Anaximander: And the Birth of Science

For the first time, the city, the polis, was conceived of as an autonomous entity that made decisions on its own behalf. Free discussion and direct participation of citizens settled municipal decisions.

It had been known since the third century BCE, when Eratosthenes, the director of the Great Library of Alexandria, measured it using a brilliant theoretical and observational technique.

Anaximander’s greatness lies in the fact that on the basis of so little, in order to better account for his observations, he redesigns the universe.

It was not new experimental data that led to the great conceptual leap represented by special relativity, but rather Einstein’s faith in the conceptual appropriateness of theories that had shown themselves to be empirically adequate, their apparent contradictions notwithstanding. This reconstruction of the logic of a scientific revolution stands al

Realizing that knowledge is provisional moves us further and further away from the dream of so many philosophies: finding a foundation to knowledge that can offer certainty.

scientific knowledge is not what we can verify directly, as positivists expected. On the contrary, it is based on theoretical constructs that can be contradicted by empirical observations. We hold valid a theory that offers predictions that are corroborated as long as it has never been contradicted (“falsified”) by reality.

Ptolemy’s Almagest and Copernicus’s De revolutionibus are two of the finest scientific works ever written.

A few centuries later, the Roman Empire would once again bring back absolute power to a single ruler, and Christianity would once again bring back knowledge in the hands of the divinity. The marriage of imperial and Christian powers would bring theocracy back.

Given our puny knowledge, we can’t not accept living in the midst of mystery. It is precisely because mystery exists and is so great around us that those who claim to hold the keys to the mystery cannot be trusted.