ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the origins of 'scientific rationality' in classical Greek metaphysics, and particularly at what this metaphysics was formulated to replace. It suggests that there is one case which appears to meet this description, namely the natural philosophy underlying scientific practice in China from the eleventh to the mid-seventeenth centuries, and that this does provides with some idea of what an alternative to 'scientific rationality' would be like. Friedrich Nietzsche's criticisms of science are distinctive in that, who were content to lament the ascendancy of science over theology or literature, his attack is effectively one on a scientific rationality that takes its starting-point and rationale from early Greek metaphysics. Much science resists notion of uncovering the reality beneath the appearances. The filling out of Copernicanism in terms of a physical model, in the work of writers like Rene Descartes, and Isaac Newton, naturally lends itself to the idea of geostatic astronomical appearances being replaced by heliostatic astronomical reality.
