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Origins of Scientific Thought from Anaximander to Proclus, 600 B.C. to 300 A.D.
Se nel «Mulino di Amleto» ci ha introdotto al «pensiero arcaico», mostrandoci come il «mýthos», che si vorrebbe contrapposto al «lógos», sia invece a sua volta una «scienza esatta», qui Giorgio de Santillana si sofferma sull’impronta lasciata da quelle remote scaturigini sulla «forma mentis» tecnoscientifica. In questa cornice il «pensiero scientifico» delle origini, tra cesure e continuità rispetto a quello «mitico», assume connotazioni inedite, in un percorso millenario che va da Parmenide a Eraclito a Pitagora, dalla medicina della scuola ippocratica alla svolta fisicocosmologica di Leucippo e Democrito, dai sofisti e Gorgia alla grande cattedrale platonica e alla sintesi di Aristotele, per arrivare a Tolomeo e Plutarco. E alla fine del percorso risalterà nitidamente non solo come le conquiste della «scienza greca» siano state il punto di partenza della «nostra» scienza, ma anche come l’usurata contrapposizione tra sapere umanistico e scientifico costituisca, fin dalle origini, una prospettiva deviante e infondata.
320 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1961
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About the author
Giorgio de Santillana
17 books36 followersGiorgio Diaz de Santillana was an Italian-American philosopher and historian of science, born in Rome. He was Professor of the History of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
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August 23, 2021
Giorgio de Santillana’s old book on the origins of scientific thought from Anaximander to Proclus (published by the University of Chicago press in 1961) represents more a cultural history than what typically goes under the rubric of the history and philosophy of science. What best to draw from this work: an appreciation of what logical thought means, as opposed to today’s merely instrumentalistic reason. In light of alarming recent trends, when it has become fashionable – particularly among those who are most strident and self-righteous in putting themselves forward as being religious – to bid farewell to reason and to truth-telling, it will prove edifying to ponder Santillana’s reflections on the connection the ancient Greek sages perceived between the order of the cosmos [ϰόσμος] and the order of the polity [πόλις].
The prologue entitled ‘Of high and far-off times’ aptly displays Santillana’s distinctive style: in place of meticulous critical analysis of the process of intellectual development based on close reading of a narrowly delimited circle of extant texts, such as one will find exhibited with polish in Philip Merlan’s scholarly pieces, a meditative rumination on prehistory that seeks to distill the conceptual essence of a mindset very foreign to our own from a welter of cultural and archaeological allusions.
Concerning the wonder by which archaic mythos gave way to rational speculation—one could hardly as yet call it science—in Ionia, on the western coastline of Asia minor where the Greeks had expanded and established themselves during the dark age that followed the collapse of the Mycenaean civilization (at the hands of the archetypal sages often referred to as the Milesians, after Thales of Milesia):
This was one of the most momentous breaks in the career of humanity, comparable only to the discovery of fire. For it is not a paradox to say that Anaximander’s system is as much an innovation on the way of thinking that came before as the whole of science has been since, from Anaximander to Einstein….Yet, let us not be fenced in by familiar similarities. These physical images arose from a background of thought very far from ours. The very word cause at that time has a strictly juridicial connotation; it means ‘responsibility’. In Latin, always conservative, usage preserves causa as the legal procedure itself, aimed at establishing responsibility. The universe which is taking shape in Anaximander’s mind (and it is difficult for us to place ourselves in the position of a man trying to project a ‘universe’) is still a vast community of forces which bring forth other forces which in turn fall into place; instead of the moderating will of a Zeus, it has its own inner necessity as a ruler, for it is itself ‘the divine’. Contrast and balance, equalization, acceptance, justice are the intelligible mainsprings of it all. This it is that makes it a kosmos, which in the early language of politics refers to the well-ordered community; a concept perhaps less defined than visualized, as...in Lorenzetti’s fresco Il Buon Governo. The famous lines of Solon’s elegy on immanent justice (‘Most hard is it to apprehend the unapparent measure of judgment, which alone holds the limits of all things’) show how the idea had been taking shape in contemporary Greece. Traditionally, Solon comes just before Anaximander. But the chronology we have is not sufficiently secure to bear this out, and it may well be that Solon’s voyage to Ionia played an important part in the formation of his own thought. Here is a world of immanent function, manifesting its own severe will to order to which man must adjust, but in adjusting he will find himself ‘at home’ in it—an expression which runs through the whole of Greek thought. (pp. 36-37)
Santillana’s winding path then takes him from Anaximenes (a more consistent systematizer with mechanistic sympathies) and Heraclitus (the proudly aristocratic discoverer of a reasonable, though gnomic, principle of order and knowledge, or Λόγος) to the Pythagoreans, whom – not the Babylonians – he credits with the invention of astronomy. The section on the birth of the famed idea of the music of the spheres (pp. 84-87) is well worth a lingering look. The nascent tradition of the physicists takes a fateful turn with the forceful intervention of Parmenides, the inventor of logical implication:
The Way of Truth [ἀλήθεια] is, without any doubt, one of the most impressively obscure statements in the history of thought. It became consecrated as the ‘foundation of metaphysics’….It is a tribute to the intellectual maturity of the Greeks of the fifth century BC that they were able to discern in the close-textured argument the appearance of a new power of thought, that of pure logical implication. They saw the strength of the law of contradiction which had been established. The very name of the subject, Being, suggested a sunlike truth which dazzles the mind….Thus, by way of Plato, Parmenides is enshrined in the realm of pure philosophy, as the First Metaphysician. Yet there is evidence to prove that, taken on his own terms, Parmenides belongs at least as much to science. If we accept that word ‘Being’, not as a mysterious verbal power, but as a technical term for something the thinker had in mind but could not yet define, and replace it by x in the context of his argument, it will be easy to see that there is one, and only one, other concept which can be put in the place of x without engendering contradiction at any point, and that concept is pure geometrical space itself….Now it is also true that anything that satisfies these three conditions [continuity, homogeneity, isotropy] must be isomorphic with and intrinsically indistinguishable from Euclidean space. That is the fundamental reason why, when we find Parmenides stating repeatedly and emphatically that his Being satisfies his three conditions...we must conclude that whatever else his Being may have meant to him in addition, it was certainly the space of the mathematician (and physicist) that he had in mind….When Zeno invented his paradoxes in order to defend Parmenides’ doctrine, those paradoxes turn out to belong to the realm of mathematical logic and to deal with continuity and motion. (pp. 94-96)
Re. the contrasting Way of Opinion [δόξα]:
The elements operate, apparently, not through any force of their own nature, but because, like the stars, they move upon paths which impose an external constraint on their motion. The spontaneity of Ionian matter has been quite abolished, and we have something which comes very close to our own ‘laws of nature’. (p. 101)
In contrast to Anaxagoras, who merits but a single paragraph, Santillana divulges a full treatment of Empedocles, the discoverer of process (pp. 108-118). Why? For him, Empedocles’ system serves as a meet illustration of one logical possibility as to a way by which to restore a sense of physical reality to Being (cf. p. 107) which the Greeks hit upon in the course of their explorations in the aftermath of Parmenides:
We can certainly trace this kind of thought back to the mystical Orphic doctrine of ‘escape from the wheel of rebirths’, but it remains naturalistically consistent with the idea of Anaximandrian justice, whereby things ‘make mutual atonement in the order of time’. The process is here carefully and imaginatively worked out, but the metaphysical constant remains, as it has been from Anaximander through Parmenides, an order of immanent justice which is also an order of Necessity, to be understood as physical, then logical, Necessity. With Empedocles, Necessity is the sum of the two contrary forces, together with the ‘contract’ which ties them together [viz., Love or φιλόης and Strife or νεῖϰος]….To grasp the inherent design is thus the way for man to become reconciled, or ‘at home’, in the cosmos. (pp. 115-117)
In a parallel extended treatment of atomism (pp. 141-167), we learn that ‘Space is for the first time formally and unequivocally infinite’ (p. 145). Always keener on the overall sweep of the course of events than on technical detail, Santillana sees in the contemporary of Empedocles and the atomists, Gorgias, a parting of ways between scientific and unscientific (p. 171). Santillana refers here by way of comparison to the pragmatism of John Dewey (pp. 175-176) and highlights the ambiguity of Sophism: at its best it stood for intellectual culture but lacked foundations:
It is only when we have met the Sophists, so frighteningly modern in so many ways, that we can distinguish in retrospect the characteristic features of archaic thought that preceded them, and was truly and directly concerned with reality above all. In the original Greek conception of physics two subjects were confused: the old question as to the origin of the universe, the quest for comprehension and acceptance, which had formerly been answered by the cosmogonic myths, and still required feats of pure abstract imagination—and the other, proceeding from a new curiosity about all the things that are to be found in the world, and how they can be explained. This latter was called ‘investigation’, in Greek historiē, and required all the information one could get. It required Herodotus to survey the whole known world, its countries, its men and its gods; Megasthenes the doctor to travel to India; Pytheas to explore the North Sea; Anaximander to construct his maps and study fossil deposits. But it was felt that no empirical wealth of facts could make sense without an inquiry into the why, into the nature of the whole, and so men were led back to the question of how it came about, and from what. Whence the search for invariants, for enduring patterns and sequences, for a chain of actions and reactions which can be described and foretold, both in society and in nature. Solon and Anaximander, as we have noticed, are really of one mind about the point of relevance; natural science, history and political theory come at about the same time from the same source. They have to go from observed regularities into the unseen causes, and are hence led back to the early metaphysics of myth, forward into its abstract developments. As Jaeger wrote, adapting a classic phrase of Kant’s, mythical though without the formative logos is blind, and logical theorizing without living mythical thought is empty. This is actually the way science was born, the first and only time when it happened. We have therefore to mark the inobjective and imaginative elements at least as much as the factual; although the former may look less new than the latter, in reality it is all one new thing. When that unity is broken, something is lost irretrievably. (pp. 176-177)
Aristotle tries to understand whereas modern science aims only to explain (p. 213) and ought to be labeled a scientist but not a physicist (p. 220). In regard to the exact sciences, especially astronomy, which coalesced into a rival research tradition:
We are here at a fateful parting of the ways. Aristotle’s physics is an assembly of Ionian components held together by verbal and logical devices from which mathematics has been banned. Mathematics, on the other hand, has reached its own freedom and self-sufficiency divorced from its original semimagical projection on physics. Aristotle’s position is that since the heavens are a real thing, they must be made of a real substance whose properties and genus we can only describe from what we see (e.g., crystalline, frictionless, unalterable), reconciling them into a whole with ad hoc suppositions. Eudoxus instead makes no physical suppositions but tries a purely abstract model, and see how far it will take him. The limits are clearly set; we can add spheres for correction as Callippus did, but the model is designed to account for the angular displacements of the planets as observed and for nothing else. The system may appear complicated, but...the theory made use of three elements only, the epoch of superior conjunction, the period of sidereal revolution (of which the synodic period is a function), and the inclination of the axis of the third sphere on that of the fourth. For the same purpose modern astronomers require six elements. It was, then, a marvel of economy. (pp. 244-245)
After the somewhat aimless chapters 16-18 (on the face of the moon, Ptolemy’s geography and computing machines), Santillana rounds out his narrative of the origins of science with two final sections, in chapters 19-20. First, the reasons for the decline and fall of science in later antiquity, which he attributes ultimately to a greater prestige of abstraction as against numerical precision (pp. 282-285). If we set aside a condensed criticism of Epicurus’ anti-intellectualism, the hurried treatment of Stoicism and a cursory glance at Neoplatonism, the content of the last chapter boils down to a grandiloquent declaration to the effect that the real conflict is not between science and religion, but between the hankering after order and design versus romantic naturalism (p. 301). Regrettably, for want of space Santillana cannot do more than indicate most sketchily why he thinks this, in just a paragraph.
To wrap up our review—why ought one, with so many demands on his time, spend the better part of an afternoon or evening to read this book? Santillana always tells a connected and prima facie plausible story whereas Alexandre Koyré can’t do any more than interject trivial observations. A good illustration (too long to quote) can be found on pp. 143-144 where he speculatively reconstructs the thought-process by which Leucippus and Democritus respond to the crisis for a serious physics (in Anaximander’s sense) posed by the Eleatics and are led to postulate the idea of atoms and the void. So far as this recensionist can tell, Santillana is guilty of but few solecisms which a scholar more versed in the technical aspects of the history of science could detect (for instance, it is not actually the case that, as he claims on p. 236, Eudoxus’ method of exhaustion is equivalent to a prototype of the modern integral calculus; see Carl Boyer, whose standard history of the calculus and its conceptual development we have reviewed before).
While perusing Santillana, one has the sense of wasting his time not in a bad way as with Koyré, but as intellectual entertainment. The former is manifestly the more cultured, and enjoys slipping in numerous wide-ranging references, often loosely connected (so it would seem) to the matter at hand—to the Gnostics, the Upanishads, Freud etc.—, but intended to stimulate brain-storming on the part of the reader. Perhaps not the deepest philosophical commentary imaginable, but nevertheless well-informed on all aspects of antiquity and therefore diverting, at the least. So, three stars for a game effort!
The prologue entitled ‘Of high and far-off times’ aptly displays Santillana’s distinctive style: in place of meticulous critical analysis of the process of intellectual development based on close reading of a narrowly delimited circle of extant texts, such as one will find exhibited with polish in Philip Merlan’s scholarly pieces, a meditative rumination on prehistory that seeks to distill the conceptual essence of a mindset very foreign to our own from a welter of cultural and archaeological allusions.
Concerning the wonder by which archaic mythos gave way to rational speculation—one could hardly as yet call it science—in Ionia, on the western coastline of Asia minor where the Greeks had expanded and established themselves during the dark age that followed the collapse of the Mycenaean civilization (at the hands of the archetypal sages often referred to as the Milesians, after Thales of Milesia):
This was one of the most momentous breaks in the career of humanity, comparable only to the discovery of fire. For it is not a paradox to say that Anaximander’s system is as much an innovation on the way of thinking that came before as the whole of science has been since, from Anaximander to Einstein….Yet, let us not be fenced in by familiar similarities. These physical images arose from a background of thought very far from ours. The very word cause at that time has a strictly juridicial connotation; it means ‘responsibility’. In Latin, always conservative, usage preserves causa as the legal procedure itself, aimed at establishing responsibility. The universe which is taking shape in Anaximander’s mind (and it is difficult for us to place ourselves in the position of a man trying to project a ‘universe’) is still a vast community of forces which bring forth other forces which in turn fall into place; instead of the moderating will of a Zeus, it has its own inner necessity as a ruler, for it is itself ‘the divine’. Contrast and balance, equalization, acceptance, justice are the intelligible mainsprings of it all. This it is that makes it a kosmos, which in the early language of politics refers to the well-ordered community; a concept perhaps less defined than visualized, as...in Lorenzetti’s fresco Il Buon Governo. The famous lines of Solon’s elegy on immanent justice (‘Most hard is it to apprehend the unapparent measure of judgment, which alone holds the limits of all things’) show how the idea had been taking shape in contemporary Greece. Traditionally, Solon comes just before Anaximander. But the chronology we have is not sufficiently secure to bear this out, and it may well be that Solon’s voyage to Ionia played an important part in the formation of his own thought. Here is a world of immanent function, manifesting its own severe will to order to which man must adjust, but in adjusting he will find himself ‘at home’ in it—an expression which runs through the whole of Greek thought. (pp. 36-37)
Santillana’s winding path then takes him from Anaximenes (a more consistent systematizer with mechanistic sympathies) and Heraclitus (the proudly aristocratic discoverer of a reasonable, though gnomic, principle of order and knowledge, or Λόγος) to the Pythagoreans, whom – not the Babylonians – he credits with the invention of astronomy. The section on the birth of the famed idea of the music of the spheres (pp. 84-87) is well worth a lingering look. The nascent tradition of the physicists takes a fateful turn with the forceful intervention of Parmenides, the inventor of logical implication:
The Way of Truth [ἀλήθεια] is, without any doubt, one of the most impressively obscure statements in the history of thought. It became consecrated as the ‘foundation of metaphysics’….It is a tribute to the intellectual maturity of the Greeks of the fifth century BC that they were able to discern in the close-textured argument the appearance of a new power of thought, that of pure logical implication. They saw the strength of the law of contradiction which had been established. The very name of the subject, Being, suggested a sunlike truth which dazzles the mind….Thus, by way of Plato, Parmenides is enshrined in the realm of pure philosophy, as the First Metaphysician. Yet there is evidence to prove that, taken on his own terms, Parmenides belongs at least as much to science. If we accept that word ‘Being’, not as a mysterious verbal power, but as a technical term for something the thinker had in mind but could not yet define, and replace it by x in the context of his argument, it will be easy to see that there is one, and only one, other concept which can be put in the place of x without engendering contradiction at any point, and that concept is pure geometrical space itself….Now it is also true that anything that satisfies these three conditions [continuity, homogeneity, isotropy] must be isomorphic with and intrinsically indistinguishable from Euclidean space. That is the fundamental reason why, when we find Parmenides stating repeatedly and emphatically that his Being satisfies his three conditions...we must conclude that whatever else his Being may have meant to him in addition, it was certainly the space of the mathematician (and physicist) that he had in mind….When Zeno invented his paradoxes in order to defend Parmenides’ doctrine, those paradoxes turn out to belong to the realm of mathematical logic and to deal with continuity and motion. (pp. 94-96)
Re. the contrasting Way of Opinion [δόξα]:
The elements operate, apparently, not through any force of their own nature, but because, like the stars, they move upon paths which impose an external constraint on their motion. The spontaneity of Ionian matter has been quite abolished, and we have something which comes very close to our own ‘laws of nature’. (p. 101)
In contrast to Anaxagoras, who merits but a single paragraph, Santillana divulges a full treatment of Empedocles, the discoverer of process (pp. 108-118). Why? For him, Empedocles’ system serves as a meet illustration of one logical possibility as to a way by which to restore a sense of physical reality to Being (cf. p. 107) which the Greeks hit upon in the course of their explorations in the aftermath of Parmenides:
We can certainly trace this kind of thought back to the mystical Orphic doctrine of ‘escape from the wheel of rebirths’, but it remains naturalistically consistent with the idea of Anaximandrian justice, whereby things ‘make mutual atonement in the order of time’. The process is here carefully and imaginatively worked out, but the metaphysical constant remains, as it has been from Anaximander through Parmenides, an order of immanent justice which is also an order of Necessity, to be understood as physical, then logical, Necessity. With Empedocles, Necessity is the sum of the two contrary forces, together with the ‘contract’ which ties them together [viz., Love or φιλόης and Strife or νεῖϰος]….To grasp the inherent design is thus the way for man to become reconciled, or ‘at home’, in the cosmos. (pp. 115-117)
In a parallel extended treatment of atomism (pp. 141-167), we learn that ‘Space is for the first time formally and unequivocally infinite’ (p. 145). Always keener on the overall sweep of the course of events than on technical detail, Santillana sees in the contemporary of Empedocles and the atomists, Gorgias, a parting of ways between scientific and unscientific (p. 171). Santillana refers here by way of comparison to the pragmatism of John Dewey (pp. 175-176) and highlights the ambiguity of Sophism: at its best it stood for intellectual culture but lacked foundations:
It is only when we have met the Sophists, so frighteningly modern in so many ways, that we can distinguish in retrospect the characteristic features of archaic thought that preceded them, and was truly and directly concerned with reality above all. In the original Greek conception of physics two subjects were confused: the old question as to the origin of the universe, the quest for comprehension and acceptance, which had formerly been answered by the cosmogonic myths, and still required feats of pure abstract imagination—and the other, proceeding from a new curiosity about all the things that are to be found in the world, and how they can be explained. This latter was called ‘investigation’, in Greek historiē, and required all the information one could get. It required Herodotus to survey the whole known world, its countries, its men and its gods; Megasthenes the doctor to travel to India; Pytheas to explore the North Sea; Anaximander to construct his maps and study fossil deposits. But it was felt that no empirical wealth of facts could make sense without an inquiry into the why, into the nature of the whole, and so men were led back to the question of how it came about, and from what. Whence the search for invariants, for enduring patterns and sequences, for a chain of actions and reactions which can be described and foretold, both in society and in nature. Solon and Anaximander, as we have noticed, are really of one mind about the point of relevance; natural science, history and political theory come at about the same time from the same source. They have to go from observed regularities into the unseen causes, and are hence led back to the early metaphysics of myth, forward into its abstract developments. As Jaeger wrote, adapting a classic phrase of Kant’s, mythical though without the formative logos is blind, and logical theorizing without living mythical thought is empty. This is actually the way science was born, the first and only time when it happened. We have therefore to mark the inobjective and imaginative elements at least as much as the factual; although the former may look less new than the latter, in reality it is all one new thing. When that unity is broken, something is lost irretrievably. (pp. 176-177)
Aristotle tries to understand whereas modern science aims only to explain (p. 213) and ought to be labeled a scientist but not a physicist (p. 220). In regard to the exact sciences, especially astronomy, which coalesced into a rival research tradition:
We are here at a fateful parting of the ways. Aristotle’s physics is an assembly of Ionian components held together by verbal and logical devices from which mathematics has been banned. Mathematics, on the other hand, has reached its own freedom and self-sufficiency divorced from its original semimagical projection on physics. Aristotle’s position is that since the heavens are a real thing, they must be made of a real substance whose properties and genus we can only describe from what we see (e.g., crystalline, frictionless, unalterable), reconciling them into a whole with ad hoc suppositions. Eudoxus instead makes no physical suppositions but tries a purely abstract model, and see how far it will take him. The limits are clearly set; we can add spheres for correction as Callippus did, but the model is designed to account for the angular displacements of the planets as observed and for nothing else. The system may appear complicated, but...the theory made use of three elements only, the epoch of superior conjunction, the period of sidereal revolution (of which the synodic period is a function), and the inclination of the axis of the third sphere on that of the fourth. For the same purpose modern astronomers require six elements. It was, then, a marvel of economy. (pp. 244-245)
After the somewhat aimless chapters 16-18 (on the face of the moon, Ptolemy’s geography and computing machines), Santillana rounds out his narrative of the origins of science with two final sections, in chapters 19-20. First, the reasons for the decline and fall of science in later antiquity, which he attributes ultimately to a greater prestige of abstraction as against numerical precision (pp. 282-285). If we set aside a condensed criticism of Epicurus’ anti-intellectualism, the hurried treatment of Stoicism and a cursory glance at Neoplatonism, the content of the last chapter boils down to a grandiloquent declaration to the effect that the real conflict is not between science and religion, but between the hankering after order and design versus romantic naturalism (p. 301). Regrettably, for want of space Santillana cannot do more than indicate most sketchily why he thinks this, in just a paragraph.
To wrap up our review—why ought one, with so many demands on his time, spend the better part of an afternoon or evening to read this book? Santillana always tells a connected and prima facie plausible story whereas Alexandre Koyré can’t do any more than interject trivial observations. A good illustration (too long to quote) can be found on pp. 143-144 where he speculatively reconstructs the thought-process by which Leucippus and Democritus respond to the crisis for a serious physics (in Anaximander’s sense) posed by the Eleatics and are led to postulate the idea of atoms and the void. So far as this recensionist can tell, Santillana is guilty of but few solecisms which a scholar more versed in the technical aspects of the history of science could detect (for instance, it is not actually the case that, as he claims on p. 236, Eudoxus’ method of exhaustion is equivalent to a prototype of the modern integral calculus; see Carl Boyer, whose standard history of the calculus and its conceptual development we have reviewed before).
While perusing Santillana, one has the sense of wasting his time not in a bad way as with Koyré, but as intellectual entertainment. The former is manifestly the more cultured, and enjoys slipping in numerous wide-ranging references, often loosely connected (so it would seem) to the matter at hand—to the Gnostics, the Upanishads, Freud etc.—, but intended to stimulate brain-storming on the part of the reader. Perhaps not the deepest philosophical commentary imaginable, but nevertheless well-informed on all aspects of antiquity and therefore diverting, at the least. So, three stars for a game effort!
March 18, 2025
Ne Le origini del pensiero scientifico Giorgio de Santillana offre una ricostruzione della genesi del pensiero scientifico, ispirandosi forse alla frase di Keplero che l'autore stesso ricorda nel Prologo:«I modi in cui gli uomini giunsero alla conoscenza delle cose celesti mi sembrano tanto meravigliosi quasi quanto la natura stessa di quelle cose». È stata infatti proprio l'osservazione dei moti celesti a stimolare la ricerca di invarianti impersonali che si celano dietro gli avvenimenti, alla molteplicità dei fenomeni.
De Santillana traccia un percorso suggestivo, rileggendo la storia della filosofia dai presocratici al neoplatonismo alla luce dei contributi che il pensiero greco ha fornito al pensiero scientifico.
Nel periodo aurorale del pensiero presocratico, nell'arco di qualche generazione si susseguirono pensatori di grande vivacità intellettuale che tentarono di interpretare il cosmo come un “tutto unitario” di pensiero ed essere, retto da un principio di volta in volta differente, arrivando a formulare principi cardine come il Principio di Ragion Sufficiente e quello di Non-contraddizione. Ma il pensiero presocratico naufraga sullo scoglio problematico di come conciliare l'infinitamente grande e l'infinitamente piccolo, l'essere immutabile e ingenerato col mutamento e il movimento. Scoglio che cercherà di essere aggirato dagli atomisti, dagli eleati e dai pitagorici, la cui influenza su Platone, per l'autore, determinerà una spaccatura tra la pensiero scientifico e un nuovo ritorno al pensiero mitico in chiave religiosa, che lasciò cadere per secoli in semi-oblio le conquiste dell'antica scienza. Il percorso si chiude con il neoplatonismo, con cui anche la luminosa prosperità del pensiero greco giunge al suo tramonto: dal neoplatonismo nascerà infatti il Cristianesimo.
“A partire dal complesso platonico, una delle strade portava a una matematizzazione integrale dell'universo, aperta e speculativa, quale era quella tentata dai pitagorici. L'altra, scelta da Platone nella sua tarda età, sfociava in un ordine del mondo chiuso e rigido, dominato da una teologia astrale […]. D'altronde, questa nuova e strana visione della realtà aprì la porta a qualcosa che in nessun modo si adattava all'atteggiamento mentale della filosofia greca classica, e cioè a vangeli di redenzione vecchi e nuovi”.
De Santillana traccia un percorso suggestivo, rileggendo la storia della filosofia dai presocratici al neoplatonismo alla luce dei contributi che il pensiero greco ha fornito al pensiero scientifico.
Nel periodo aurorale del pensiero presocratico, nell'arco di qualche generazione si susseguirono pensatori di grande vivacità intellettuale che tentarono di interpretare il cosmo come un “tutto unitario” di pensiero ed essere, retto da un principio di volta in volta differente, arrivando a formulare principi cardine come il Principio di Ragion Sufficiente e quello di Non-contraddizione. Ma il pensiero presocratico naufraga sullo scoglio problematico di come conciliare l'infinitamente grande e l'infinitamente piccolo, l'essere immutabile e ingenerato col mutamento e il movimento. Scoglio che cercherà di essere aggirato dagli atomisti, dagli eleati e dai pitagorici, la cui influenza su Platone, per l'autore, determinerà una spaccatura tra la pensiero scientifico e un nuovo ritorno al pensiero mitico in chiave religiosa, che lasciò cadere per secoli in semi-oblio le conquiste dell'antica scienza. Il percorso si chiude con il neoplatonismo, con cui anche la luminosa prosperità del pensiero greco giunge al suo tramonto: dal neoplatonismo nascerà infatti il Cristianesimo.
“A partire dal complesso platonico, una delle strade portava a una matematizzazione integrale dell'universo, aperta e speculativa, quale era quella tentata dai pitagorici. L'altra, scelta da Platone nella sua tarda età, sfociava in un ordine del mondo chiuso e rigido, dominato da una teologia astrale […]. D'altronde, questa nuova e strana visione della realtà aprì la porta a qualcosa che in nessun modo si adattava all'atteggiamento mentale della filosofia greca classica, e cioè a vangeli di redenzione vecchi e nuovi”.
September 11, 2025
Avrei voluto conoscere De Santillana. L'autore si conferma anche in questo lavoro profondo e ambizioso, e un grande cultore della materia. La nota dolente di questo e dello scritto su Amlodi è la stessa: un'esposizione un po' confusionaria che non riesce a cogliere il nodo del discorso ma si perde su linee di ragionamento trasversali. Sebbene più sistematico del precedente, questo testo è più che altro un indagine sulla scienza greca ma sempre da uno sguardo più ampio, filosofico, vago, che non riesce a trovare il suo dominio specifico. Resta un'opera di valore e sensibilità, e adoro sempre ritornare alla Grecia classica.
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February 24, 2025Individuare i germi della scienza nella filosofia dal 600 a.C. porta a un'ulteriore domanda: perché, pur essendone in grado, i Greci antichi non svilupparono le proprie conoscenze? Uno dei motivi è il distacco dal calcolo matematico, operato dai grandi classici nel tentativo di unificare Essere e Fenomeno.
December 13, 2014
Needlessly didactic. Hard to follow. I stopped after 60 pages.
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