1 The Birth of Science - MSRI

8
The Decadence and End of Science
8.1 The Crisis in Hellenistic Science
Hellenistic science and indeed Hellenistic civilization, after their extraor- page 253
dinary development in the third century B.C., ran into a crisis during the
next century.
The resumption of studies in the imperial period secured a revival of
ancient knowledge, but did not yield any new scientific theories; even the
scientific method itself was rejected. The rejection of theoretical concepts,
which as we have seen is implicit in Galen and will be seen explicitly in
Plutarch, was theorized on a philosophical level by the Skeptics. The best
extant exposition of Skepticism is the work of Sextus Empiricus Against
the mathematicians, written around 200 A.D. (see page 166).
Sextus writes against the possibility of constructing theoretical models.
His arguments are well represented in the following passages:
If there is such a thing as mathema and it is attainable by humankind,
it presupposes agreement on four things: the thing which is taught,
the teacher, the learner, and the method of learning. However, the
thing which is taught does not exist, nor does the teacher, the learner,
nor the method of learning, as we shall demonstrate. Therefore, there
is no mathema. 1
1 Sextus Empiricus, Adversus mathematicos, I, 9. We use Blank’s translation (Against the grammarians,
Clarendon, Oxford, 1998) except in leaving the word mathema untranslated; its meaning is
learning, study, or an object thereof (see page 165).
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