Aristotle, teacher of Alexander the Great, died in 322 B.C., one year after
his renowned pupil. The passing of these two scientific and political giants
represents a profound transition between the Classical (or Hellenic)
and the later Hellenistic periods. Hellenistic natural
philosophy was characterized more by the mathematical sciences than by physics
or natural philosophy of the sort practiced by the presocratics. Mathematical
approaches to knowing nature diversified into fields such as geometry, trigonometry,
astronomy, optics, statics, and music, among others.
The intellectual centers, like the political ones, moved from Greece and Athens.
Other cities achieved prominence in natural philosophy, including Alexandria
in Egypt, Syrakusa in Sicily, and Pergamos
in Asia Minor. In Alexandria the Ptolemaic dynasty provided lavish support for
natural philosophy, among other intellectual studies, with the establishment
of the unsurpassed library and the Temple to the Muses (museum).
The study questions will help you assess your knowledge; print them out and complete them as you read.
-
T
or F ? Aristarchus
of Samos (3rd century) argued that the Sun is in the center and the Earth
circles the Sun as a planet.
-
T
or F? Heraclides
of Pontus (4th century) invented a method for calculating the sizes and
distances of the Sun and Moon.
-
T
or F? Aristarchus
of Samos (3rd century) argued that the Earth rotates on its axis.
-
T
or F? Archimedes
(3rd century) used geometry to advance the study of statics, the science
of weights and levers.
-
T
or F? Apollonios
of Perga (late 3rd century) wrote a geometrical treatise on the conic sections
(ellipse, parabola, hyperbola).
-
T
or F? Apollonius
discovered precession (the 26,000 year cycle in which the equinox points
travel around the celestial equator).
-
T
or F? Hipparchos
radically transformed Greek astronomy by introducing Babylonian methods,
aims, and numbers (parameters).
-
T
or F? Hipparchos
calculated the average length of the lunar month to within one second of
the modern value.
-
T
or F? Alexander
the Great established an empire that reached from Spain in its westernmost
extent all the way to Jerusalem on its eastern border.
-
T
or F? Zeno of
Citium founded the Stoic school of philosophy in Athens.
-
T
or F? After
the death of Alexander the Great, one of his generals named Ptolemy ruled
Egypt.
-
T
or F? The Museum
of Alexandria was both a religious shrine and a place of learning, founded
by a former member of Aristotle’s Lyceum.
-
T
or F? At its
peak, the Library of Alexandria was said to contain nearly half a million
scrolls.
-
T
or F? The second
head of the Lyceum, Theophrastus, rejected Aristotle’s empirical approach
and renounced the pursuit of natural sciences such as botany and mineralogy,
favoring the study of pure logic instead.
-
T
or F? The third
head of the Lyceum, Strato, demonstrated from a stream of falling water
that heavy bodies accelerate as they descend.
-
T
or F? Epicurus,
founder of the Epicurean school, taught that bodies are made of particles
(corpuscles or atoms) with intervening void spaces.
-
T
or F? The philosophy
of Epicurus was deterministic, in the sense that it postulated that all
events have a mechanistic cause.
-
T
or F? Both Stoics
and Epicureans advocated the study of science (natural philosophy) as an
aid to ethics.
-
T
or F? Stoics
argued that the cosmos is like a piece of mechanical clockwork, passive
and inert.
-
T
or F? According
to the Stoics, there is a dichotomy (radical distinction) between the sub-lunar
(terrestrial) and supra-lunar (celestial) regions.
-
T
or F? According
to the Stoics, there is an eternal cycle of worlds, constantly generating
and dissolving, in a purposeful and determined sequence.
-
T
or F? The Epicureans
defended teleology and viewed the universe as an organism.
-
T
or F? According
to Aristotle, every field of natural science should be expressed in the
language of mathematics.
-
T
or F? Greek
mathematics emphasized geometry.
-
T
or F? The length
of the diagonal of a square, whose sides are each 1 unit long, cannot be
expressed as a ratio of two whole numbers.
-
T
or F? Euclid’s
Elements of Geometry consists of a catalog of reported discoveries
in mathematics, arranged in alphabetical order.
-
T
or F? A conclusion
of a geometrical proof follows inevitably and necessarily from its premises,
according to Euclid.
-
T
or F? Around
425 BC, Meton proposed a cycle of 19 years for synchronizing the lunar and
solar calendars.
-
T
or F? Plato
and Eudoxus explained the motions of the heavens with what is called a “Two
sphere” kind of model.
-
T
or F? The celestial
equator lies directly above the Earth’s equator.
-
T
or F? Fixed
stars were believed to lie on a giant sphere that rotated around the Earth
once a day.
-
T
or F? The ecliptic
is the path taken by the Sun as it travels around the sky each year.
-
T
or F? Zodiac
constellations contain the ecliptic.
-
T
or F? The Sun
crosses the celestial equator at the equinoxes.
-
T
or F? The Sun
lies directly overhead the equator on a solstice.
-
T
or F? The Moon
travels around the zodiac about once each month.
-
T
or F? The planets
all travel roughly eastward against the background of fixed stars on a path
very near to the ecliptic.
-
T
or F? Retrograde
motion occurs when a planet’s usual eastward motion through the zodiac is
temporarily reversed.
-
T
or F? Mercury
and Venus always appear near the Sun, while the other planets sometimes
appear opposite the Sun in the sky.
-
T
or F? Plato,
according to later reports, challenged astronomers to explain all the motions
of the planets as combinations of uniform and circular motions.
-
T
or F? The astronomical
models of Eudoxus of Knidos (4th century) generated quantitative predictions
of planetary positions.
-
T
or F? Aristotle
combined the concentric spheres of the planets, according to Eudoxus, into
a single cosmological system of over 50 spheres (including unrolling spheres
to cancel effects as needed).
-
T
or F? A temple
of healing at Epidaurus was a center of hundreds of Greek temples devoted
to Asclepius, whom Homer regarded as a great physician.
-
T
or F? The Hippocratic
corpus is a collection of about 70 treatises all of which were written by
Hippocrates of Cos.
-
T
or F? Most Hippocratic
writings, such as On the Sacred Disease, de-emphasize divine intervention
as a direct cause of specific cases of illness, attributing
the course of nature itself to the divine.
-
T
or F? Hippocratic
medicine often attributed disease to imbalances of the four humors, where
treatments of diet, exercise and purgings were designed to restore a proper
balance.
-
T
or F? Instead
of using medicines derived from plants, most Hippocratic medicines were
chemical in origin, such as mercury or arsenic.
-
T
or F? Hippocratic
writers all agreed that a theoretical understanding of the causes of disease
is essential to effective treatment.
-
T
or F? According
to Roman authors, anatomists in Alexandria conducted human vivisections
(dissections of living prisoners).
-
T
or F? In Alexandria,
Herophilus of Chalcedon advanced anatomy by drawing clear distinctions between
sensory and motor nerves, and between arteries and veins.
-
T
or F? In Alexandria,
Erasistratus of Ceos, described the valves of the heart and argued that
they function by ensuring that blood flows only one direction through the
heart.
-
T
or F? “Empiricists”
opposed Herophilus and Erasistratus by arguing that human dissection should
be forbidden, because past experience provides a more reliable foundation
for medicine than the study of human anatomy and physiology.
