Best Quotes from The Beginnings Of Western Science by David C. Lindberg with Page Numbers

My hope and expectation is that this book, in its second incarnation, will continue to reach a general audience, including students, with the startling news that the ancient and medieval periods were the scene of impressive scientific achievements.

I believe that it will also interest the general educated reader and scholars who do not specialize in the history of ancient and medieval science.

No other book of which I am aware covers the same breadth of material, over the same chronological span, at the same level of presentation.

I have more persistently attempted to place ancient and medieval science in philosophical, religious, and institutional context.

I have used the notes not only for purposes of documentation and acknowledgment of scholarly debt, but also as an opportunity for a running bibliographical commentary.

It is my hope that this book will continue to prove itself suitable for classroom use.

I have had the pleasure of copyediting my own prose, attempting to breathe life into a dead sentence.

Revisions are just a few of the many improvements that have been made, reflecting a sharper awareness of the importance of all scientific contributions.

Nobody covers a subject as large as this without a great deal of help.

I am profoundly indebted to friends and colleagues who have done their best to instruct me in the intricacies of their various specialties and rescue me from confusion and error.

"Many of the ingredients of what we now regard as science were certainly present."

"...we can comfortably employ the expression 'science' or 'natural science' in the context of antiquity and the Middle Ages."

"This is the only suitable way of understanding how we became what we are."

"We must respect the way earlier generations approached nature, acknowledging that although it may differ from the modern way, it is nonetheless of interest because it is part of our intellectual ancestry."

"But the word 'know,' seemingly so clear and simple, is almost as tricky as the term 'science'; indeed, it brings us back to the distinction between technology and theoretical science."

"What about theoretical knowledge? What did prehistoric people 'know' or believe about the origins of the world in which they lived, its nature, and the causes of its numerous and diverse phenomena?"

"The primary function of oral tradition is the very practical one of explaining, and thereby justifying, the present state and structure of the community."

"We should not expect the explanatory principles accepted by preliterate people to resemble ours: lacking any conception of 'laws of nature' or deterministic causal mechanisms, their ideas of causation extend well beyond the sort of mechanical or physical action acknowledged by modern science."

"The stories embodied in oral traditions are intended to convey and reinforce the values and attitudes of the community, to offer satisfying explanations of the major features of the world as experienced by the community, and to legitimate the current social structure."

"The invention of writing was a prerequisite for the development of philosophy and science in the ancient world."

"The world of the philosophers... was an orderly, predictable world in which things behave according to their natures."

"The capricious world of divine intervention was being pushed aside, making room for order and regularity; chaos was yielding to kosmos."

"To be sure, these philosophical developments did not signal the end of Greek mythology... the historians... retained much of the old mythology..."

"The explanations are entirely naturalistic; eclipses do not reflect personal whim or the arbitrary fancies of the gods, but simply the nature of fiery rings..."

"This is a search for unity behind diversity and order behind chaos."

"The need not simply to report... but also to defend them against critics and competitors..."

"The early philosophers began at the only possible place: the beginning."

"It is often the fate of foundational questions to seem pointless to later generations who take the foundations for granted."

"To gain access to these higher realities, we must escape the bondage of sense experience and climb out of the cave..."

"The true reality is not merely found in the common properties of classes of things but also has objective, independent existence."

1. "Knowledge is thus gained by a process that begins with experience..."

2. "For Aristotle, there were just individual dogs."

3. "If every object is constituted of form and matter, then Aristotle could make room for both change and stability..."

4. "Change, for Aristotle, is thus never random, but confined to the narrow corridor connecting pairs of contrary qualities; order is thus discernible even in the midst of change."

5. "The world we inhabit is an orderly one... because every natural object has a 'nature'—an attribute... that makes the object behave in its customary fashion."

6. "To explain the arrangement of teeth in the mouth, for example, we must understand their functions..."

7. "Everything that comes into being or is made must (1) be made out of something, (2) be made by the agency of something, and (3) must become something."

8. "True knowledge was always causal knowledge."

9. "We cannot understand the changes that occur within an acorn... if we do not understand the oak tree that is its final destination."

10. "The proper measure of a philosophical system or a scientific theory is not the degree to which it anticipated modern thought, but its degree of success in treating the philosophical and scientific problems of its own day."

"To say that the season for studying philosophy has not yet come, or that it is past and gone, is like saying that the season for happiness is not yet or that it is now no more."

"The way to achieve happiness, Epicurus believed, was to eliminate fear of the unknown and the supernatural, and for this purpose, it appeared to Epicurus, natural philosophy was ideally suited."

"If we had never been molested by alarms over celestial and atmospheric phenomena, nor by the misgiving that death somehow affects us, nor by neglect of the proper limits of pains and desires, we should have had no need to study natural philosophy."

"The establishment of the Museum in Alexandria is important not only because of the significant research carried out there, but also because it is the first instance of the support of advanced learning through public or royal patronage."

"Plato’s school acquired sufficient permanency to endure long beyond his death."

"Socrates and Plato ... were not itinerant but remained in Athens, and they departed from sophistic methods of instruction..."

"Education to this point had been strictly elementary, largely athletic and artistic in its orientation. About the middle of the fifth century, the sophists made their appearance in Athens, offering something new."

"It must be understood that there was nothing resembling modern, compulsory mass education."

"The possession of private property, along with Plato’s provision for the selection of a successor, doubtless contributed to the longevity of the school."

"The pursuit of happiness was regarded as the goal of human existence."

The applicability of mathematics to nature has been the subject of a long debate within the Western scientific tradition.

The ancient Pythagoreans appear to have maintained that nature is mathematical through-and-through.

Plato argued that the fundamental building blocks of the visible world were not material, but geometrical.

What binds everything together into a unified cosmos... is simply geometrical proportion.

Aristotle was convinced that mathematics and physics are both useful, but it was clear to him that they are not the same thing.

The mathematician and the physicist may study the same object, but they concentrate on different aspects of it.

These preparatory claims lay the groundwork for the propositions that fill the thirteen books that follow.

Euclid shows how to 'exhaust' the area of a circle by means of an inscribed polygon.

It is a significant achievement to create a geometrical language for talking about planetary motion and to put that language to use.

He was searching not for physical structure, but for mathematical order.

"Health is primarily that state in which these constituent substances are in the correct proportion to each other, both in strength and quantity, and are well mixed."

"The physician’s most basic task is to assist the natural healing process."

"Careful attention to seasonal and climatic factors, and to the natural disposition of the patient, was also part of successful therapy."

"Disease is associated with some imbalance in the body or interference with its natural state."

"Proceed cautiously, on the basis of accumulated experience, accepting causal theories only when they were supported by overwhelming evidence."

"Nature acts uniformly; whatever the causes may be, they are not capricious, but uniform and universal."

"The task of the physician is to understand the patterns of health and disease."

"To offer the simplest example, in the opening lines of the Hippocratic Oath, the physician swears by Apollo and Asclepius and calls on the gods and goddesses to witness his oath."

"When you meet the patient, you study the most important symptoms without forgetting the most trivial."

"The structure of the human body is perfectly adapted to its functions, unable to be improved even in imagination."

"The artistic and intellectual conquest belonged to the Greeks."

"Mathematics would be included for utilitarian reasons, or as training for the intellect."

"A certain amount of mathematics would be included for utilitarian reasons, or as training for the intellect."

"Members of the Roman upper class had about the same level of interest in the fine points of Greek natural philosophy as the average American politician has in metaphysics and epistemology."

"We need always to remember that the Roman aristocracy regarded learning, except for clearly utilitarian matters, as a leisure-time pursuit."

"The level of discourse in these settings varied."

"The church was the major patron of scientific learning."

"Classical pagan literature, widely judged to be irrelevant or dangerous, was not prominent."

"Neither Isidore nor Bede was a creator of new scientific knowledge, but both restated and preserved existing scientific knowledge in an age when the study of nature was a marginal activity."

"Both traditions contributed, each in its own way, to preservation of the classical tradition—thereby delivering to succeeding generations the legacy that would serve as a foundation and furnish many of the resources."

"Greek science entered the world of Islam, not as an invading force … but as an invited guest."

"The guest, now a comfortable member of the community, was the source and inspiration for remarkable scientific achievements by outstanding scholars."

"Much of the important philosophical and scientific work was carried out in relatively tolerant urban centers—enclaves where scholars enjoyed considerable intellectual freedom."

"The fact that Islam’s foundation in revealed religion surely influenced the reception of the classical tradition."

"This scientific movement had its origin, for practical purposes, in Baghdad under the ‛Abbāsids, though many other centers of scientific patronage also emerged."

"What we know about the Islamic achievement is found in a collection of texts."

"The classical tradition arrived not as a finished product but piecemeal, as a work-in-progress; and the literate population of the recipient culture... applied itself to mastery and advancement of the best and most convincing body of philosophical and scientific knowledge the world had ever seen."

"Questions remain...whether the Damascus and Baghdad observatories were anything more than observation posts. There is no such question regarding...the Maragha and Samarqand observatories."

"Perhaps the question that we ought to be asking is not 'Why or when did Islamic science decline?’, but 'How is it that an intellectual tradition that began in such unpromising circumstances developed an astonishing scientific tradition that endured as long as it did?'"

"It may be that this very diversity ensured that there would remain enclaves of educated, theologically tolerant people, where a scientific tradition, foreign in both origin and content, could take root and flourish."

"The idea of the Middle Ages ... has now been almost totally abandoned by professional historians in favor of the neutral view that takes 'Middle Ages' simply as the name of a period in Western history..."

"[Charlemagne] invested a great deal of time and effort studying rhetoric, dialectic and particularly astronomy..."

"The importance of the copying of classical texts is demonstrated by the fact that our earliest known copies of most Roman scientific and literary texts...date from the Carolingian period."

"The most important contribution of the Carolingian period was the collection and copying of books in the classical tradition..."

"An important renewal of scholarly activity...was prompted by concerns about the low level of clerical literacy..."

"By the end of the twelfth century, Latin Christendom had recovered major portions of the Greek and Arabic philosophical and scientific achievement..."

"A generation after Anselm, Peter Abelard...extended the rationalist program begun by Anselm."

"Searching for secondary causes is not a denial, but an affirmation, of the existence and majesty of the first cause."

"The universities were enormously large by comparison with Greek, Roman, or early medieval schools, but... they developed a common curriculum consisting of the same subjects taught from the same texts."

"Within this educational system the medieval master had a great deal of freedom...there was almost no doctrine, philosophical or theological, that was not submitted to... scrutiny and criticism..."

The task was to come to terms with the contents of the newly translated texts—to master the new knowledge, organize it, assess its significance, discover its ramifications, work out its internal contradictions, and apply it (wherever possible) to existing intellectual concerns.

The new texts were enormously attractive because of their breadth, their intellectual power, and their utility.

Aristotelian philosophy proved too attractive to ignore or suppress permanently.

The problem was not how to eradicate Aristotelian influence, but how to domesticate it.

Philosophy employs the natural human faculties of sense and reason to arrive at such truths as it can.

Even though the natural light of the human mind [i.e., philosophy] is inadequate to make known what is revealed by faith, nevertheless what is divinely taught to us by faith cannot be contrary to what we are endowed with by nature.

There can be no true conflict between theology and philosophy, since both revelation and our rational capacities are God-given.

The two roads may sometimes lead to different truths, but they never lead to contradictory truths.

Theology does not oppress the sciences, but puts them to work, directing them to their proper end.

The infinite scope of God’s activity guaranteed by the doctrine of divine omnipotence was, for practical purposes, restricted to the initial act of creation.

Light is the essence of the cosmos, the divine spark that initiates existence.

The cosmos reflects the unity of purpose and design, bound by divine providence.

Humanity stands as the pinnacle of creation, a microcosm of the vast universe.

The natural world is an intricate tapestry, where every thread is interwoven with divine wisdom.

Knowledge of the heavens opens the gates to understanding the very fabric of reality.

To explore the cosmos is to engage in the sublime act of uncovering God’s handiwork.

Every star and every planet is a testament to the order and beauty of divine creation.

The quest for knowledge is a journey toward enlightenment and the divine truth embedded in the cosmos.

The movements of celestial bodies remind us of the dance of creation and the harmony that sustains existence.

In every corner of the universe, one finds reflections of higher truths and profound mysteries.

Medieval physics was not a primitive version of modern physics and cannot be legitimately judged by comparison with its modern namesake.

The medieval natural philosopher took his starting point from the text of Aristotle’s Physics and devoted his career to clarification of ambiguities, disputation about difficult or contentious portions of the text, and original application or extension of Aristotelian principles.

He was typically a gifted reader and interpreter of the texts of Aristotle and his commentators, eager to display his logical and creative powers in discussion and debate.

These natures we discern through long and persistent observation.

For Aristotle, natural things are always in a state of flux; it is part of their essential nature to be in transition from potentiality to actuality.

If we are ignorant of change, we are ignorant of nature.

The central object of study in Aristotle’s natural philosophy, then, was change in all of its forms and manifestations.

For all medieval scholars, the task undertaken was the formulation of a conceptual and a mathematical framework suitable for analyzing problems of motion.

By successfully importing the visual cone of the extramissionists into the intromission theory, he has combined the advantages of the extramission and intromission theories.

Medieval scholars executed the task of creating a conceptual framework with brilliance, setting the stage for future generations.

"We must take great care to employ this medical art, if it should be necessary, not as making it wholly accountable for our state of health or illness, but as redounding to the glory of God."

"The cure of the soul is more important than the cure of the body."

"It is not at all in keeping with your profession to seek for bodily medicines, and they are not really conducive to health."

"In the radically new institutional setting provided by the monasteries, it was not only nurtured and preserved through a dangerous period in European history, but it was also pressed into service on behalf of Christian ideals of charity."

"With the desire for status and professional advancement, the desire for intellectual recognition and the prestige of having formal credentials arose."

"The healing arts continued to be practiced more or less as local healers had always done, despite the chaos that accompanied the disintegration of the Roman Empire."

"The principle of balance dictated that when health was compromised, measures must be taken to restore equilibrium."

"It is through the efforts of countless individuals that the medical tradition has been preserved and evolved."

"Hospitals became a cornerstone of medical care, serving the poor and the sick with kindness and professionalism."

"The past is not just a series of events, but the foundation upon which we build our understanding of the present and future."

My attempt, in this book, to reconstruct the lives, beliefs, and activities of historical actors from the ancient and medieval past has surely raised more questions than it has been able to answer.

Revolution does not demand total rupture with the past.

We should reserve our quibbling for those occasions for which quibbling is suited.

The brilliance of the creators of the scientific revolution is revealed not only in their repudiation of the past and creation of theoretical novelties, but also in their ability to re-deploy inherited scientific ideas, theories, assumptions, methodologies, instrumentation, and data.

No scientist really begins at the beginning, without any expectations, theoretical knowledge, or methodological commitments.

The scientific revolution took place within an ideologically rich human environment; it had ideologically rich historical foundations, and with those foundations came continuities.

We may also safely infer that the Maragha, Samarkand, and Istanbul observatories developed research programs based on organized observation of the heavens.

Experimental efforts continued in the European Middle Ages... they were most plentiful in the mathematical sciences.

A rival metaphysics, Epicurean atomism, became known largely through the long philosophical poem by the Roman, Lucretius.

A systematic theory of experimental science was understood by enough philosophers in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries to produce the methodological revolution to which modern science owes its origin.