ABOUT BACKGROUND OF DEVELOPMENT OF SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT IN ANCIENT GREECE

Abstract

This paper discusses the process of the birth of science as a public institution. Science has gone from fragmentary success in understanding the world to the formation of a set of ideas about the nature of things and phenomena. The main direction of the formation of a planetary civilization should be considered the evolution of scientific ideas in Eurasia, near warm seas and in a favorable climate. And here, admittedly, we must pay tribute to the contribution of the Greeks, who created a social order that contributed to the development of philosophy, which allowed to build the foundation of science. For example, the Hellenes of the Miletus School raised important questions that went beyond private tasks and related to general problems of a philosophical nature. Only by relying on this foundation could one begin to build the magnificent building of Science. It was the philosophy of the Greeks that allowed them to achieve impressive success in the development of science. Such successes were unparalleled at that time. Their mathematics, more like geometry, were built by the Greeks on axioms, which they considered intuitively obvious. These axioms served to guarantee the stability of all subsequent conclusions. The Greeks developed deduction and logic, which was most vividly presented in the book “The Beginnings” by Euclid, the purpose of which was to describe nature. In the famous book “Almagest” by K. Ptolemy not only summarized the existing ideas about the Universe, but also clearly formulated the principle of choosing just such a theory, which is the simplest. These two scientific works up to the Middle Ages exerted a noticeable influence on scientific thought. Scientists of that era did not separate applied science from philosophy and ethics. Therefore, they tried to use any scientific achievements to solve many problems and, when contradictions arose, they lost interest in such inconsistent theories. In modern conditions, when scientific fields have diverged with their supporters far from each other, the desire of the ancient thinkers to coordinate natural science research with philosophy, ethics and religion seems strange. But it is precisely this coexistence and mutual enrichment of such different areas of human thought that attracts the attention of individual modern scholars to the heritage of ancient Greek thinkers.