Monday, June 02, 2008

I've always been a bit skeptical of literary criticism

And this web page by Michael Fowler about ancient Greek science confirms it. Imagine the progress we would have made if it wasn’t for literary criticism:

Strato, like Aristotle, believed in close observation of natural phenomena, but in our particular field of interest here, the study of motion, he observed much more carefully than Aristotle, and realized that falling bodies usually accelerate. ...rainwater pouring off a corner of a roof is clearly moving faster when it hits the ground than it was when it left the roof, because a continuous stream can be seen to break into drops which then become spread further apart as they fall towards the ground. ... One is forced to conclude that falling objects do not usually reach some final speed in a very short time and then fall steadily, which was Aristotle's picture.

Had this line of investigation been pursued further at the Lyceum, we might have saved a thousand years or more, but after Strato the Lyceum concentrated its efforts on literary criticism.