The Shape of the Heavens #339

The world according to the ancient Greeks (1)

Dear friends and supporters of Daily Philosophy,

Another week is over, and today I have a particularly interesting and fun article for you, the first in a short series of diversions on the science of the ancient Greeks. If you like them, I might write more on specific topics, so please tell me your thoughts in the comments!

One of the great sources for ancient Greek science is The Doctrines of the Philosophers (Ancient Greek: Περὶ τῶν ἀρεσκόντων φιλοσόφοις φυσικῶν δογμάτων; Latin: Placita Philosophorum), by an unknown author or authors, conventionally attributed to the label “Pseudo-Plutarch” (online here). The author lived around the 3rd or 4th century AD, and the particularly fascinating thing about this book is that it is organised by topic instead of philosophers. This means that one can look up, say, the chapter “Whence Is It That Infants Born In The Seventh Month Are Born Alive,” and find what Empedocles, Polybus, Diocles, Aristotle and Hippocrates had to say about the topic! This is great for researching a topic, because otherwise one would have to go through all the philosophers’ works, fragments and mentions by others in order to collect all the different views.

What I find fascinating is to see how the ancients, having so few instruments at their disposal, still managed to come up with perfectly plausible (and sometimes, almost correct) theories about the heavens, the nature of the stars, and the place of Earth in all that.

Let’s have a look at what the ancient astronomers thought!

David E. Cooper: Pessimism, Quietism, and Nature as Refuge (2024). 168 pages, £18.99. Get it here!

Space and Earth

Before we can talk about the Earth, let’s see how the ancients perceived the whole of the universe. Plutarch writes (I will now leave the “Pseudo-” prefix before “Plutarch” away for readability, but please remember that we are always talking about the unknown author of Placita Philosophorum, not the real Plutarch):

Pythagoras was the first philosopher that gave the name of χόσμος to the world, from the order and beauty of it; for so that word signifies.

This is an important point. “Kosmos,” as the word is more commonly written, means both universe (compare “cosmic,” “cosmology,” “cosmonaut”) and ordered beauty (“cosmetics,” or, in modern Greek: kosmema = jewel). Perceiving the universe as an ordered thing, something that is beautiful due to its working in an ordered and predictable way, is the first step to seeing science as a meaningful activity. If I believed that the universe is chaotic and that the gods can make rules and cause events at will, then physics, chemistry, biology and all the other sciences would be impossible. Science, just like religion, is, deep down, based on a belief that can itself not be further justified: that the universe is beautiful, that the cosmos cares about cosmetics.

Physicist Albert Einstein once wrote:

Mozart's music is so pure and beautiful that I see it as a reflection of the inner beauty of the universe.