Our understanding of science, mathematics, and medicine today can be deeply enriched by studying the historical roots of these areas of inquiry in the ancient Near East and Mediterranean. The present volume brings together contributions from more than thirty of the most important scholars working in these fields in the United States and Europe in honor of the eminent historian of ancient science and medicine Heinrich von Staden.
Our understanding of science, mathematics, and medicine today can be deeply enriched by studying the historical roots of these areas of inquiry in the ancient Near East and Mediterranean. The fields of ancient science and mathematics have in recent years witnessed remarkable growth. The present volume brings together contributions from more than thirty of the most important scholars working in these fields in the United States and Europe in honor of the eminent historian of ancient science and medicine Heinrich von Staden, Professor Emeritus of Classics and History of Science at the Institute of Advanced Study and William Lampson Professor Emeritus of Classics and Comparative Literature at Yale University. The papers range widely from Mesopotamia to Ancient Greece and Rome, from the first millennium B.C. to the early medieval period, and from mathematics to philosophy, mechanics to medicine, representing both a wide diversity of national traditions and the cutting edge of the international scholarly community.
A critical revaluation of ancient spiritual systems long ignored or rejected because of their assumed incompatibility with science. Here are Swami Muktananda on the mind, Swami Prajnananda on Karma, Swami Kripananda on the Kundalini, Joseph Chilton Pearce on spiritual development, Jack Kornfield on Buddhism for Americans, Claudio Naranjo on meditation, and much more.
This volume in the highly respected Cambridge History of Science series is devoted to the history of science, medicine and mathematics of the Old World in antiquity. Organized by topic and culture, its essays by distinguished scholars offer the most comprehensive and up-to-date history of ancient science currently available. Together, they reveal the diversity of goals, contexts, and accomplishments in the study of nature in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, Rome, China, and India. Intended to provide a balanced and inclusive treatment of the ancient world, contributors consider scientific, medical and mathematical learning in the cultures associated with the ancient world.
‘We are all Greeks. Our laws, our literature, our religion, our arts, have their root in Greece’, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley once wrote. It is in Greek that the questions which shaped the destiny of Western culture were asked, and so were the first attempts at an answer, and the search for a method of investigation. This book tries to rediscover the propulsive force that for over two millennia spread, and still lives in our system of thought. By systematically quoting the very words of the leading actors and by tracing their sources, it leads the reader along a path where they will be able to observe the establishment of philosophical ideas and language, in an updated and balanced picture of archaic lore, of the thought of the classical and hellenistic ages, and of the philosophy of late antiquity. The book looks closely at the progress of scientific thought and at its increasing autonomy, while following the evolution of the fruitful yet problematic relationship between the Greek world and the Near East.
The development of science in the modern world is often held to depend on such institutions as universities, peer-reviewed journals, and democracy. How, then, did new science emerge in the pre-modern culture of the Hellenistic Egyptian monarchy? Berrey argues that the court society formed around the Ptolemaic pharaohs Ptolemy III and IV (reigned successively 246-205/4 BCE) provided an audience for cross-disciplinary, learned knowledge, as physicians, mathematicians, and mechanicians clothed themselves in the virtues of courtiers attendant on the kings. The multicultural Greco-Egyptian court society prized entertainment that drew on earlier literature, mixed genres and cultures, and highlighted motion and sound. New cross-disciplinary science in the Hellenistic period gained its social currency and subsequent scientific success through its entertainment value as court science. Ancient court science sheds light on the long history of scientific interdisciplinarity.
The past few years have seen a revolution in our ability to map whole genome DNA from ancient humans. With the ancient DNA revolution, combined with rapid genome mapping of present human populations, has come remarkable insights into our past. This important new data has clarified and added to our knowledge from archaeology and anthropology, helped resolve long-existing controversies, challenged long-held views, and thrown up some remarkable surprises. The emerging picture is one of many waves of ancient human migrations, so that all populations existing today are mixes of ancient ones, as well as in many cases carrying a genetic component from Neanderthals, and, in some populations, Denisovans. David Reich, whose team has been at the forefront of these discoveries, explains what the genetics is telling us about ourselves and our complex and often surprising ancestry. Gone are old ideas of any kind of racial 'purity', or even deep and ancient divides between peoples. Instead, we are finding a rich variety of mixtures. Reich describes the cutting-edge findings from the past few years, and also considers the sensitivities involved in tracing ancestry, with science sometimes jostling with politics and tradition. He brings an important wider message: that we should celebrate our rich diversity, and recognize that every one of us is the result of a long history of migration and intermixing of ancient peoples, which we carry as ghosts in our DNA. What will we discover next?
Science in Byzantium has rarely been systematically explored. A first of its kind, this collection of essays highlights the disciplines, achievements, and contexts of Byzantine science across the eleven centuries of the Byzantine empire. After an introduction on science in Byzantium and the 21st century, and a study of Christianization and the teaching of science in Byzantium, it offers a comprehensive and up-to-date survey of the scientific disciplines cultivated in Byzantium, from the exact to the natural sciences, medicine, polemology, and the occult sciences. The volume showcases the diversity and vivacity of the varied scientific endeavours in the Byzantine world across its long history, and aims to bring the field into broader conversations within Byzantine studies, medieval studies, and history of science. Contributors are Fabio Acerbi, Anne-Laurence Caudano, Gonzalo Andreotti Cruz, Katerina Ierodiakonou, Herve Inglebert, Stavros Lazaris, Divna Manolova, Maria K. Papathanassiou, Inmaculada Pérez Martín, Thomas Salmon, Ioannis Telelis, Anne Tihon, Alain Touwaide, Arnaud Zucker.
The birth of science in ancient Greece had a historical impact that is still being felt today. Physicist Demetris Nicolaides examines the epochal shift in thinking that led pre-Socratic philosophers of the sixth and fifth centuries BCE to abandon the prevailing mythologies of the age and, for the first time, to analyze the natural world in terms of impersonal, rationally understood principles. He argues not only that their conceptual breakthroughs anticipated much of later science but that scientists of the twenty-first century are still grappling with the fundamental problems raised twenty-five hundred years ago. Looking at the vast sweep of human history, the author delves into the factors that led to the birth of science: urbanization, the role of religion, and in Greece a progressive intellectual curiosity that was unafraid to question tradition. Why did the first scientific approach to understanding the world take place in Greece? The author makes a convincing case that, aside from factors of geography and politics, the power of the Greek language and a cultural proclivity for critical thinking played a large role. In the Light of Science is a unique approach to the history of science revealing the important links between the ancient past and the present scientific endeavor to understand the universe.
This book is devoted to the last part of Aristotle’s collection of short treatises known today as the Parva Naturalia, i.e. the treatise On Youth and Old Age, on Life and Death, on Respiration. In the three main sections of the book, the author offers a translation, a commentary and a thorough analysis of this work. The author argues in favour of the unity of the work and contextualises its ideas within Aristotle’s corpus and the medical tradition of his time. After an Introduction to the nature of the work and its significance for the history of natural philosophy and science, a new English translation follows, along with a detailed commentary of Chapters 1-6, which combines philosophical discussion with philological observations. The book includes four interpretive essays, which tackle problems related to the whole treatise on a more philosophical basis, including questions about the structure and unity of the work, the organisation of the material, Aristotle’s methodological principles, his aims and target audience as well as the relevance of his selected themes to the thematic agenda of some Hippocratic writings. This book is of interest to students and researchers in Aristotle’s psychophysiology, and his views about the embodied mind, as well as to anyone concerned with the history of natural philosophy and science more generally.
