It’s hard to make an assessment of this book. On its face, it seems to be a historical study of the place of Anaximander in the development of modern science. And, for the first half of the book, it really is that. But from there, Rovelli takes off into a much more loosely bound discussion of truth, reality, relativism, religion, language, and the fate of the world.
I’ll start with Anaximander. It’s a cliche that history is told by the winners. But if science is a “winner”, then Rovelli is telling the winner’s history of science. His claim, at the highest level, is that Anaximander produced the first “scientific revolution”, the beginnings of science itself.
What Anaximander does is remarkable. But I’m not convinced by Rovelli that Anaximander’s thought traces the beginning of a solid line toward modern science.
Here are some key aspects Rovelli calls out in Anaximander’s thought as a progenitor of science:
- that the world may be different than it appears to us
- knowledge as a progression of dialogue and debate based on questioning what has previously been thought
- a new model of the shape and position of earth (not flat, resting on a foundation of some sort, but a cylinder freely floating in the universe)
Certainly, in the terms of Anaximander’s thinking, and in the absence of any explicitly mythological elements, there is a strain that we could call “naturalistic.”
But I think he’s actually more interesting and puzzling than that. In what we have of Anaximander’s actual writings, there are two concepts that seem difficult, in our own time and terms, to reconcile.
One concerns change and multiplicity — that “all things originate from one another, and vanish into one another.” Anaximander is traditionally interpreted in naturalistic terms, although his claim is not unambiguously naturalistic, at least not in modern terms. What he means by “originate” could as well be given a logical or purely conceptual interpretation as a naturalistic one. And in fact, the cosmologies of ancient Greece commonly told of such things as order and difference as developing from prior unities or chaos.
The second concept is the “apeiron” as the origin or principle (“arche”) of all things. “Apeiron” is sometimes translated as “the infinite” or “the indefinite” or “the undifferentiated.” I think it a stretch to give an unambiguously naturalistic interpretation of “apeiron”. In a naturalistic interpretation, you could read it as a truly empirical “thing” — an undifferentiated substance out of which all the multiplicity of things we are familiar with originates. Or you could see it as a logical concept, as the origin of multiplicity in undifferentiated unity. In fact, I think the distinction between a naturalistic interpretation and a logical one is something we lay over Anaxminder’s thought — it simply wasn’t a mature distinction at the time.
Correspondingly, what comes after Anaximander is neither pure naturalistic science nor pure rationalism. The themes that Rovelli pulls from Anaximander’s thought and times are important for the future history of knowledge, but in various guises besides anything we would call “science” in a modern sense.
For example, Parmenides, certainly not a “scientist”, explicitly separated the world as it appears to us (the world of “seeming”) from the world as it really is (the world of “truth”). Aristotle refined a method of presenting the thoughts of earlier philosophers as a basis for his own arguments and positions, providing an explicit structure for progress in thought, but not a method of science per se.
Likewise, Plato’s rationalist dialectic has roots in dialogue and debate of a conceptual sort, and is embedded in his idealist metaphysic of “forms”, at best a distant kin to modern science.
All of this is criticism of Rovelli’s history based on a popular conception of what is meant by “science”. And were Rovelli an adherent of that popular conception, one that revolves around strict adherence to observation, hypothesis, experiment, and “method”, then he would be a scientistic teller of fables about the emergence of science from the darkness of superstition and myth.
But he wants to construct a different understanding of what science is, one he refers to at one point as “science as a cognitive activity” (p. 111). He gives at least one explicit definition:
[Science] means building and developing an image of the world, which is to say a conceptual structure for thinking about the world, effective and consistent with what we know and learn about the world itself.
There’s a lot packed into that sentence.
He says also, “It [i.e., science] is, above all, an ongoing exploration of new ways of thinking.”
Rovelli is doing at least two things at once in this part of the book. He is telling a story about the history of science, finding its origins in Anaximander’s thought (or more broadly, that of the Milesian philosophers), but he is also, in doing so, recommending that we think a little bit differently about what science is, that we crack away some of the rigid, technical structures we’ve built around the enterprise of science and get back to something that may have been more fitting to Anaximander’s time, a less tightly bound search for the terms in which to understand the world.
In doing so, he steps into the territory of modern philosophy of science. In his chapter on “What is Science?” he attempts to find his footing within that debate, with Kuhn, Feyerabend, Lakatos, and others. The discussion is very short, and his criticisms of those thinkers abrupt and controversial. But in a way, that doesn’t matter — it’s not the point of this part of the book. The point, I think, is to, with the help of Anaximander’s thought, turn our understanding of science in a more conceptual direction — into an explicit focus not only on facts and observation per se, but on the terms in which we think about and organize the facts and observations of science. Rovelli thinks that, in fact, this is what great scientists do.
The second (roughly) half of the book takes off into a broad discussion coming to rest eventually in a discussion of science and religion. While Rovelli is not so strident a proponent of science over religion as some of his contemporaries, you will find familiar themes here — in particular an attack on “absolutism” as a defining characteristic of religion.
Discussions of religion vs. science tend to be one-sided, and Rovelli’s is no exception. I found particularly presumptuous this characterization of science as acceptance of uncertainty and religion as assertion of absolutism. In practice, the difference doesn’t seem so stark. Scientists often assert absolute postitions. Sometimes it’s the truth of theories, and other times, equally forceful, the absolutism of method. And religion is often a dynamic of faith and doubt, and sometimes acceptance of mystery. Broad strokes don’t do either side justice.
All in all, Rovelli has made me think more deeply about Anaximander, and about what “knowing” really is, in the time of the pre-Socratics. Maybe fittingly, I don’t find his account to be “true”, but enlightening.
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