In this volume G. argues both for continuity across archaic and early classical reflection about the order of the world and against certain claims about a conceptual rupture between the poets, including Homer and Hesiod, and the early physicists. G. finds the continuity in a shared poetic and philosophical use of kubernan (‘steering, captaining’) and kratein (‘controlling’): the latter group uses both terms to describe the action of the archê on the cosmos. And he rejects the attribution to the philosophical thinkers of a ‘mechanistic’ view of nature and thus of a radically new way of conceiving the structure and changes to be found in the world. Nevertheless, G. believes that there was development in the centuries before Plato: the poets had ‘no real conception of phusis’ and ‘no real conception of enquiry’ (p. 185); the philosophers formulated both of these.
The book proceeds in a long sequence of fragment- or excerpt-centric observations. G. does not set out various ‘philosophies of nature’, but rather accumulates evidence in connection with the main contentions mentioned. From the narrative perspective, this work is markedly staccato, at times almost like accumulated marginal notes in one's edition of Laks–Most (though only Diels–Kranz numbers are used; and oddly there is no index locorum). The most common term of transition is ‘interesting’ (in a single page on Heraclitus this adjective is used six times). The prose register is decidedly casual, and copy-editing is minimal. Sections, with opaque headings, are often only several paragraphs long. The performative effect is of a specialist in early Greek philosophy who wants to chat with colleagues about a lot of neat texts, in particular to establish the view of their authors.
However modest the literary or structural aspect of the work (though its conversationality and simplicity have their appeal), the scope of the project is far from modest, and its substantive positions, which are clear, direct and well-evidenced, reward continued reflection. G. writes, appealingly, within the discipline of the philosophy and history of science, and so he makes frequent appeal to scholarship, if polemically, that seeks to compare the Greek enlightenment to that of seventeenth-century Europe, for instance, acknowledging the perspectives and interpretations of Thomas Hobbes and William Harvey.
Chapter 1, though called ‘Methodological Issues’, gives a fair overview of G.'s positions: the philosophers were engaging with the thought of Homer and Hesiod rather than starting afresh; for all these early thinkers divine powers are natural and no powers are supernatural; the analogies the philosophers used to explain their thinking about nature should be seen as organic rather than mechanistic; and, in general, mechanistic thinking, which was never a successful scientific programme, does not characterise early Greek thinking.
Chapter 2, ‘Order in Homer and Hesiod’, starts with a disenchanting view about Circe and the Moly, the phusis of which Odysseus is shown to protect him: she is not a witch, and the plant is not magical, because Homer does not have a concept of the counter-natural, on which both concepts would depend. The chapter turns to moira – what the gods maintained to effect the order of the world – and the question of its violability: it is at least very strong, but its absolute inescapability is indeterminate. The concept kata moiran gets transformed to kata phusin in later thinkers.
Chapter 3, ‘Early Ideas on Knowledge and Enquiry’, discusses the interference of the gods in the world (and the non-existence of chance), then argues that, if Homeric people ‘want to know more about our world, they do not mount an investigation in the sense that the early enquirers into nature will enquire, but they appeal to the gods’ (p. 59). This is unsatisfying – because it is counterintuitive, if the point is that those people did not try to find out what they could have tried to find out; or it is misleading, if the point is that they did not try to find out what they had good reason to believe was beyond human discovery; or it is close to trivial, if the point is that they requested divine support to find out what they wanted to find out; or it is a consequence of the genre, if the point is that we do not see any of them hypothesising or theorising about the nature of the world. G. draws our attention to later thinkers’ not mentioning the Muses when invoking their capacity to report their discoveries; the most important aspect of his claim that later thinkers had to ‘generate’ an idea of historia or skopein is that questions of the reliability or authority of those discoveries will have to deal with prior views about the significance of the divine realm for our epistemic states.
Chapter 4, ‘Anaximander and the Kubernan Tradition’, addresses the impressive range of texts in which ‘steering’ or ‘governing’ arises, then dialecticises about Anaximandrian cosmology supporting its non-mechanistic aspect: enkrinesthai as ‘secrete’ rather than ‘separate’; a seed-case metaphor for cosmic development; no evidence for vortices; maritime imagery; no multiple kosmoi; his astronomy not metaphysical. The tone is argumentative, but the goal is achieved: there are good reasons to take Anaximander's thinking ‘organically’.
Chapter 5, ‘New Explanations, New Philosophies of Nature’, is a survey of Anaximandrian meteorological positions, interpreted as reactions to Homer and Hesiod. It is particularly interested in Anaximander's views about invariant order. This chapter provides a charitable reconstruction of Anaximander, though the arguments, especially in relation to other scholars, sometimes verge on the telegraphic.
Chapter 6, ‘Anaximenes and the Kratein tradition’, de-mechanises Anaximenes and then discusses references to kratein (or related words) in Xenophanes, Heraclitus, Parmenides, the Derveni author, Empedocles, Anaxagoras and Democritus. There is also an excursus on the putative ‘like-to-like’ principle (pp. 130–2), which gets closer analysis in the following chapter (pp. 137–42).
Chapter 7, ‘Leucippus and Democritus’, deals with the hardest case for the anti-mechanist: the atomists. G.'s view, as we see it here and throughout the book, is that the partisan of the ‘Greek natural philosophy as mechanistic’ view has two major problems. First, the metaphor of ‘mechanistic’ thinking comes from a modern European perspective, whereby clocks and other man-made devices perform their tasks regularly, reliably and invariably; but the Greeks’ devices neither had these qualities nor were perceived to have them: they wore down and broke all the time; thus, the Greeks would not have tried to explain mindless law-abiding natural behaviour in ‘mechanistic’ terms. Second, even on a generous interpretation of ‘mechanistic’ philosophy, it is clear that the Greeks, Leucippus and Democritus included, favoured organic or social metaphors, and the details of atomistic physics are decidedly non-mechanistic (and do not use ‘forces’ in the way sometimes assumed). This debate often seems semantic: ‘is the winnowing basket a mechanê?’ G. thinks not, of course. Still, those ascribing ‘mechanistic’ thinking to the Greeks may be obscuring reality behind labels.
Chapter 8, ‘The Hippocratic Authors’, starts with the unpromising line, ‘The Hippocratic authors are another interesting case, and again there are debates about how great an affinity they have to modern ideas’ (p. 161); but it ends up being a reprise of earlier issues now with a distinct and impressively varied corpus.
The book has a conclusion that nicely summarises the key findings.
