Anaximander: And the Birth of Science

The ancient cosmogonies that shaped foundational myths, from the Babylonian Enuma Elish to Hesiod’s Theogony, mentioned in chapter 1, tell of a world in which the order is established by a great god, Marduk or Zeus, who takes power. Following a long period of battles and confusion, a deity triumphs and establishes an order that is at once cosmic, s

Plato and Aristotle make a neat distinction between having an opinion and possessing convincing scientific arguments in support of it. I think that the average educated European or American of today knows that the Earth is round, but is probably not able to offer direct and convincing proof of this belief. His level of scientific understanding, at

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.

search for always newer ways to conceive the world. Its strength lies not in the certainties it reaches but in a radical awareness of the vastness of our ignorance. This awareness allows us to keep questioning our own knowledge, and, thus, to continue learning. Therefore the scientific quest for knowledge is not nourished by certainty, it is nouris

Scientific predictions are important for at least two reasons: they make technical applications possible (calculating whether a roof will collapse without need to wait for a snowfall), and they are our key tool for corroborating (or falsifying) a theory. (Copernicus began to be taken seriously only after Galileo saw the phases of Venus predicted by

“Tradition” is nothing else than the codified thinking of human beings who lived at times when ignorance was even greater than ours.

The first evidence we have of written language is, in fact, of two languages, Sumerian and Akkadian.

Hecataeus had traced his descent and claimed that his sixteenth forefather was a god, but the priests traced a line of descent by counting the statues, and these were three hundred and forty-five.

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.