Anaximander: And the Nature of Science. Rovelli, C. (2018).

I enjoyed being taken on a guided tour of the development of scientific ideas, from a practising scientist who is writing from the perspective of the latest developments in physics.

“The path opened by Anaximander, the continuous reenvisioning of the world, is an immense adventure. The frightening aspect of this adventure is recognizing our own ignorance. I think that accepting our uncertainty is not only the high road to knowledge – it is also the honest and beautiful choice. Our knowledge, like the Earth, floats in nothingness. Its provisional nature and the underlying void do not make life meaningless; they make it more precious.

We do not know where this adventure is leading, but scientific thinking – continuous critical revision of accepted knowledge, openness to the possibility of rebellion against any belief, the ability to explore new images of the world and create novel ones – represents a major chapter in the slow evolution of the history of humankind. It is a chapter opened by Anaximander; we are immersed in it, curious to see where it may lead.”

Chapter 1 - Sixth Century.

A brief historical survey of happenings during this time, with a focus on the comparative assessment of how various civilizations grappled with the development of a calendar based on astronomy, each with varying degrees of success.

Rovelli oberserves that the (problematic) but persistent relation between the celestial and the earthly underlies much of these attempts.

Chapter 2 - Anaximander’s contributions.

Difficulty in finding direct sources for Anaximander’s thought is acknowledged.

Which invites us to ask ourselves how it is possible to ascribe anything to Anaximander at all with any substantive certainty. There is a certain speculative, mythological flavour to this reconstruction effort, given that very few of Anaximander’s writings survive, with many of them being indirect evidence through secondary sources.

Chapter 3 - Atmospheric phenomena.

Rovelli elaborates on Anaximander’s naturalistic reading of metereological phenomena as a conceptual break from the religious and mythological readings of the time, albeit one that was unverifiable given the state of their pre-scientific knowledge.

Rovelli asserts that this extends beyond metereological phenomena. Extending to cosmic naturalism - by comparing a metaphysical account of creation with Hesiod; to biological naturalism - by observing similarities with Darwin. And further - as the beginning of scientific inquiry.

Some of Rovelli’s assertions feel speculative, indirect evidence is supplied other than the author’s assessment based on a personal, holistic reading of indirect sources attributed to Anaximander. Which means we must proceed on trust.

Chapter 4 - Earth floats in space.

Rovelli debunks the idea that anyone believed the Earth was flat in medieval times, citing the absence of any writings supporting this, and the work of Dante, St Thomas Aquinas.

Rovelli traces the idea of a spherical Earth as conventionally attributed to Aristotle in Phaedo, but as an assertion without proof. He traces this further back to Parmenides and Pythagoras.

Rovelli shows how many scholars without scientific training discount Anaximander’s theory of a cylindrical disk shaped Earth because they cannot see past the details. Uses modern refinements on sphericality to show how this is a detail.

Rovelli asserts that Anaximander’s conceptual leap is that the Earth is a finite body floating in space. This required the development of an account of there being sky beneath the ground, absence of absolute direction in space, an account of why objects fall, and why it is the case that the Earth does not fall.

Particularly interesting is the account given that the genius of Anaximander relied on avoiding the quagmire of answering why the Earth didn’t fall in light of experience of with objects, rather, to question whether this it was legitimate to extrapolate from objects - this is classic scientific question reframing at its most powerful.

And the observation that new ideas are easy to cook up, just not easy to develop an idea that can accomodate existing body of knowledge as well as provide new explanations - there is often a lot of refined theory building that is needed in order to make a conceptual leap.

There are plenty of examples of this observation in the development of real analysis in mathematics in the 19th and 20th Century.

Rovelli, echoing Kahn and Popper, attributes Anaximander’s understanding of the open world finite body floating in space as on par with a Coepernican revolution.

One can appreciate just how deeply alien ‘higher truths’ can be before we’ve discovered them. In the sense that there did not exist earthly bodies that could just ‘float in space’.

Chapter 5 - Invisible entities and natural laws.

Genealogical tracing of a metaphysics from philosophers in Miletus that in Rovelli’s view, enabled the development of modern science.

Naturalistic ideas of Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes are covered from a scientific perspeftive, together with their search for some kind of a metaphysical primitive.

Thales - “arche”, which he concludes is water.

Anaximenes - compression and rarefaction as a precursor to the atomists of Leucippus and Democritus

Anaximander - “apeiron” as ‘indistinct’. Rovelli believes that it is the use of a distinct invisible theoretical entitiy as a metaphor which allows for explanation and prediction of naturalistic phenomena that has the hallmarks of modern science, drawing parallels with Maxwell’s idea of a ‘field’ and many others from modern science.

Rovelli’s contribution is to assert that the scientific program of a Newtonian celestial mechanics - Coepernicus, Kepler, Newton etc. began in Anaximander, who influenced Pythagoras and Plato.

Chapter 6 - Rebellion and virtue.

Rovelli argues that Thales-Anaximander’s mentor-mentee relationship is paradigmatic for the development of scientific knowledge.

One that induces the mentee to fully assimilate the mentor’s ideas as the former is able to see its knowledge value. But where the mentee is able to question its assumptions and tenets and make refinements to this.

Chapter 7 - Writing, democracy and cultural crossbreeding.

Rovelli outlines his belief that what happened in Miletus in the 6th century was crucial for the development of a refined scientific naturalism.

He emphasises that the development of a writing system inherited from the Phoenicians that democratised knowledge in Greek times.

And also that the development of democratic political structures and peer debate allowed a pivot in worldview away from the mythico-religious to naturalist. Process of secularisation.

“Each time that we - as a nation, a group, continent, or a religion - look inward in celebration of our specific identity, we do nothing but lionize our own limits and stupidity. Each time that we open ourselves to diversity and ponder that which is different from us, we enlarge the richness and intelligence of the human race.”

Chapter 8 - What is science?

A beautifully lucid, optimistic account of the joys of scientific practice in the face of radical doubt, incommensuarability challenges. Clearly, Rovelli has thought conscientiously about the metaphysical challenges (material-ideal) and epistemological challenges (incommensurability etc.) but retains an insider’s optimism that makes it easy to see how and why they are an illustrious scientist.

Chapter 9 - Cultural relativism and absolute thought.

A more polemical chapter on epistemology that begins with disavowal of cultural relativism, with the critique that it is self-contradictory. And then an equally charged disavowal of absolute Truth as a position wielded by theocrats.

The solution is the somewhat tricky position that we cannot transcend a particular domain of discourse when making an aesthetic judgement, but we are always free to make a judgement without necessarily binding ourselves to the ‘ridiculous position’ that all ideas are equally valid.

The idea that within a domain, we can always generate an observer, who can never transcend this domain, but pass judgement, is also touched on in the works of the cybernetician/theoretical biologist, Humberto Maturana.

Whilst this is not really a solution, Rovelli appears to find optimism in the fact that supposedly distinct cultures are able to communicate and find some kind of consensus on what is more ‘true’, taking the example of calculations of the Sun’s distance from Chinese culture and from Eratosthenes.

Chapter 10 - Can we understand the World without Gods?

A polemical chapter that discusses the elephant in the room when it comes to Anaximander’s naturalist thought, which is its coexistence with religion and the idea of a God who is the metaphysical source of all things.

Rovelli asserts that Anaximander’s writings contained no explicit challenge to religion, leaving it open. And that it is easy to infer that there is no room for God in the latter’s writings because there is aboslutely no reference to the divine, thereby forming an implicit challenge to religion.

A familiar sounding violent conflict between religion and naturalism is presented, with 1500 years of repressive activity towards philosophical schools, multiple great libraries beginning with the arrival of Christianity in the Roman Empire, to the clashes experienced by Galileo and Darwin, to the French and Russian Revolution.

Rovelli gives a plausible reading of that this conflict tempered during the Enlightenment because of an explicit separation of both scientific naturalism and religion’s spheres of influence. He makes the astute observation that the the “truce is intrinsically unstable” because the former’s tendency is to invite questioning, whilst the latter’s tendency is to invite compliance.

The strength of the chapter are some of the explanatory observations. But it is clear that Rovelli has strong opinions on the role of Christianity in the suppression of scientific knowledge, and its barbarism in genreal, which at certain points in this chapter become conflated with religion in general.

I did not enjoy this part and found it overly polemical - there are better and more nuanced discussions of this last issue elsewhere.

Chapter 11: Prescientific thought.

Various theoretical explanations for mythico-religious thought are proffered, such as classical sociological explanations by Durkheim and Marx, to less familiar ones.

I particularly enjoyed Rovelli’s rehearsal of Jaynes’ theory in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. that the whole architecture of religious thought was the result of a linguistic decentralisation of a Neolithic male voice that enabled growing populations to supply an internal self-description.

Some musings on perfomativity in human linguistic practices such as rites are offered, and the chapter ends with a call to have faith in one’s own critical thinking, despite the complexity and fickleness of our thought processes.