CHAPTER ONE
METHOLOGICAL CONSIDERATION
1.1 INTRODUCTION
Science is the concerted human effort to understand better, the history of the natural world and how the natural world works withobservable physical evidence as the basis of that understanding. It is done through observation of natural phenomena, and/or through experimental processes under controlled conditions.
The foundation of Modern Western Science is traceable to Thales of Miletus, Anaximander, Anaximenes, Pythagoras and Aristotle especially in their conception of the universe. That is the crux of this essay. The aforementioned philosophers conceived the foundations of the universe in different ways. Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes all tried to answer the central question: what was the underlying “stuff” of the universe. All three believed it was a material substance rather than mental or spiritual.
Thales thought that everything was full of gods. He said that the magnet has a soul because it moves iron. Arguing from the magnet and amber he attributed soul or life even to inanimate objects.
He supposed that water was the primary substance of all things, and that the universe is ensouled and full of divinities.
Anaximander was a contemporary of Thales, from the same city, Miletus. He too was a scientist and inventor. He is said to have invented the Sundial, and to have made other clocks to tell the time, to have drawn the first map and made the first globe.
Anaximander believed that the origin of all things was what he called the “apeiron” – an unlimited or indefinite indestructible substance, out of which individual things were created and destroyed.
He appears, like many pantheists, to have believed that there were many worlds or universe, some coming to be, others passing away.
Anaximenes was a pupil of Anaximander. For him, everything derived from air, it seemed clear that he was not referring to everyday air but to an infinite variety of air, using the same word “apeiron” used by his tutor. Anaximenes held that infinite air is the principle from which things and gods and thing divine, all come into being.
In the course of my work, I shall also discuss on Aristotle and Pythagoras. For Aristotle’s cosmology, the earth is at the centre of the universe. It was accepted for more than 18 centuries from inception (around 350 B.C) until the works of Nicholas Copernicus in the early 1500s. In my work, Aristotle discussed the general nature of the cosmos and certain properties of individual bodies.
Pythagoras postulated that the universe could be understood in terms of whole numbers. To express the universe in terms of numbers the idea was born that the world could be understood through mathematics, a central concept in the development of mathematics and science.
All these five philosophers’ postulations of the universe stood as a bedrock for Modern Western Science till date.
In my work, the method of science, the rational image of science and the critics of science are also discussed.
