ABSTRACT
Modern scholars often rely on the history of Greco-Latin science2 as a backdrop and support for interpreting past philosophical thought. Their warrant is the practice established long ago by Greek and Latin philosophers, of treating science as paradigmatic in their explanations of what knowledge is, what its objects are, how knowledge is obtained, and how it is expressed or communicated. Unfortunately, when they turn to the history of ancient science, these same scholars usually remain too much under the spell of the ancient philosophers. Granted, it is true that GrecoLatin science often served as a model and touchstone for philosophy and that, on occasion, this philosophy may have inspired science. But the marked tendency to follow Greek and Latin writers in viewing ancient science through the complex, distorting lens of ancient philosophy has hindered recognition that the various sciences of antiquity sometimes differ significantly from one another as well as from philosophy in their intellectual, literary, and social contexts. Moreover, it has encouraged scholars to ignore or even disparage clear indications that some of these sciences were deeply indebted in the course of their history to work outside the Greco-Latin tradition, in Akkadian, for example. And, what is worse, out of ignorance and neglect of the various contexts of ancient science, modern scholars have misrepresented the past fundamentally in numerous ways by resorting to alien predilections and concerns when trying to explain the origins, character, and development of Greek and Latin science.3 In sum, the amorphous system of learned belief expressed now in handbooks on ancient science and currently underlying the modern interpretation of ancient philosophy, for instance, is largely inadequate and erroneous.
