Representatives of ancient science are. Specifics of ancient science

Moscow State University of Instrument Engineering and Informatics

Abstract on the history of science and technology on the topic: “Science of antiquity: main stages and achievements”

1st year student

Kuznetsova Anna Alexandrovna

KB-5 gr. 1402 (15.03.06)

Kushner Vladimir Grigorievich

2015 Year 1 Antique period development of science

The term antiquity (from the Latin Antiquus - ancient) is used to designate everything that was associated with Greco-Roman antiquity, from Homeric Greece to the fall of the Western Roman Empire, arose during the Renaissance. At the same time, the concepts of “ancient history”, “ancient culture”, “ancient art”, “ancient city”, etc. appeared. The concept of "ancient Greek science" was probably first substantiated by P. Tannery in late XIX century, and the concept of “ancient science” - S. Ya. Lurie in the 30s of the twentieth century.

Science owes its appearance to man’s desire to increase the productivity of his labor and, ultimately, his standard of living. Gradually, since prehistoric times, knowledge about natural phenomena and their relationships has accumulated.

One of the first sciences was astronomy, the results of which were actively used by priests and clergy. The ancient applied sciences included geometry - the science of accurately measuring areas, volumes and distances - and mechanics. Geometry also included geography.

IN Ancient Greece to the 6th century BC e. The earliest theoretical scientific systems emerged that sought to explain reality by a set of basic principles. In particular, a system of primary elements widely spread throughout Europe appeared, and the philosophers Leucippus and Democrat created the first atomic theory of the structure of matter, later developed by Epicurus. For a long time, science was not completely separated from philosophy, but was an integral part of it. However, already ancient philosophers distinguished cosmogony and physics as part of philosophy: systems of ideas about the origin and structure of the world, respectively.

One of the brightest representatives of ancient Greek philosophy is Aristotle. Having carried out a huge number of observations and compiled a very detailed description his ideas about physics and biology, he nevertheless did not conduct experiments.

Before the era of scientific revolutions, it was believed that man-made artificial experimental conditions cannot produce results that would adequately describe phenomena occurring in nature.

The concept of ancient science

Among scientific scientists there are two extreme points views in the very concept of science, which are in radical contradiction with each other.

The first point of view says that science in the proper sense of the word was born in Europe only in the 16th-17th centuries, during a period usually called the great scientific revolution. Its emergence is associated with the activities of such scientists as Galileo, Kepler, Descartes, and Newton. It is to this time that the birth of the scientific method itself, which is characterized by a specific relationship between theory and experiment, should be attributed. At the same time, the role of mathematization was realized natural sciences- a process that continues to our time and has now captured a number of areas of knowledge that relate to man and human society. Ancient thinkers, strictly speaking, did not yet know experiment and, therefore, did not truly have scientific method: their conclusions were largely the product of groundless speculation, which could not be subjected to real verification. An exception can be made, perhaps, only for one mathematics, which, due to its specifics, is purely speculative in nature and therefore does not need experimentation. As for scientific natural science, it actually did not exist in ancient times; there were only weak beginnings of later scientific disciplines, which were immature generalizations of random observations and practice data. The global concepts of the ancients about the origin and structure of the world cannot in any way be recognized by science: at best, they should be attributed to what later received the name of natural philosophy (a term that has a clearly odious connotation in the eyes of representatives of exact natural science).

Another point of view, directly opposite to the one just stated, does not impose any strict restrictions on the concept of science. According to its adherents, science in the broad sense of the word can be considered any body of knowledge related to the real world surrounding a person. From this point of view, the origin mathematical science should be attributed to the time when man began to perform the first, even the most elementary operations with numbers; astronomy appeared simultaneously with the first observations of the movement of celestial bodies; availability of a certain amount of information about the animal and flora, characteristic of a given geographical area, can already serve as evidence of the first steps of zoology and botany. If this is so, then neither the Greek nor any other of the historical civilizations known to us can claim to be considered the birthplace of science, because the emergence of the latter is pushed back somewhere very far, into the foggy depths of centuries.

Turning to the initial period of the development of science, we will see that various situations took place there. Thus, Babylonian astronomy should be classified as an applied discipline, since it set itself purely practical goals. When carrying out their observations, the Babylonian astrologers were least of all interested in the structure of the universe, the true (and not just apparent) movement of the planets, the causes of such phenomena as solar and lunar eclipses. These questions, apparently, did not arise before them at all. Their task was to pre-calculate the onset of phenomena that, according to the views of that time, had a beneficial or, conversely, detrimental effect on the fate of people and even entire kingdoms. Therefore, despite the presence of a huge number of observations and the very complex mathematical methods with which these materials were processed, Babylonian astronomy cannot be considered a science in the proper sense of the word.

We find exactly the opposite picture in Greece. Greek scientists, who were far behind the Babylonians in terms of knowledge of what was happening in the sky, from the very beginning raised the question of the structure of the world as a whole. This question interested the Greeks not for any practical purposes, but for its own sake; its production was determined by pure curiosity, which was inherent to such a high degree in the inhabitants of the then Hellas. Attempts to solve this issue boiled down to creating models of space, which at first were of a speculative nature. No matter how fantastic these models may be from our current point of view, their significance lay in the fact that they anticipated the most important feature of all later natural science - modeling the mechanism of natural phenomena.

Something similar happened in mathematics. Neither the Babylonians nor the Egyptians distinguished between exact and approximate solutions mathematical problems. Any solution that gave practically acceptable results was considered good. On the contrary, for the Greeks, who approached mathematics purely theoretically, what mattered above all was a rigorous solution obtained through logical reasoning. This led to the development of mathematical deduction, which determined the nature of all subsequent mathematics. Eastern mathematics even in its highest achievements, which for a long time remained inaccessible to the Greeks, and never approached the method of deduction.

So, distinctive feature Greek science from the moment of its inception was its theoretical nature, the desire for knowledge for the sake of knowledge itself, and not for the sake of those practical applications that could stem from it. In the first stages of the existence of science, this feature undoubtedly played a progressive role and had a great stimulating effect on the development of scientific thinking.

Ancient science.

Ancient science - the cradle modern science, i.e. at this stage, basic concepts, problems of science, a culture of thinking were formed, scientific terms: theory, system, method, method, analysis, synthesis.

Length of period, duration: III century. BC. – V century AD The following stages are distinguished:

1) Classical stage (VII – VI centuries BC).

2) Hellenism (III century BC – 1st century AD).

3) Roman (II – V centuries AD).

Geographical boundaries: the limits of Greek and Roman influence.

Features of ancient science.

In the world and national science There are a number of major researchers of ancient science. Professor Ryazansky (1980) “Ancient Science”: 4 main features of ancient science turned ancient science into a social cultural activity:

1) Science is an activity to obtain new knowledge. On this basis, a group of people was formed - scientists (according to Plato - a special group of people with a “golden soul”).

2) Science differs from other fields of knowledge in its theoretical abstraction and abstractness.

3) This science was primarily demonstrative, based on logic, laws, it was rational; used some logical, dialectical methods; used methods to test new knowledge.

4) It was true science. She created the first major scientific systems knowledge. This consistency was manifested in the fact that the ancient scientist used a certain set, a system of scientific methods. Rational methods were considered the main ones. Ancient science went through 3 stages in its development:

1) The early stage of ancient (classical) science. VII – IV centuries. BC. It was a science mainly devoted to the problems of nature (natural science). She was searching for the fundamental principle of the world as a whole (it was a science that sought to separate itself from philosophy). The highest point of development at this stage was reached in the 4th century. BC. – scientific philosophy of Aristotle, who created the first geocentric picture of the world.

2) Hellenic (III century BC – II century AD). Key Feature- the beginning of the process of differentiation (division) of science - mathematics, astronomy, and medicine appeared. Work on the creation of specific sciences was started by Aristotle (the foundations of science, logic, the foundations of political science). The greatest successes of science of this period are associated with the names: the mathematics of Euclid, the physics of Archimedes. At this stage, ancient science achieved its greatest successes.

3) II century. AD – III century AD - the stage of decline of ancient science, although there were achievements in astronomy by Claudio Ptolemy, who complemented the heliocentric picture of the world. Advances in medicine: Roman physician Galinus (treatment of the wounded).

The greatest merit of antiquity is that ancient science for the first time broke the monopoly of mythological and religious knowledge and founded such methods of knowledge as research and evidence. There was a transition from undifferentiated, mythological in nature knowledge to dismembered differentiated knowledge, which became a separate science and science as a special field of knowledge. Ancient science opened a new way of exploring the world - the way of reason, rationalism and logic.

Ancient philosophy demonstrated how one can systematically develop the idea of ​​various types of objects and methods of their mental development. She gave examples of constructing knowledge about such objects. This is a search for a single basis and derivation of consequences from it. These samples had an undeniable influence on the formation of the theoretical layer of research in ancient mathematics.

The Greek polis made socially significant decisions, passing them through the filter of competing proposals and opinions at the people's assembly. The advantage of one opinion over another was revealed through evidence, dialogue was conducted between equal citizens, and the only criterion was the validity of the proposed standard. This cultural ideal of a reasoned opinion was transferred by ancient philosophy to scientific knowledge. It is in Greek mathematics that we encounter the presentation of knowledge in the form of theorems: “given - required to be proven - proof” (while in ancient Egyptian and Babylonian mathematics the scheme is: “do this - look, you did it right”).

The first steps towards the understanding and development of dialectics as a method were associated with the analysis of the clash of opposing opinions in a dispute. As for logic, its development in ancient philosophy began with the search for criteria for correct reasoning in oratory, and the standards of logical consequence developed here were then applied to scientific reasoning.

The application of examples of theoretical reasoning to the knowledge of mathematics accumulated at the stage of pre-science gradually brought it to the level of theoretical knowledge. Already at the origins of the development of ancient philosophy, attempts were made to systematize the mathematical knowledge acquired in ancient civilizations and apply the proof procedure to them. Thus, Thales, one of the early ancient Greek philosophers, is credited with proving the theorem about the equality of the angles of the base isosceles triangle. Thales's student Anaximander compiled a systematic outline of geometric knowledge, which also contributed to the identification of accumulated recipes for solving problems that had to be substantiated and proven as theorems.

The most important milestone on the path to the creation of mathematics as a theoretical science was the work of the Pythagorean school. She created a picture of the world, which was based on the principle: the beginning of everything is number. The Pythagoreans considered numerical relations the key to understanding the world order. And this created special preconditions for the emergence theoretical level mathematics. Numbers were presented as special objects that needed to be comprehended by the mind, their properties and connections studied, and then, based on knowledge about these properties and connections, explained the observed phenomena. It is this attitude that characterizes the transition from purely empirical knowledge of quantitative relations to theoretical research.

In Pythagorean mathematics, along with the proof of a number of theorems, the most famous of which is the famous Pythagorean theorem, important steps were taken to connect theoretical research properties geometric shapes with properties of numbers. The connections between these two areas of emerging mathematics were two-way. The Pythagoreans sought not only to use numerical relations to characterize the properties of geometric figures, but also to apply geometric images to the study of sets of numbers.

The development of theoretical knowledge of mathematics was carried out in ancient times in close connection with philosophy and within the framework of philosophical systems. Almost all the major philosophers of antiquity - Democritus, Plato, Aristotle, etc. - paid great attention to mathematical problems. They gave the ideas of the Pythagoreans, burdened with many mystical and mythological layers, a more strict rational form. Both Plato and Aristotle, although in different versions, defended the idea that the world is built on mathematical principles, that the basis of the universe is a mathematical plan. In ancient times, the idea was already formulated that the language of mathematics should serve to understand and describe the world. The development of theoretical knowledge of mathematics in ancient culture worthily culminated in the creation of the first sample scientific theory- Euclidean geometry. In principle, its construction, combining individual blocks into an integral system geometric problems, solved in the form of proving theorems, marked the formation of mathematics into a special, independent science.

At the same time, numerous applications were obtained in antiquity mathematical knowledge to descriptions of natural objects and processes. First of all, this concerns astronomy, where calculations of the positions of the planets, predictions of solar and lunar eclipses were made, and bold attempts were made to estimate the sizes of the Earth, Moon, Sun and the distances between them. In ancient astronomy, two competing concepts of the structure of the world were created: the heleocentric ideas of Aristarchus of Samos and geocentric system Hipparchus and Ptolemy.

In ancient times, important steps were also taken in the application of mathematics to the description of physical processes. Particularly characteristic in this regard are the works of the great Hellenic scientists of the so-called Alexandrian period - Archimedes, Euclid, Ptolemy, etc. During this period, the first theoretical knowledge of mechanics appeared, among which, first of all, it should be noted that Archimedes developed the principles of statics and hydrostatics (the theory of the center of gravity developed by him , theory of leverage, discovery of the fundamental law of hydrostatics and development of problems of stability and equilibrium of floating bodies, etc.).

All this knowledge can be regarded as the first theoretical models and laws of mechanics obtained using mathematical proof. In Alexandrian science there are already statements of knowledge that are not strictly tied to natural philosophical schemes and claim independent significance.

There was only one step left before the birth of theoretical natural science as a special, independent and valuable area of ​​human knowledge and activity. However, ancient science was unable to develop theoretical natural science and its technological applications. Most researchers see the reason for this in slavery - cheap slave labor did not create the necessary incentives for the development of solid equipment and technology, and, consequently, the natural science and engineering knowledge that serves it.

Test on the topic:

"Specifics of ancient science"

Introduction

Term antiquity(from lat. Antiquus - ancient) used to refer to everything associated with Greco-Roman antiquity, from Homeric Greece to the fall of the Western Roman Empire, arose during the Renaissance. At the same time, the concepts of “ancient history”, “ancient culture”, “ancient art”, “ancient city”, etc. appeared. The concept of “ancient Greek science” was probably first substantiated by P. Tannery at the end of the 19th century, and the concept of “ancient science” by S. Ya. Lurie in the 30s of the 20th century.

Science owes its appearance to man’s desire to increase the productivity of his labor and, ultimately, . Gradually, since prehistoric times, knowledge about natural phenomena and their relationships has accumulated.

One of the first sciences was , the results of which were actively used by priests and clergy. The ancient applied sciences included - the science of precise measurement of areas, volumes and distances - and. The geometry included .

In Ancient Greece by the 6th century. BC e. The earliest theoretical scientific systems emerged that sought to explain reality by a set of basic principles. In particular, a system has emerged that has become widespread throughout Europe. , and philosophers created the first structure of matter, subsequently developed. For a long time, science was not completely separated from, but was its . However, already ancient philosophers identified within philosophy and: systems of ideas about the origin and structure of the world, respectively.

One of the brightest representatives of ancient Greek philosophy is. Having conducted a huge number of observations and compiled a very detailed description of his ideas about physics and biology, he nevertheless did not conduct experiments.

Before the era of scientific revolutions, it was believed that artificial experimental conditions created by man could not produce results that would adequately describe the phenomena occurring in nature.

The concept of ancient science

Among scientific scientists, there are two extreme points of view in the very concept of science, which are in radical contradiction with each other.

The first point of view says that science in the proper sense of the word was born in Europe only in the 16th-17th centuries, during a period usually called the great scientific revolution. Its emergence is associated with the activities of such scientists as Galileo, Kepler, Descartes, and Newton. It is to this time that the birth of the scientific method itself, which is characterized by a specific relationship between theory and experiment, should be attributed. At the same time, the role of mathematization of the natural sciences was realized - a process that continues to our time and has now captured a number of areas of knowledge that relate to man and human society. Ancient thinkers, strictly speaking, did not yet know experiment and, therefore, did not possess a truly scientific method: their conclusions were largely the product of groundless speculation that could not be subjected to real verification. An exception can be made, perhaps, only for one mathematics, which, due to its specifics, is purely speculative in nature and therefore does not need experimentation. As for scientific natural science, it actually did not exist in ancient times; there were only weak rudiments of later scientific disciplines, representing immature generalizations of random observations and practical data. The global concepts of the ancients about the origin and structure of the world cannot in any way be recognized by science: at best, they should be attributed to what later received the name of natural philosophy (a term that has a clearly odious connotation in the eyes of representatives of exact natural science).

Another point of view, directly opposite to the one just stated, does not impose any strict restrictions on the concept of science. According to its adherents, science in the broad sense of the word can be considered any body of knowledge related to the real world surrounding a person. From this point of view, the origin of mathematical science should be attributed to the time when man began to perform the first, even the most elementary, operations with numbers; astronomy appeared simultaneously with the first observations of the movement of celestial bodies; the presence of a certain amount of information about the animal and plant world characteristic of a given geographical area can already serve as evidence of the first steps of zoology and botany. If this is so, then neither the Greek nor any other of the historical civilizations known to us can claim to be considered the birthplace of science, because the emergence of the latter is pushed back somewhere very far, into the foggy depths of centuries.

Turning to the initial period of the development of science, we will see that various situations took place there. Thus, Babylonian astronomy should be classified as an applied discipline, since it set itself purely practical goals. When conducting their observations, Babylonian stargazers were least of all interested in the structure of the universe, the true (and not just apparent) movement of the planets, and the causes of such phenomena as solar and lunar eclipses. These questions, apparently, did not arise before them at all. Their task was to pre-calculate the onset of phenomena that, according to the views of that time, had a beneficial or, conversely, detrimental effect on the fate of people and even entire kingdoms. Therefore, despite the presence of a huge number of observations and the very complex mathematical methods with which these materials were processed, Babylonian astronomy cannot be considered a science in the proper sense of the word.

We find exactly the opposite picture in Greece. Greek scientists, who were far behind the Babylonians in terms of knowledge of what was happening in the sky, from the very beginning raised the question of the structure of the world as a whole. This question interested the Greeks not for any practical purposes, but for its own sake; its production was determined by pure curiosity, which was inherent to such a high degree in the inhabitants of the then Hellas. Attempts to solve this issue boiled down to creating models of space, which at first were of a speculative nature. No matter how fantastic these models may be from our current point of view, their significance lay in the fact that they anticipated the most important feature of all later natural science - modeling the mechanism of natural phenomena.

Something similar happened in mathematics. Neither the Babylonians nor the Egyptians distinguished between exact and approximate solutions to mathematical problems. Any solution that gave practically acceptable results was considered good. On the contrary, for the Greeks, who approached mathematics purely theoretically, what mattered above all was a rigorous solution obtained through logical reasoning. This led to the development of mathematical deduction, which determined the nature of all subsequent mathematics. Eastern mathematics, even in its highest achievements, which for a long time remained inaccessible to the Greeks, never approached the method of deduction.

So, the distinctive feature of Greek science from the moment of its inception was its theoretical nature, the desire for knowledge for the sake of knowledge itself, and not for the sake of those practical applications that could have resulted from it. In the first stages of the existence of science, this feature undoubtedly played a progressive role and had a great stimulating effect on the development of scientific thinking.

Signs and specifics of ancient science

There are four main features of ancient science. These signs are also signs of its difference from the non-science of previous history:

1. Science as a type of activity for acquiring new knowledge. To carry out such activities, certain conditions are necessary: ​​a special category of people, means for its implementation and sufficiently developed methods of recording knowledge;

2. The intrinsic value of science, its theoretical nature, the desire for knowledge for the sake of knowledge itself;

3. The rational nature of science, which is primarily expressed in the evidence of its provisions and the presence of special methods for acquiring and testing knowledge;

4. Systematicity (systematicity) scientific knowledge, both by subject field and by phases: from hypothesis to grounded theory.

Turning to ancient science during the period of its highest achievements, one can find in it a feature that fundamentally distinguishes it from the science of modern times. Despite the brilliant successes of ancient science of the era of Euclid and Archimedes, it was missing the most important ingredient, without which we now cannot imagine such sciences as physics, chemistry, and partly biology. This ingredient is experimental method in the form in which it was created by the creators of modern science - Galileo, Boyle, Newton, Huygens. Ancient science understood the importance of experimental knowledge, as evidenced by Aristotle, and before him Democritus. Ancient scientists were good at observing surrounding nature. They have reached high level in the technique of measuring lengths and angles, which we can judge on the basis of the procedures developed by them, for example, to determine dimensions globe(Eratosthenes), to measure the visible disk of the Sun (Archimedes) or to determine the distance from the Earth to the Moon (Hipparchus, Posidonius, Ptolemy). But an experiment as an artificial reproduction of natural phenomena, in which side and insignificant effects are eliminated and which aims to confirm or refute one or another theoretical assumption - antiquity has never known such an experiment. Meanwhile, it is precisely this kind of experiment that underlies physics and chemistry - sciences that have acquired a leading role in the natural sciences of modern times. This explains why a wide area of ​​physicochemical phenomena remained in antiquity at the mercy of purely qualitative speculation, never waiting for the advent of an adequate scientific method.

One of the signs of real science is its intrinsic value, the desire for knowledge for the sake of knowledge itself. This feature, however, does not exclude the possibility of practical use scientific discoveries. The Great Scientific Revolution of the 16th-17th centuries. pawned theoretical basis for the subsequent development of industrial production, the direction of the new to use the forces of nature in the interests of man. On the other hand, the needs of technology have become a powerful stimulus for scientific progress in modern times. Such interaction between science and practice becomes closer and more effective over time. In our time, science has become the most important productive force of society.

In ancient times, there was no such interaction between science and practice. The ancient economy, based on the use of manual labor by slaves, did not need the development of technology. For this reason, Greco-Roman science, with a few exceptions (which include, in particular, the engineering work of Archimedes), did not have practical outlets. On the other hand, the technical achievements of the ancient world - in the field of architecture, shipbuilding, military equipment - were not in any way! connections with the development of science. The absence of such interaction was ultimately detrimental to ancient science.

Specifics of ancient science using the example of mathematics

In antiquity, the level of development of mathematics was very high. The Greeks used the arithmetic and geometric knowledge, but there is no reliable data to accurately determine their impact, as well as the influence of the tradition of the Kritomicen culture. The history of mathematics in Ancient Greece, including the Hellenistic era, is divided into four periods:

- Ionian period(600-450 BC):

As a result of independent development, as well as on the basis of a certain stock of knowledge borrowed from the Babylonians and Egyptians, mathematics turned into a special scientific discipline based on the deductive method. According to ancient legend, it was Thales who initiated this process. However, the true credit for the creation of Mathematics as a science apparently belongs to Anaxagoras and Hippocrates of Chios. Democritus, watching the game on musical instruments, found that the pitch of a sounding string varies depending on its length. Based on this, he determined that the intervals of the musical scale can be expressed as ratios of the simplest integers. Based on the anatomical structure of space, he derived formulas for determining the volume of a cone and a pyramid. The mathematical thought of this period was characterized, along with the accumulation of elementary information on geometry, by the presence of the rudiments of the theory of duality, elements of stereometry, the formation of a general theory of divisibility and the doctrine of quantities and measurements;

- Athenian period(450 – 300 BC):

Specific Greek mathematical disciplines developed, the most significant of which were geometry and algebra. The goal of the geometrization of mathematics, in essence, was to find solutions to purely algebraic problems (linear and quadratic equations) using visual geometric images. It was determined by the desire to find a way out of the difficult situation in which mathematics found itself as a result of the discovery of irrational quantities. The assertion that the ratios of any mathematical quantities can be expressed through ratios of integers, i.e. through rational quantities. Influenced by the writings of Plato and his students, Theodore of Cyrene and Theaetetus worked on the problem of incommensurability of segments, while Eudoxus of Cnidus formulated general theory relations, which could also be applied to irrational quantities;

- Hellenistic period(300 – 150 BC):

During the Hellenistic era, ancient mathematics reached its highest level of development. For many centuries, the Museyion of Alexandria remained the main center of mathematical research. Around 325 BC, Euclid wrote the work “Elements” (13 books). Being a follower of Plato, he practically did not consider the applied aspects of mathematics. Heron of Alexandria paid special attention to them. Only created by scientists Western Europe In the 17th century, the new mathematics of variables turned out to be more important than the contribution that Archimedes made to the development of mathematical problems. He approached the analysis of infinitesimal quantities. Along with the widespread use of mathematics for applied purposes and its application to solve problems in the field of physics and mechanics, a tendency has again emerged to attribute special, supernatural qualities to numbers.

- Final period(150 – 60 BC):

The independent achievements of Roman mathematics include only the creation of a system of roughly approximate calculations and the writing of several treatises on geodesy. The most significant contribution to the development of ancient mathematics at the final stage was made by Diophantus. Apparently using the data of Egyptian and Babylonian mathematicians, he continued to develop methods of algebraic calculus. Along with the strengthening of religious and mystical interest in numbers, the development of a genuine number theory also continued. This was done, in particular, by Nicomachus of Geras. In general, in the conditions of an acute crisis of the slave-owning mode of production and the transition to a feudal formation, regression was observed in mathematics.

Conclusion

Studying the specifics of science during the period of antiquity, I came to the conclusion that ancient scientific views had a significant humanitarian component both in form and content. Scientific works put on the form literary works, bore the imprint of mythology, romanticism, and dreams. In the ancient world, speculative constructions, guesses, and ideas arose that were developed at a later time. Such ideas include, for example, the hypothesis of the heliocentric structure of the world, atomism. A tradition of scientific schools arose, the first of which were Plato's Academy and Aristotle's Lyceum.

During the period of antiquity, science emerged as a separate sphere of spiritual culture. A special group of people appears who specialize in obtaining new knowledge; knowledge becomes systemic, theoretical and rational. Natural sciences existed in the form of natural philosophy, inseparable from philosophy. Scientists of the ancient world were encyclopedists, bearers of both humanitarian and natural science knowledge. The experimental base of the natural sciences was extremely limited. In methodological terms, an important achievement of antiquity is the creation of the deductive method of research, enshrined in its most complete form in Aristotle’s Logic, and the axiomatic method of presenting scientific theories, first used in Euclid’s Elements. Formal logic Aristotle, enriched with new rules, is now called traditional. On its basis, mathematical logic arose. Mathematics is formed as an interdisciplinary science, used in solving both scientific and applied problems.

List of used literature

1. « » (

2. Ancient science ( , publishing house: academic project, 2008);

5. " History of philosophy. Tutorial. Statement of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation" (Author : Sizov V.S., 2008).

Test on the topic:

"Specifics of ancient science"

Introduction

The term antiquity (from the Latin Antiquus - ancient) used to denote everything associated with Greco-Roman antiquity, from Homeric Greece to the fall of the Western Roman Empire, arose during the Renaissance. At the same time, the concepts of “ancient history”, “ancient culture”, “ancient art”, “ancient city”, etc. appeared. The concept of “ancient Greek science” was probably first substantiated by P. Tannery at the end of the 19th century, and the concept of “ancient science” by S. Ya. Lurie in the 30s of the 20th century.

Science owes its appearance to man’s desire to increase the productivity of his labor and, ultimately, his standard of living. . Gradually, since prehistoric times, knowledge about natural phenomena and their relationships has accumulated.

One of the first sciences was astronomy , the results of which were actively used by priests and clergy. The ancient applied sciences included geometry - the science of accurately measuring areas, volumes and distances - and mechanics. Geometry also included geography .

In Ancient Greece by the 6th century. BC e. The earliest theoretical scientific systems emerged that sought to explain reality by a set of basic principles. In particular, a system of primary elements, widely spread throughout Europe, appeared , and the philosophers Leucippus and Democritus created the first atomic theory of the structure of matter, later developed by Epicurus. For a long time, science was not completely separated from philosophy, but was an integral part of it. . However, already ancient philosophers distinguished cosmogony and physics as part of philosophy: systems of ideas about the origin and structure of the world, respectively.

One of the brightest representatives of ancient Greek philosophy is Aristotle. Having conducted a huge number of observations and compiled a very detailed description of his ideas about physics and biology, he nevertheless did not conduct experiments.

Before the era of scientific revolutions, it was believed that artificial experimental conditions created by man could not produce results that would adequately describe the phenomena occurring in nature.

The concept of ancient science

Among scientific scientists, there are two extreme points of view in the very concept of science, which are in radical contradiction with each other.

The first point of view says that science in the proper sense of the word was born in Europe only in the 16th-17th centuries, during a period usually called the great scientific revolution. Its emergence is associated with the activities of such scientists as Galileo, Kepler, Descartes, and Newton. It is to this time that the birth of the scientific method itself, which is characterized by a specific relationship between theory and experiment, should be attributed. At the same time, the role of mathematization of the natural sciences was realized - a process that continues to our time and has now captured a number of areas of knowledge that relate to man and human society. Ancient thinkers, strictly speaking, did not yet know experiment and, therefore, did not possess a truly scientific method: their conclusions were largely the product of groundless speculation that could not be subjected to real verification. An exception can be made, perhaps, only for one mathematics, which, due to its specifics, is purely speculative in nature and therefore does not need experimentation. As for scientific natural science, it actually did not exist in ancient times; there were only weak rudiments of later scientific disciplines, representing immature generalizations of random observations and practical data. The global concepts of the ancients about the origin and structure of the world cannot in any way be recognized by science: at best, they should be attributed to what later received the name of natural philosophy (a term that has a clearly odious connotation in the eyes of representatives of exact natural science).

Another point of view, directly opposite to the one just stated, does not impose any strict restrictions on the concept of science. According to its adherents, science in the broad sense of the word can be considered any body of knowledge related to the real world surrounding a person. From this point of view, the origin of mathematical science should be attributed to the time when man began to perform the first, even the most elementary, operations with numbers; astronomy appeared simultaneously with the first observations of the movement of celestial bodies; the presence of a certain amount of information about the animal and plant world characteristic of a given geographical area can already serve as evidence of the first steps of zoology and botany. If this is so, then neither the Greek nor any other of the historical civilizations known to us can claim to be considered the birthplace of science, because the emergence of the latter is pushed back somewhere very far, into the foggy depths of centuries.

Turning to the initial period of the development of science, we will see that various situations took place there. Thus, Babylonian astronomy should be classified as an applied discipline, since it set itself purely practical goals. When conducting their observations, Babylonian stargazers were least of all interested in the structure of the universe, the true (and not just apparent) movement of the planets, and the causes of such phenomena as solar and lunar eclipses. These questions, apparently, did not arise before them at all. Their task was to pre-calculate the onset of phenomena that, according to the views of that time, had a beneficial or, conversely, detrimental effect on the fate of people and even entire kingdoms. Therefore, despite the presence of a huge number of observations and the very complex mathematical methods with which these materials were processed, Babylonian astronomy cannot be considered a science in the proper sense of the word.

We find exactly the opposite picture in Greece. Greek scientists, who were far behind the Babylonians in terms of knowledge of what was happening in the sky, from the very beginning raised the question of the structure of the world as a whole. This question interested the Greeks not for any practical purposes, but for its own sake; its production was determined by pure curiosity, which was inherent to such a high degree in the inhabitants of the then Hellas. Attempts to solve this issue boiled down to creating models of space, which at first were of a speculative nature. No matter how fantastic these models may be from our current point of view, their significance lay in the fact that they anticipated the most important feature of all later natural science - modeling the mechanism of natural phenomena.

Something similar happened in mathematics. Neither the Babylonians nor the Egyptians distinguished between exact and approximate solutions to mathematical problems. Any solution that gave practically acceptable results was considered good. On the contrary, for the Greeks, who approached mathematics purely theoretically, what mattered above all was a rigorous solution obtained through logical reasoning. This led to the development of mathematical deduction, which determined the nature of all subsequent mathematics. Eastern mathematics, even in its highest achievements, which for a long time remained inaccessible to the Greeks, never approached the method of deduction.

So, the distinctive feature of Greek science from the moment of its inception was its theoretical nature, the desire for knowledge for the sake of knowledge itself, and not for the sake of those practical applications that could arise from it. In the first stages of the existence of science, this feature undoubtedly played a progressive role and had a great stimulating effect on the development of scientific thinking.

Signs and specifics of ancient science

There are four main features of ancient science. These signs are also signs of its difference from the non-science of previous history:

1. Science as a type of activity for acquiring new knowledge. To carry out such activities, certain conditions are necessary: ​​a special category of people, means for its implementation and sufficiently developed methods of recording knowledge;

2. The intrinsic value of science, its theoretical nature, the desire for knowledge for the sake of knowledge itself;

3. The rational nature of science, which is primarily expressed in the evidence of its provisions and the presence of special methods for acquiring and testing knowledge;

4. Systematicity (consistency) of scientific knowledge, both in the subject field and in phases: from hypothesis to grounded theory.

Turning to ancient science during the period of its highest achievements, one can find in it a feature that fundamentally distinguishes it from the science of modern times. Despite the brilliant successes of ancient science of the era of Euclid and Archimedes, it was missing the most important ingredient, without which we now cannot imagine such sciences as physics, chemistry, and partly biology. This ingredient is an experimental method in the form in which it was created by the creators of modern science - Galileo, Boyle, Newton, Huygens. Ancient science understood the importance of experimental knowledge, as evidenced by Aristotle, and before him Democritus. Ancient scientists were able to observe the surrounding nature well. They reached a high level in the technique of measuring lengths and angles, as we can judge from the procedures they developed, for example, to determine the size of the globe (Eratosthenes), to measure the visible disk of the Sun (Archimedes) or to determine the distance from the Earth to the Moon (Hipparchus, Posidonius, Ptolemy). But an experiment as an artificial reproduction of natural phenomena, in which side and insignificant effects are eliminated and which aims to confirm or refute one or another theoretical assumption - antiquity has never known such an experiment. Meanwhile, it is precisely this kind of experiment that underlies physics and chemistry - sciences that have acquired a leading role in the natural sciences of modern times. This explains why a wide area of ​​physicochemical phenomena remained in antiquity at the mercy of purely qualitative speculation, never waiting for the advent of an adequate scientific method.