Science Education in the Early Roman Empire by Richard Carrier

Author:Richard Carrier
Language: eng
Format: azw3, azw, epub
ISBN: 9781634310901
Publisher: Pitchstone Publishing
Published: 2016-10-01T04:00:00+00:00

And this was no basic logic they were involved in, but a logic “more subtle, more advanced, more technical” than almost anything that would be seen until modern times.264 Science was thoroughly embroiled in all of this. For just as Barnes found for logic, a Stoic passion for physics is likewise documented,265 which has also been obscured by a subsequent Christian disinterest in preserving very many Stoic treatises in that field. Hence across the empire Stoic education did not avoid scientific knowledge but was immersed in it. The same could be said, even if in differing degrees, of all the major schools, from the Platonists and Aristotelians to the Epicureans and Skeptics. Exposure to scientific knowledge and methods in their lectures and debates would have been considerable for any layperson of the time, even when varying from teacher to teacher.

After philosophy school came specialized science education. Many scientists would move from the philosophy schools into the tutelage of a scientific expert, although some might have attempted to find such an arrangement without much or any prior training in philosophy—or in some cases even the enkyklios, though such students would have to tutor under what we would call a quack. Such students would not become ‘ancient scientists’ in our sense of the term, but pseudoscientists, teachers of nonsense who did not use any valid methods or even heed the actual scientific knowledge the ancients had then achieved. There were a great many such quacks in the ancient world, far more so than today, since there were no regulatory agencies and not much popular understanding of how to tell a quack from a genuine expert. Everything we have surveyed so far on the rarity of education, and the even greater rarity of exposure to significant science content, or even training in critical thought, ensured the success of quackery and pseudoscience in all fields, and Galen attests to the widespread existence of quack teachers in all scientific subjects.266 But there were genuine experts who sought to compete against this sea of quacks and pseudoscientists through their mastery of the skills of rhetoric in addition to the knowledge of their own particular art, and therefore there were serious schools all over the Roman world for prospective science students who wanted real knowledge.

As just one example of how genuine knowledge was taken seriously, Strabo comments on the need for sound facts in writing on geography:

The person who attempts to write an account of the countries of the earth must take many of the physical and mathematical principles as hypotheses and elaborate his whole treatise with reference to their intent and authority. For, as I have already said, no architect or engineer would be competent even to fix the site of a house or a city properly if he had no conception beforehand of climates and celestial phenomena, and of geometrical figures and magnitudes, and heat and cold, and other such things—much less a person who would fix positions for the whole of the inhabited world.267

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