Classics: Science, Technology, & Mathematics

"Catalogs the achievements and legacy of more than four millennia of scientific thought in the ancient world of the Mediterranean and the Near East, from Academy to Xenophon, providing a complete overview of the physical, chemical, life, medical, and social sciences of the classical world."

"Ancient Greek thought is the essential wellspring from which the intellectual, ethical, and political civilization of the West draws and to which, even today, we repeatedly return. In more than sixty essays by an international team of scholars, this volume explores the full breadth and reach of Greek thought -- investigating what the Greeks knew as well as what they thought about what they knew, and what they believed, invented, and understood about the conditions and possibilities of knowing,"

"Professor Aaboe discusses a few topics developed by the Greeks as reconstructed from Euclid's Elements, from the writings of Archimedes, and from Ptolemy's Almagest."

"The volume gives a general survey of the science of Classical Antiquity, laying however special stress on the mathematical and physical aspects."

"This book is an attempt to compress into a few pages an account of the general evolution of Greek biological and medical knowledge."

"This volume presents an up-to-date Greek text of On Ancient Medicine, a new English translation, and a detailed commentary that focuses on questions of medical and scientific method; the introduction sets out a new approach to the problem of the work's relationship to its intellectual context and addresses the contentious issues of its date, authorship, and reception."

"Scientific and technological texts have not played a significant role in modern literary criticism. This applies to Classics, too, despite the fact that a large part of the field’s extant texts deal with questions of medicine, mathematics, and natural philosophy. Focusing mostly on medical and mathematical texts, this collection aims at approaching ancient Greek science and its texts from the cross-disciplinary perspective of authorship."

"This study traces Greek science through the work of the Pythagoreans, the Presocratic natural philosophers, the Hippocratic writers, Plato, the fourth-century B.C. astronomers, and Aristotle. G. E. R. Lloyd also investigates the relationships between science and philosophy and science and medicine; he discusses the social and economic setting of early Greek science; and he analyzes the motives and incentives of the different groups of writers."

"In this volume, the author discusses the fundamental Greek contributions to science, drawing on the rich literary and archaeological sources for the period after Aristotle. Particular attention is paid to the Greeks' conceptions of the inquiries they were engaged on, and to the interrelations of science and philosophy, science and religion, and science and technology."

"The topics range over all areas and periods of Greek science, from the earliest Presocratic philosophers to Ptolemy and Galen. In each case the article is preceded by an introduction that assesses scholarly debate on the topic since the original publication."