as fi shermen and beekeepers for information. His books His-
tory of Animals and Parts of Animals describe more than 500
species of living creatures, and his account of the dogfi sh was
not equaled until the 19th century.
Aristotle’s aim was not just to record details for their
own sake but also to gather and use reliable data to arrive
at theories about how and why things worked. An impor-
tant guiding principle for him was the concept of teleology,
which assumes that everything in nature is the way it is for
a reason, except for unavoidable side eff ects. Aristotle said
that “nature did nothing in vain.” So when Aristotle looked,
for example, at a heart, he assumed that the heart did some-
thing useful for the organism and did it well, and he tried
to work out what that purpose might be and how the heart
accomplished it. Th is can be a useful principle of discovery
in biology, but it also meant that Aristotle and his followers
rarely accepted that anything could happen just by chance,
without a fi nal purpose.
Aristotelian physics, though incorrect, was extremely
infl uential. While Aristotle did a lot of sustained and or-
ganized investigation into nature, like most other Greek
thinkers he rarely carried out experiments. Experiment was
rare in the ancient world and did not usually have much au-
thority, and the notion of test by falsifi cation of a predicted
hypothesis (the modern scientifi c method) was never sug-
gested. Aft er the ancient period a later thinker John Philo-
ponus (sixth century c.e.) is said to have done experiments
disproving Aristotle’s claim that heavier objects fall faster
than lighter ones, but no one took much notice until Gali-
leo fi nally disproved Aristotle some 2,000 years later, in the
16th century.
Despite the lack of experiment, the concept of proof
was very important in ancient science and philosophy. Ar-
istotle developed the fi rst explicit system of logic, in which,
if the starting points are true, the proof is so constructed and
worked out that the conclusion must also be correct. It is an
important idea and works well in mathematics, but it is much
more diffi cult, as Aristotle recognized, to apply to biology
and other real-world situations that have many complicated
variables.THE LYCEUM
Aristotle set up a like-minded group of thinkers and learn-
ers, a school (the Lyceum or the Peripatetic), and many of
his followers did similar research. Th eophrastus (371–287
b.c.e.), the head of the Lyceum aft er Aristotle’s death, inves-
tigated and collected data on plants and stones and wrote
books about fi re and weather. Strato (d. 269 b.c.e.), who was
the leader of the Lyceum aft er Th eophrastus, was interested
in basic matter and problems such as how people could hear
through solid walls. Little of Strato’s work survives, but he
seems to have argued that there were tiny pockets of void
(empty space) within matter that explained how sound trav-
eled through solids. Strato’s theories had practical applica-
tions in the work of the mechanists.Th e kind of science done by the ancient philosophers and
other thinkers was an intellectual project largely restricted to
the social and literate elite. Philosophers oft en justifi ed what
they did as the highest form of human endeavor, the acquisi-
tion of knowledge for its own sake and not for gain or use,
practiced by people who did not need to work. But there were
tensions. A comedy of the fi ft h century b.c.e., Th e Clouds, by
Aristophanes, satirizes this kind of thought as ivory tower
navel-gazing.SPECIALIST THINKERS
For Aristotle, scientifi c understanding of the natural world,
natural philosophy, or natural history was part of a broader
project to understand and thus to be able to manage human
life and ethics in its entirety, from poetry to theology and
from politics (Aristotle defi ned humans as political animals)
to the nature of friendship, and he was as interested in rheto-
ric as in logic. Th us philosophy is not the same as science,
even for Aristotle, the most scientifi c philosopher of the an-
cient world.
But there were contemporaries of Aristotle who special-
ized in certain areas of intellectual and scientifi c enquiry.
Mathematics was a developing fi eld. Greek mathematics is
primarily geometrical rather than arithmetical (algebra had
not been invented). Although many theorems were known to
other older civilizations, such as the Babylonian and Egyp-
tian, a distinctive Greek addition, perhaps infl uenced by phi-
losophy’s concern with standards for truth and certainty, was
a concern to prove a general theorem would be true for all
possible values.
Well-known mathematicians of this era include Th e-
odorus and Th eaetetus, both of whom have roles in one of
Plato’s fi ctional philosophical dialogues on the nature of
knowledge. Th e Pythagorean philosopher and mathemati-
cian Archytas, in the early fi ft h century b.c.e., viewed math-
ematics as essential to understanding reality. Archytas
developed many solutions and proofs, including the solution
to the problem of doubling the cube, and provided a math-
ematical account of musical scales. Th ere was increasing
agreement on methodology, terminology, and what counted
as a proof. By around 300 b.c.e., the mathematician Euclid
could write a book called Elements (of Mathematics) that laid
out all known mathematics as a set of demonstrated proofs
from which, beginning at the most basic hypotheses and
defi nitions, increasingly complex theorems could be reliably
derived. Mathematics had become an ideal of intellectual in-
quiry, the successful pursuit and discovery of knowledge for
the sake of knowledge. It was also vital in several other kinds
of investigation, especially astronomy and mechanics.ASTRONOMY
Naturalistic theories about the universe and its origins, called
cosmology and cosmogony, respectively, had been a major
theme of pre-Socratic thought. Anaximander, for example,
said that the world was a cylinder, with humans living on one938 science: Greece0895-1194_Soc&Culturev4(s-z).i938 938 10/10/07 2:30:30 PM