Ancient Greece-Science

The achievements of ancient Greek science were among the best of antiquity. Personalities such as Thales of Miletus, Pythagoras, and Aristotle developed ideas that would influence Western thought, science, and philosophy for centuries to come, with mathematics, astronomy, and logic based on Egyptian and Babylonian knowledge. Aristotle was the first philosopher to develop a systematic study of logic, an early form of evolution was taught by figures of Greek philosophy such as Anaximander and Empedocles, and Pythagoras' mathematical theorem is still used today.

However, Greek science had its flaws as well as its successes. Observation was scorned by the Greeks in favor of the deductive process in which knowledge was constructed through pure thought. This method is key in mathematics, and the Greeks attached so much importance to it that they mistakenly believed that deduction was the way to obtain the most knowledge.

Effect of Mathematics

Greek achievements in mathematics and astronomy were among the best of antiquity. First, mathematics developed under the influence of Egyptian mathematics; Astronomy flourished in the Hellenistic Period after Alexander the Great (356 BC - 323 BC) conquered the East with the help of Babylon.

A strength of science is that it seeks to distinguish itself from concepts with specific uses and seeks common applications and general principles. The more general the science, the more abstract it is and the more applications it has. What the Greeks derived from Egyptian mathematics was basically rules of thumb that had specific applications. For example, the Egyptians knew that a triangle with sides in the ratio 3:4:5 is a right triangle. Pythagoras took this concept and extended it to its limit by deducing a mathematical theorem that bears his name: in a right triangle, the square on the opposite side of the right angle (hypotenuse) is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides. This was not just true for the 3:4:5 triangle, it was also a principle for any other right triangle, regardless of size.

Pythagoras was the founder and leader of a sect that fused Greek philosophy, religion, art, and mysticism. In ancient times, the Greeks did not make a clear distinction between scientific and non-scientific disciplines. There is a widespread view that the coexistence of Greek art, philosophy, mysticism, and other non-scientific disciplines interacting with science interfered with the development of scientific ideas. This seems to indicate a misconception about how the human spirit works. It is true that moral and mystical prejudices in the past have delayed or impeded some knowledge, and the sharp boundaries of scientific knowledge are not clear. However, it is true that non-scientific disciplines foster the human mind's imagination, inspiring to approach problems that seemed impossible to solve, and stimulating human creativity to consider the counterintuitive possibilities (such as a global world in motion) proved at the time. The human spirit has found many motivations for scientific progress in non-scientific disciplines, and it is likely that it would largely lack the impetus of scientific progress if it were not for the impetus of art, mysticism, and philosophy.

Aristotelian Logic

Aristotle was the first philosopher to develop a systematic study of logic. His system would become an authority in deductive reasoning for more than two thousand years. Although he repeatedly acknowledged the importance of induction, he prioritized the use of deduction to construct knowledge. In the end, his influence turned out to reinforce the overestimation of deduction in science and analogies in logic.

The doctrine of comparison is his most influential contribution to logic. He defined qiyas as a discourse in which certain things are expressed, something else necessarily emerges from their being as such. A well-known example:

All men are mortal. (main proposition)

Socrates is a man. (secondary proposition)

Socrates is mortal. (solution)

This view cannot be logically changed and we cannot dispute its conclusion. However, doing science in this way has at least two failures. First, the way the main premise works. Why should we accept the main premise without question? The only way a major proposition can be accepted is by presenting the obvious statement, such as "all men are mortal." This means that the result of this view is not new understanding, but rather something that has already been implied, directly or indirectly, in the main proposition. Second, it does not seem necessary to go through all this to logically prove that Socrates is mortal.

Aristotle's contribution to logic and science became an authority and remained undisputed until the modern age. It took centuries to realize the flaws of Aristotle's approach to science. The Platonic influence also contributed to the valuation of inference and experimentation: Plato's philosophy saw the world as only an imperfect representation of the ideal reality that resides in the world of ideas.

Another obstacle to Greek science was the concept of "ultimate truth". After the Greeks worked out all the consequences of their axioms, further development seemed impossible. Some aspects of knowledge seemed "complete" to them, and some of its concepts were turned into dogmas that were not open to further analysis. Today we understand that there is never an observation that can make a concept "final". No primitive test can tell us that a generalization is completely and absolutely valid. A single observation that contradicts a theory forces it to be revised.