From Categories to Quantitative Concepts

Abstract

This chapter analyzes the changes in linguistic usage and extended terminology that preceded and enabled the developments of classical Greek philosophy and the Scientific Revolution. Classical explanations of human activities in terms of nature and of natural processes in terms of an inner necessity emerged from a protracted process of demythologizing earlier mythological accounts. Aristotle’s Categories made individual objects the subjects of scientific investigation and so initiated the language of physics. Later scientific advances by Alexandrian and Arabic philosophers never treated a quantitative account of properties. This emerged from detheologizing medieval accounts of the quantity of a quality. It culminated in the scientific terminology of Newtonian physics.

Just as geographers crowd on to the outer edges of their maps the parts of the earth which elude their knowledge, with explanatory notes that “What lies beyond is sandy desert without water and full of wild beasts”, or “blind marsh”, or “Scythian cold”, or “frozen sea”, so in the writing of my Parallel Lives, now that I have traversed those periods of time which are accessible to probable reasoning and which afford a basis for a history dealing with facts, I might well say of the earlier periods: “What lies beyond is full of marvels and unreality, a land of poets and fabulists, of doubt and obscurity”.

Plutarch, Life of Theseus