The philosophic origins of science and the evolution of the two cultures.

Another Dimension Another Dimension Another Dimension Another Dimension Another Dimension " A small but growing number of American philosophers have opened private practices as 'philosopher practitioners' offering a therapy based on the idea that solutions to many personal, moral, and ethical problems can be found not in psychotherapy or Prozac but deep within the 2,500-year-old body of philosophical discourse. " This quotation from the New York Times of March 8, 1998, may have been startling to some and amusing to others—the New Yorker used it as a preamble to a humorous article—but not to anyone, myself included, who has enjoyed the pleasure of delving into the history of philosophy and who appreciates its relevance to the scientific process. What a splendid opportunity, then, to explore the philosophic origins of science and its long and fruitful legacy. The quest for knowledge is an old preoccupation with roots in prehistory, starting with Adam and Eve, who did not go about it scientifically—and you know what happened to them. Even so, ancient humans continued the quest to understand and study the nature around them: the trees and the animals, the bearing of children, the heavenly bodies; that is, the natural phenomena that today we refer to as the natural sciences. Among the old civilizations, the Babylonians and Egyptians contributed considerably to these sciences, practiced primitive medicine and surgery, and collected facts about natural history and biology. It was, however, left to the Greeks to enlarge the scope of these collections and formulate from the facts a unified concept of nature and the laws that govern it. The oldest Greek thinkers were natural philosophers, and it was much later that ethical issues and other problems found a place in Greek thought. Practically all philosophers were teachers; many had their own schools, had to teach several subjects (rhetoric, ethics, poetics, astronomy, physics, biology), and wrote treatises on these subjects, which were surely sometimes used as textbooks. A few of these philosophers were also poets and wrote their own books in verse; Empedocles, for example, wrote two treatises, " On Nature " and " Purifications, " in dactylic hexameter. I shall mention only one of these early philosophers, Democritos (approximately 450 BC), for two reasons. The first is that he was the very antithesis of the usual image of a brooding philosopher; he was known by several nicknames, one being " the laughing philosopher " because …