What Have the Greeks Done for Modern Civilisation?Mahaffy, J. P. (John Pentland)
Philosophy
What Have the Greeks Done for Modern Civilisation?
Mahaffy, J. P. (John Pentland)
Civilization; Greece -- Civilization; Greece -- Intellectual life
Theophrastus, Eudemus, and Aristoxenus are among the best-known names of
these helpers, and from these we have valuable work extant. Physical
geography was entrusted to Dikæarchus. All these researches were carried
out in the same spirit, and with that unity of purpose that marks a
school. There was apparently but one division of all the domain of
science in which Aristotle did no original work, and yet his
contribution to it is not to be underrated. This was the field of pure
mathematics. For we know that he entrusted to his ablest pupil, Eudemus
the Rhodian, the task of writing the history of what other men had done
in this field. These books on the history of arithmetic, of geometry,
and of astronomy (then called astrology) were well known and valued, and
the modern critics declare that whatever is now known about the earlier
development of mathematics was derived from this pure and rich source.
Still more remarkable is it that this, the part of the edifice to which
Aristotle himself did not contribute, should have been the only one that
took root and flourished without any period of corruption or decay. As
to Aristotle’s personal competence in this matter, I am assured by the
best mathematicians that his not infrequent allusions to mathematics, by
way of metaphor or illustration, show a clear and sound understanding of
the subject. It is not, therefore, the vagary of an idle admirer, but
the deliberate expression of a weighty judge, when we learn from him in
his Discussion on Beauty--which he, being a Greek, of course seeks in
form, symmetry, and proportion--that the highest and noblest examples of
earthly beauty are to be found in mathematics.
Euclid was almost the contemporary of Aristotle, and so the Peripatetic
Mathematics found at Alexandria a new home and a mighty development,
which lasted for centuries and is not stayed to this day. But the rest
of the vast system of Aristotle seems, after about two generations, to
have fallen into incompetent hands. The activity of the Greek intellect
passed into other channels and became again purely philosophical and
ethical instead of scientific, as I shall show when I speak of the Stoic
and Epicurean systems.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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