Everybody knows one thing about Archimedes. He suddenly understood about floating bodies in water, leaped out of his bath and ran through the street shouting ‘Eureka’ (‘I have found it.’) Which he did. But he also did a great many more things. He was a brilliant mathematician, a philosopher, an engineer. He also made a dead-pan remark about having a lever long enough to move the world. He epitomised the Greek connection and the basis of European thought.
Leonardo must have been proud of him. We owe a great debt to those with names like Aristotle (botanist and philosopher), Pythagoras (and his hypotenuse), and Homer (poet). They brought into being things we might never have imagined and left sign-posts for future inquiry.
And then of course we haves to thank the Arabs who gave us our numbers.
These names should remind us that Christianity does not include in its stock all the good things men have done or taught. They lived before the days of Jesus and in the case of Zeno influenced the shape of Christianity through Stoicism.
We stand on the shoulders of great men who lived in Greece and Rome and showed us ways to think. They were a bit hazy about observation and experiment and they never discovered steam or electric power. That had to take its turn.
And then in the West came Christianity. That introduced the idea of the one God taking human form and appearing amongst us. This of course was a disturbing development in Western thought, although it had occurred to Eastern thinkers. We were led into paradox after paradox as great minds stretched themselves to accommodate this new understanding of meaning in the universe. Philosophers, mathematicians, poets had to revise their conclusions and their use of language.
At our peril we reject the great body of thought assembled by the Greeks. We hear a lot about transparency these days and the obligation to come clean with our thinking. The Greeks knew all about this, thanks to an array of thinkers including Diogenes and his tub and Zeno and his ethics.
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