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#1
By
Marshall
on
31st August 2011, 06:19 PM
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I just got a copy and I really like the book. You could say that the Roman Pliny author of Natural History gave the best short summary of what this book says, some 2000 yrs in advance:
Rerum fores aperuisse, Anaximander Milesius traditur primus. It is said that Anaximander of Miletus first opened the doors of nature. —Pliny, Natural History As a way of reviewing the book, possibly the best would be to simply show the table of contents. It gives a clear idea of what it is about. You can see from Chapter 10 heading that one reason I like it is that Anaximander was a key innovator in non-god explanation. He and Thales, who both lived in the Ionian city of Miletus around 600 bc, pioneered the business of giving natural explanations of things. Tested by reason and observation, argued about, not invoking mythical figures. Essentially they began the process of defining for us what a natural or physical explanation is. ==sample excerpt from The First Scientist: TOC== Contents Introduction xi one The Sixth Century 1 Knowledge and Astronomy 4 The Gods 15 Miletus 18 two Anaximander’s Contributions 29 three Atmospheric Phenomena 37 Cosmological and Biological Naturalism 42 four Earth Floats in Space, ...Suspended in the Void 45 five Invisible Entities and Natural Laws 61 Thales: Water 62 Anaximenes: Compressing and Rarefying 64 Anaximander: Apeiron 65 The Idea of Natural Law: Anaximander, Pythagoras, and Plato 70 six Rebellion Becomes Virtue 75 seven Writing, Democracy, and Cultural Crossbreeding 83 The Greek Alphabet 87 Science and Democracy 93 Cultural Crossbreeding 97 eight What Is Science? 103 The Crumbling of Nineteenth-Century Illusions 104 Science Cannot be Reduced to Verifiable Predictions 107 Exploring Forms of Thought About the World 111 The Evolving Worldview 114 The Rules of the Game and Commensurability 120 Why is Science Reliable? 123 In Praise of Uncertainty 125 nine Between Cultural Relativism and Absolute Thought 131 ten Can We Understand the World Without Gods? 143 The Conflict 147 eleven Prescientific Thought 157 The Nature of Mythical-Religious Thought 159 The Different Functions of the Divine 170 Conclusion 179 Notes 183 Bibliography 191 Illustration Credit 199 Index 201 Acknowledgments ==endquote== They came up with the idea of a NATURAL LAW, a law that the physical universe follows. Anaximander invented the first "mechanical" cosmic model, with an unsupported Earth and a sphere of stars revolving around it---the sun and moon on giant wheels. No god in the picture driving the sun around in a fiery chariot, just wheels. His model served as inspiration for a whole series of improved versions (a mere 300 years later someone on an island near Miletus even developed a heliocentric model of the cosmos). And in his spare time he explained the rain, and proposed natural causes for all sorts of other things. One of the exciting things is where Carlo Rovelli, a physicist, reflects on what elements in social, economic and civic life may have contributed to the remarkable development of Greek science that began in Miletus. How did the Ionians come by their style of reasoning, their mental independence---willingness to challenge, and concepts such as geometric model, law, proportion? It spills over into another book I've been reading: Lucio Russo's The Forgotten Revolution. (About Hellenistic science.) Save that for another time. |
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