The Legacy of Greece: Essays By: Gilbert Murray, W. R. Inge, J. Burnet, Sir T. L. Heath, D'arcy W. Thompson, Charles Singer, R. W. Livingston, A. Toynbee, A. E. Zimmern, Percy Gardner, Sir Reginald Blomfield
Philosophy
The Legacy of Greece: Essays By: Gilbert Murray, W. R. Inge, J. Burnet, Sir T. L. Heath, D'arcy W. Thompson, Charles Singer, R. W. Livingston, A. Toynbee, A. E. Zimmern, Percy Gardner, Sir Reginald Blomfield
Greece -- Civilization
The immediate effect of Aristotle's rejection of Platonist mathematics
was one he certainly neither foresaw nor intended. It was to make a
breach between philosophy and science. Mathematical science, whether
Aristotle realized it or not, was still in the vigour of its first
youth, and mathematicians were stirred by the achievements of the last
generation to attempt the solution of still higher problems. If the
Lyceum turned away from them, they were quite prepared to carry on the
Academic tradition by themselves, and they succeeded for a time beyond
all expectation. The third century B. C. was, in fact, the Golden Age of
Greek mathematics, and it has been suggested that this was due to the
emancipation of mathematics from philosophy. If that were true, it would
be very important for us to know it; but it can, I think, be shown that
it is not true. The great mathematicians of the third century were
certainly carrying on the tradition of their predecessors who had been
philosophers as well as mathematicians, and it is not to be wondered at
that they were able to do so for a time. But the really striking fact is
surely that Greek mathematics became sterile in a comparatively short
time, and that no further advance was made till the days of Descartes
and Leibniz, with whom philosophy and mathematics once more went hand in
hand.
Nor was the effect of this divorce on philosophy itself less
disastrous. Theophrastus continued Aristotle's work on Aristotle's
lines, and founded the science of Botany as his predecessor had founded
that of Zoology, but the Peripatetic School practically died out with
him and had very little influence till the study of Aristotle was
revived long afterwards by the Neoplatonists.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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