Nonsense on Stilts by Massimo Pigliucci

Author:Massimo Pigliucci [Massimo Pigliucci]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3

This, then, seems to have been the nature of science at its ancient origin. Not a quest for knowledge of the ultimate structure of the universe (that will come shortly, as we shall see), but a hodgepodge of practices with one fundamental end: to improve humanity’s lot on earth, whether through actual knowledge of nature (astronomy, agriculture) or through what we today would call superstition (astrology, spiritual healing)—though of course at the time few people could tell the difference. All of that changed radically as soon as the theater of intellectual activity shifted to Greece, beginning with the so-called pre-Socratic philosophers.² The pre-Socratics were an intellectually (and perhaps otherwise, who knows?) wild bunch, about which we don’t know very much, since most of their ideas survive only through fragments of manuscripts or through brief discussions (where they are usually introduced, then summarily dismissed) by later thinkers such as Aristotle. Some held ideas that sound downright preposterous to us, for instance, that the fundamental nature of all things is water (according to Thales of Miletus, sixth century BCE), air (Anaximenes, also sixth century BCE), or fire (Heraclitus of Ephesus, circa 500 BCE). For that matter, Pythagoras and his followers (sixth and fifth centuries BCE) may have thought that numbers are the fundamental constituent of the world—though it is debatable whether they meant that literally (as crazy as it sounds) or whether, in a more sophisticated and modern fashion, they maintained that mathematics is a crucial tool to uncover deep truths about the universe.³

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