Greek Science

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.

Greek Science, first published in 1999, is written for scientists, classicists, historians of science, and anyone with an interest in the beginnings of science. It surveys the range and scope of ancient work on topics now called science, at a lively pace and with colourful examples. It encompasses ancient empirical studies as well as theoretical works, the life sciences and the exact sciences, and is written by one of the foremost authorities on ancient science and technology. No knowledge of Greek, Latin, or ancient history is assumed.

First published in 2002. The history of science is one of knowledge being passed from community to community over thousands of years, and this is the classic account of the most influential of these movements -how Hellenistic science passed to the Arabs where it took on a new life and led to the development of Arab astronomy and medicine which flourished in the courts of the Muslim world, later passing on to medieval Europe. Starting with the rise of Hellenism in Asia in the wake of the campaigns of Alexander the Great, O'Leary deals with the Greek legacy of science, philosophy, mathematics and medicine and follows it as it travels across the Near East propelled by religion, trade and conquest. Dealing in depth with Christianity as a Hellenizing force, the influence of the Nestorians and the Monophysites; Indian influences by land and sea and the rise of Buddhism, O'Leary then focuses on the development of science during the Baghdad Khalifate, the translation of Greek scientific material into Arabic, and the effect for all those interested in the history of medicine and science, and of historical geography as well as the history of the Arab world.

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.

In this volume I have attempted to give especial and marked attention to the fate of Greek science in late antiquity. Elementary texts in the past have long ignored this aspect of Greek science. The importance of the course of Greek science in late antiquity is evident, for it was during this period that much of the Greek scientific corpus was put into the form in which it passed to the medieval Latin West. We are justified, then, in considering this volume as an introduction to medieval and early modern science—that science being considered as a transformation of Greek science.

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.