archytas and Isocrates……Page 73
4. Why is mathematics useful?……Page 84
5. From ‘progress’ to ‘perfection’……Page 90
1. Plato as architect of mathematical sciences?……Page 95
2. The Catalogue of geometers……Page 102
3. Mathematics at the Academy……Page 113
4. Plato on science and scientific directorship……Page 117
5. The theory and history of science in the Academy……Page 121
1. Greek science in the late fourth century BC……Page 130
2. Aristotelian theory of science and the Peripatetic historiographical project ……Page 135
3. History in the Lyceum……Page 146
4. The aims of the historiographical project……Page 153
5. Eudemus’ history of science……Page 160
6. Doxography: between systematics and history……Page 166
1. Eudemus of Rhodes……Page 179
2. The History of Geometry: on a quest for new evidence……Page 182
3. The Catalogue of geometers: from Eudemus to Proclus……Page 192
4. Early Greek geometry according to Eudemus……Page 204
5. Teleological progressivism……Page 223
1. The fragment of Eudemus’ History of Arithmetic……Page 227
2. Aristoxenus: On Arithmetic……Page 231
3. The origin of number……Page 237
1. Eudemus’ History of Astronomy and its readers……Page 241
2. Thales and Anaximander……Page 251
3. Physical and mathematical astronomies……Page 263
4. Anaxagoras. The Pythagoreans……Page 268
5. Oenopides of Chios……Page 273
6. From Meton to Eudoxus. ‘Saving the phenomena’……Page 280
1. The decline of the historiography of science……Page 290
2. Biography and doxography……Page 306
3. From inventio to translatio artium: scheme and reality……Page 310
Sources……Page 322
Bibliography……Page 325
General index……Page 334