/pdf/the-essential-tension-selected-studies-in-scientific-573i6ya5b7.pdf

The Essential tensión: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change

Introduction Hellenistic political philosophy has had a bad press. In lectures published in 1983 the distinguished and influential ancient historian Moses Finley gave it as his view that Plato and Aristotle ‘were the first genuine political theorists of antiquity, and the last’. For only they attempted ‘a complete and coherent account’ of the ideal society ‘grounded in systematic metaphysics, epistemology, psychology and ethics’. Some thirty years earlier, in what remains an eminently serviceable general account of Greek political thought, T. A. Sinclair wrote as follows: Looking back over the political thought of the third century BC one cannot help being struck with its barrenness. This is of course due in part to the decline in the polis and in part to the loss of contemporary writings on the subject. But it is also due to the refusal or inability to relate political thinking to the material conditions in which men lived. Epicurus and Chrysippus did their best to help men to face life cheerfully, but the men whom they helped were the few, who had sufficient education to understand their message and sufficient leisure for lessons in philosophy. Finley and Sinclair are only echoing a long entrenched judgement which finds a classic formulation in the third volume of Zeller's great history of Greek philosophy, first published in 1852. For Zeller the Hellenistic period found the Greeks coping with a deterioration in their external circumstances, and particularly with loss of political self-determination as the monarchies of Alexander's successors eclipsed the city-state, by withdrawing into the inner world of self-consciousness.

Social and political thought

The herophilus the art of medicine in early alexandria that we provide for you will be ultimate to give preference. This reading book is your chosen book to accompany you when in your free time, in your lonely. This kind of book can help you to heal the lonely and get or add the inspirations to be more inoperative. Yeah, book as the widow of the world can be very inspiring manners. As here, this book is also created by an inspiring author that can make influences of you to do more.

Herophilus: the art of medicine in early Alexandria

Duhem's 1908 essay questions the relation between physical theory and metaphysics and, more specifically, between astronomy and physics an issue still of importance today. He critiques the answers given by Greek thought, Arabic science, medieval Christian scholasticism, and, finally, the astronomers of the Renaissance.\

BOOK AND FILM REVIEWS: Positivism in Ancient and Modern Science: To Save the Phenomena, An Essay on the Idea of Physical Theory from Plato to Galileo

Over the centuries, magicians have developed extensive knowledge about the manipulation of the human mind—knowledge that has been largely ignored by psychology. It has recently been argued that this knowledge could help improve our understanding of human cognition and consciousness. But to what extent is this possible? What has already been done? And how much could it ultimately contribute to our exploration of the human mind? We propose here a framework outlining how knowledge about magic can be used to help us understand the human mind. Various approaches—both old and new—are surveyed, in terms of four different levels. The first focuses on the methods in magic, using these to suggest new approaches to existing issues in psychology. The second focuses on the effects that magic can produce, such as the sense of wonder induced by seeing an apparently impossible event. Third is the consideration of magic tricks—methods and effects together—as phenomena of scientific interest in their own right. Finally, there is the organization of knowledge about magic into an informative whole, including the possibility of a science centered around the experience of wonder.

/pdf/a-framework-for-using-magic-to-study-the-mind-1usa50s9xh.pdf

A framework for using magic to study the mind

Many twentieth century scholars describe ancient natural philosophy in terms of a dichotomy between so-called 'mechanistic' and teleological approaches to explanation. The atomists in particular are taken as representative of the former. However, scholars have pointed to some difficulties with this practice;' and different things are meant by the claim that there are 'mechanistic conceptions' or 'mechanical explanations' of the natural world in early natural philosophy. Often the term is taken to refer to the presence of some specific feature in an ancient account, such as explanation by material properties alone, rejection of teleological explanation, or the view that causation should be restricted to contact action. The characterizations of mechanistic thought typically offered can be quite diverse perhaps more so than is commonly recognized and it is not clear that any one definition or subset of necessary and sufficient characteristics would encompass the different ways the term is used. While there surely are similiarities between ancient atomism and later corpuscularian philosophies, care must be taken with the use of an omnibus term like 'mechanistic' to describe these similarities, lest it obscure as much as it reveals. Here I do not attempt an analysis of the manifold ways the terms 'mechanical' or 'mechanistic' are used.2 Rather, I intend to focus attention on only one possible meaning, one that identifies a method of investigation rather than some substantive feature of a natural philosophy. The term 'mechanistic' can be taken to refer to a method of investigating the natural world through terms and principles drawn from the discipline called 'mechanics'. So understood, it is only to be expected that the characteristics associated with the term should be diverse and open-ended and vary through time, as the understanding of mechanics has evolved. This is not the way the term is most commonly used; nonetheless, I suggest that this sense of

Ancient Automata and Mechanical Explanation

It has long been thought that the ancient Greeks did not take mechanics seriously as part of the workings of nature, and that therefore their natural philosophy was both primitive and marginal. In this book Sylvia Berryman challenges that assumption, arguing that the idea that the world works 'like a machine' can be found in ancient Greek thought, predating the early modern philosophy with which it is most closely associated. Her discussion ranges over topics including balancing and equilibrium, lifting water, sphere-making and models of the heavens, and ancient Greek pneumatic theory, with detailed analysis of thinkers such as Aristotle, Archimedes, and Hero of Alexandria. Her book shows scholars of ancient Greek philosophy why it is necessary to pay attention to mechanics, and shows historians of science why the differences between ancient and modern reactions to mechanics are not as great as was generally thought.

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The Mechanical Hypothesis in Ancient Greek Natural Philosophy

It is a common practice among scholars of ancient natural philosophy and the early history of science to talk of ancient accounts of the natural world as falling into one of two categories, the Ideological or the mechanistic. These terms can refer either to individual accounts of specific phenomena, or to a more general approach to natural philosophy; in the latter sense, the two need not be mutually exclusive. Many interpretations of Aristotelian teleology take his approach to be compatible with offering 'mechanistic' explanations of specific phenomena. The philosophers most commonly said to have a consistently 'mechanistic' approach — i.e., to avoid teleology altogether — are the atomists, although the term is also applied to other Presocratic and medical theories. Although the term 'mechanistic' is widely used in this context, there are acknowledged problems with using this modem term to categorize ancient philosophers. At different times scholars have either questioned whether the atomists in fact satisfy a given modern conception of the

https://www.degruyter.com/view/j/apeiron.2002.35.3/apeiron.2002.35.3.235/apeiron.2002.35.3.235.pdf

Galen and the Mechanical Philosophy

In this paper I outline a role for mechanistic conceptions of organisms in ancient Greek natural philosophy, especially the study of organisms. By ‘mechanistic conceptions’ I mean the use of ideas and techniques drawn from the field of mechanics to investigate the natural world. ‘Mechanistic conceptions’ of organisms in ancient Greek philosophy, then, are those that draw on the ancient understanding of the field called ‘mechanics’ — he mechanike techne—to investigate living things, rather than those bearing some perceived similarity to modern notions of ‘the mechanical.’ I have argued elsewhere that evidence of mechanistic conceptions of the natural world can be found, not only among seventeenth and eighteenth century ‘mechanical philosophers,’ but also—albeit in vestigial form — in some ancient Greek texts. Unfortunately, these reports are slight, often by detractors of this approach, and offer only clues as to the motivational context for employing these mechanical conceptions. Here, my purpose is to suggest what role they might have played in the history of natural philosophy.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/info/40232326

Teleology Without Tears: Aristotle and the Role of Mechanistic Conceptions of Organisms

Philosophy in the period immediately after Aristotle is sometimes thought to be marked by the decline of natural philosophy and philosophical disinterest in contemporary achievements in the sciences. But in one area at least, the early third century B.C.E. was a time of productive interaction between such disparate fields as epistemology, physics and geometry. Debates between the sceptics and the dogmatic philosophical schools focus on epistemological problems about the possibility of self-evident appearances, but there is evidence from Euclid's day of a quite different response. The sceptical challenge provoked the development of theories explaining error formation, showing how illusions can be studied systematically and are subject to prediction. Such theories do not legitimate claims about the nature of the underlying entities perceived, but provide justification for forming expectations about future perceptions. While it overtly focuses on purely geometrical considerations, the Euclidean model of optics nonetheless provides support for certain views about the nature of vision and the physics of light. Moreover, by offering a model in which the image received is not thought to be a perspicuous mirroring of the object seen, Euclid may have helped promote a view of perception as something reconstructed from information received, not as a mere form transferred into the eye. The ancient sceptic may indeed have fulfilled his promise to promote inquiry by focusing attention on problems that escape the attention of a hasty theorist.

Sylvia Berryman

Papers

Ancient Automata and Mechanical Explanation

The Mechanical Hypothesis in Ancient Greek Natural Philosophy

Galen and the Mechanical Philosophy

Teleology Without Tears: Aristotle and the Role of Mechanistic Conceptions of Organisms

Euclid and the Sceptic: A Paper on Vision, Doubt, Geometry, Light and Drunkenness