Search results for ""author andrew gregory""

Medicine, anatomy, astronomy, mathematics and cosmology, science began with the Greeks, and Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras, Archimedes and Hippocrates were amongst its stars. That man ever managed to develop a 'scientific' attitude to the natural world at all is one of the true wonders of human thought.Eureka! shows how, free from intellectual and religious dogma, these early thinkers rejected myths and capricious gods and, in distinguishing between the natural and supernatural, effectively discovered nature.Andrew Gregory, Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at University College London, unravels the genesis of science in this fascinating exploration of the origins of Western civilisation, and our desire for a rational, legitimating system of the world.

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'The god wanted everything to be good, marred by as little imperfection as possible.' Timaeus, one of Plato's acknowledged masterpieces, is an attempt to construct the universe and explain its contents by means of as few axioms as possible. The result is a brilliant, bizarre, and surreal cosmos - the product of the rational thinking of a creator god and his astral assistants, and of purely mechanistic causes based on the behaviour of the four elements. At times dazzlingly clear, at times intriguingly opaque, this was state-of-the-art science in the middle of the fourth century BC. The world is presented as a battlefield of forces that are unified only by the will of God, who had to do the best he could with recalcitrant building materials. The unfinished companion piece, Critias, is the foundational text for the story of Atlantis. It tells how a model society became corrupt, and how a lost race of Athenians defeated the aggression of the invading Atlanteans. This new edition combines the clearest translation yet of these crucial ancient texts with an illuminating introduction and diagrams. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

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