I studied Greek philosophy in college and graduate school and wrote my Ph.D. dissertation on Plato. In response to the environmental crisis, first widely recognized in the 1960s, I turned my philosophical attention to that contemporary challenge, which, with the advent of climate change, has by now proved to be humanity’s greatest. I taught the world’s first course in environmental ethics at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point in 1971 and, with a handful of other philosophers, helped build a literature in this new field over the course of the next decade—a literature that has subsequently grown exponentially. With Greek Natural Philosophy, I rekindled the romance with my first love.
I wrote
Greek Natural Philosophy: The Presocratics and Their Importance for Environmental Philosophy
This book persuasively answers our question why science originated exactly when and where it did: the advent of a unique method of writing, the Greek alphabet, in the context of cosmopolitan democratic societies.
As a result, Greek culture underwent a transition from “orality” to “literacy.” And with that revolution in communications technology came a rewiring of human consciousness. Literacy fostered individual rather than community identity and abstract conceptual rather than concrete narrative thinking. These are the necessary conditions of science as opposed to myth.
Individual thinkers, liberated from the self-proclaimed divinely inspired myth makers, wrote down bold theories about the stuff, forces, and laws of nature, which were available to other individual thinkers not by word of mouth, but in stable visual form, thus inspiring them to formulate better theories.
One of the most original and penetrating thinkers in Greek studies describes the transformation from oral culture to literacy in classical times and reflects upon its continued meaning for us today.
"Fresh insights into the orality-literacy shift in human consciousness from one who has long been studying this shift in ancient Greece and has now brought his vast learning and reflections to bear on our own times. This book is for a wide audience and calls for thoroughly rethinking current views on language, thought, and society from classical scholarship through modern philosophy, anthropology, and poststructuralism."-Walter J. Ong
A renowned historian of science, Clagett carries the story of Greek science forward all the way to the sixth century CE—a span of 1200 years. From that point in time, Greek science passed into the hands of Islamic scholars who advanced it further, especially the mathematical sciences.
This book is not, like ours, organized chronologically and developmentally but according to modern scientific domains—biology and medicine, mathematics, physics, and astronomy. And it focuses on specific scientific inquiries, while we focus on more general and fundamental things like ontology (what exists), cosmology (the overall structure of the universe), the laws of nature, and the drivers of change and motion.
This book is thus a complement to ours in its wide historical sweep and in what it highlights.
Greek Science in Antiquity is a comprehensive book written by Marshall Clagett that explores the scientific advancements made by ancient Greeks. The book covers a wide range of topics, including mathematics, astronomy, mechanics, and medicine, and provides a detailed account of the theories and discoveries made by Greek scientists from the 6th century BCE to the 5th century CE. The book begins by examining the early Greek philosophers and their contributions to the development of science, including Thales, Pythagoras, and Aristotle. It then delves into the mathematical achievements of the Greeks, such as the invention of geometry and the discovery…
According to the Bible the world was created by God. In Greek mythology, the world was born of Gaia (Earth) sired by Ouranos (Sky).
The Greek natural philosophers retained this assumption but demythologized it. Their word “phusis“ translates into English as “nature” (which is of Latin origin, itself originally meaning “birth”). The words “physics,” “physical,” “physician,” etc. are derivatives. As Nadaff explains, the primal meaning of “phusis“ is “growth” and the principal project of early Greek science was to explain the birth and growth of the cosmos.
Because humans and human society are worldly things, they are parts of nature and the order of nature is reflected in the human social order. But actually the human social order was projected onto nature. Thus, for example, do we speak of the “laws” of nature.
MIT scientist Tegmark directly connects contemporary physics and cosmology with our story of the Presocratic natural philosophers.
In his view the universe is not only described in the language of mathematics, it is a huge purely mathematical object. This was precisely the view of the Pythagoreans. In the course of expounding his theory of a mathematical universe, Tegmark brings the lay reader up to date on the latest developments in natural philosophy (aka theoretical physics and cosmology) and demonstrates their continuity with those of their ancient predecessors.
Nature, said Galileo, is 'a book written in the language of mathematics'. But why should this be? How can mathematics be at the heart of our universe?
The great Hungarian physicist and Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner stressed that this 'unreasonable effectiveness' of mathematics at describing the world was a mystery demanding explanation. Here, Max Tegmark, one of the most original cosmologists at work today, takes us on an astonishing journey to solve that mystery.
Part-history of the cosmos, part-intellectual adventure, Our Mathematical Universe travels from the Big Bang to the distant future via parallel worlds, across every possible scale -…
A follower of Socrates, Plato is best known today for his moral and political philosophy. But, unlike Socrates, he was also deeply engaged in natural philosophy.
Plato, however, differed sharply from all the others: he contended that the cosmos was created by a divine craftsman as “a moving image of eternity.” We treat Plato as a cryptic member of the Pythagorean School. And in Timaeus he expounds an ancient form of mathematical physics.
He correlates the four ancient elements—fire, earth, air, and water—with four of the five regular stereometric figures: the pyramid, cube, octahedron, and icosahedron, respectively. These constitute the mathematical—as opposed to material—atoms composing the four classical elements. And Plato correlates the fifth regular solid, the dodecahedron, with the form of the universe as a whole.
Both an ideal entrée for beginning readers and a solid text for scholars, the second edition of Peter Kalkavage's acclaimed translation of Plato's Timaeus brings enhanced accessibility to a rendering well known for its faithfulness to the original text.
An extensive essay offers insights into the reading of the work, the nature of Platonic dialogue, and the cultural background of the Timaeus. Appendices on music, astronomy, and geometry provide additional guidance. A brief outline of the themes of the work, a detailed glossary, and a selected bibliography are also included.
"Greek Natural Philosophy" presents the primary sources on the Presocratics in a straightforward way in order to tell a coherent story about the astonishing development of natural philosophy in ancient Greece and its relevance today.
The book begins with historical influences on the birth of natural philosophy, especially literacy and the ecosystem services provided by the natural environment of ancient Greece. It argues that the individual philosophers' thoughts about the nature of the cosmos, living things, humankind, and human culture were linked by a "diachronic dialectic of ideas." Each philosopher's speculations were subjected to a critique by the next generation who crafted more subtle theories.
The dialectical transition is traced from the mythopoeic worldview of Hesiod to the rational worldview of Thales and his Milesian successors, followed by Xenophanes and Heraclitus, then Parmenides and his Eleatic successors, and the qualitative pluralisms of Anaxagoras and Empedocles. An entirely fresh interpretation is provided of the Atomists and later Pythagoreans, whose work culminated in the ideas upon which Galileo, Newton, and the other architects of modern science, continued to build.
In the span of only two centuries, the Presocratics developed the basic principles of philosophy and natural science, ecology, mathematical astronomy, the atomic theory of matter, an inertial theory of motion, and the possibility that our solar system is only one of infinitely many scattered throughout infinite time and space.
The concluding chapter traces natural philosophy through subsequent centuries until its abandonment in 20th century philosophy, leading to the moribund state of philosophy by the end of that century. The authors show how environmental philosophy represents a return to natural philosophy and a model for the revival of philosophy's vigor and relevance in the 21st century.
"Greek Natural Philosophy" is suitable for undergraduate and graduate courses in ancient Greek philosophy or in environmental philosophy, and will be of interest to scholars in these fields.
I come by my interest in history and the years before, during, and after the Second World War honestly. For one thing, both my father and my father-in-law served as pilots in the war, my father a P-38 pilot in North Africa and my father-in-law a B-17 bomber pilot in England. Their histories connect me with a period I think we can still almost reach with our fingertips and one that has had a momentous impact on our lives today. I have taken that interest and passion to discover and write true life stories of the war—focusing on the untold and unheard stories often of the “Average Joe.”
October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on any other single day of the war.
The narrative of No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident while focusing its attention on ordinary individuals—clerks, radio operators, cooks, sailors, machinist mates, riflemen, and pilots and their air crews. All were men who chose to serve their country and soon found themselves in a terrifying and otherworldly place.
No Average Day reveals the vastness of the war as it reaches past the beaches in…
October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, or on June 6, 1944, when the Allies stormed the beaches of Normandy, or on any other single day of the war. In its telling of the events of October 24, No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident. The book begins with Army Private First-Class Paul Miller's pre-dawn demise in the Sendai #6B Japanese prisoner of war camp. It concludes with the death…
