Greeks and‘Origins’ 43
inFor Marxgave a naive version (‘Thales opened up the “continent” of mathematics for scientific
knowledge’, 1996, p. 14); it is fair to say that the history of science was not his primary concern.
And the tradition is still present in a more sophisticated form in the ‘archaeology’ of Michel
Foucault: having described the stages of formation of a science as ‘discursive practice’ from the
lowest (‘positivity’) to the highest (‘formalization’), he continues:
mathematics [is] the only discursive practice to have crossed at one and the same time the thresholds of positivity,
epistemologization, scientificity and formalization...hence the fact that the beginning of mathematics is questioned
not so much as a historical event as a principle of history: a geometry emerging suddenly, once and for all, from the
trivial practices of land-measuring. (Foucault (2002), 188–9.)
As Paul Ernest points out (1998, p. 230) ‘[Foucault] has fallen victim to the popular myth about
the origins of mathematics in Greece’—and rather late in the day, it might be added. It was perhaps
one of Kuhn’s major achievements to question the simplistic division implied here between what is
scientific and what is not, to make clear that there is not a single scientific practice founded once
for all, and to exhibit science as subject to its own ‘breaks’, which cannot necessarily be described
as straightforward advances or retreats. The idea of a ‘revolution’ as founding Greek culture is by
no means confined to mathematics. It has long been a central dogma in the history of Western
culture that the Greeks—around the fifth-centurybce—were responsible for the invention of the
scientific method, philosophy, rational argument, democracy, and much more. That view has been
recently challenged, at least in part, in works such as Martin Bernal’sBlack Athena(1987, 1991),
which argue that there was a close relation in culture and even in language between Greece and the
Middle East, particularly Egypt.^7 However, even if the changes which may have brought abstract
rational thought into being are not specifically Greek, they are significant; G. E. R. Lloyd has done
the best recent work in trying to describe them (see in particular 1979), and to distinguish a
hypothetical ‘before’ and ‘after’. Attempts at non-Kuhnian (sociological/‘external’) explanations
have included:
- The introduction of alphabetic writing—adapted from the Phoenicians around the eighth
centurybce, but probably only brought into general circulation some time later in the transition
from an ‘oral’ to a ‘written’ culture (Goody 1986). - The invention of coined money, about the sixth centurybce. According to the Marxist thesis
of Alfred Sohn-Rethel (1978), this led to the ‘abstraction’ of things from values, and hence to
abstract thought in general—for a recent version see Seaford (2004). - The institution of the (more or less democratic) city–state with its tradition of public political
argument. This is the central thrust of Lloyd’s books on the subject, although he is careful to
avoid single-thesis explanations.
All of these theses may have some force, and it may, as in the case of the revolution of the
sixteenth century, be necessary to think in terms of a combination of factors. Any means for
deciding the question is almost completely lost in the fog of historical conjecture, but this has not
stopped this particularly fascinating historical problem from being the subject of wild speculation
- For the controversy surrounding, Bernal’s theories, which is far from resolved, see for example, the website
http://www.blackathena.com. For several illuminating discussions of the Greeks, their innovations, and their possible indebtedness to
others, see the articles by Bernal et al. 1992 collected inIsis, vol. 83, pp. 554–607.