“in the year 1500 Europe knew less than Archimedes who died in the year 212 BC.” In short, the answer seems to be Plato and Aristotle (OP)
But Plato and Aristotle came before Archimedes! How is this an answer? Bad ideas can retard progress, but they didn’t hurt Archimedes.
By the end of the third century BC, the heroic period of Greek science was over. From Plato and Aristotle onward, natural science begins to fall into disrepute and decay (Koestler)
This is complete garbage. The Hellenistic period after Aristotle was much better than the “heroic” period before him. Aristotle appears to have created science. While there were some scientific Presocratics (Thales, Democritus), Koestler’s Pythagoras is a fantasy. Aside from inflating the achievements of the Pythagoreans, relying too much on Simplicius a thousand years later, he also gerrymanders the real achievements of real people, arbitrarily crediting the Pythagoreans. Maybe Herakleides was a Pythagorean, but he was also a student of Plato, as Koestler mentions in passing, but fails to credit. Classifying Aristarchus as Pythagorean rather than Hellenistic is crazy.
Hellenistic science didn’t decay, but abruptly collapsed, with civil war in Alexandria in 144BC and, more mysteriously, with the peaceful Roman annexation of Pergamon in 133BC.
Koestler says a bunch of contradictory things about Plato. He recognizes that there are a bunch of different time periods to explain, so he seems to recognize that his explanations don’t fit together.
One place he says that it’s not Plato’s fault, but the fault of the Neoplatonists. Maybe that could explain the decline after Ptolemy and the lack of interest of the Byzantines in science, but in the quote above he’s talking about decline before Ptolemy, so Plato proper. He specifically notes a gap between Hipparchus and Ptolemy, so he is talking about a fast fall, not decay past Ptolemy.
He recognizes that the Western Dark Age didn’t have Plato or Aristotle. He specifically mentions that the West got Aristotle before Plato. In between it got Archimedes and science exploded. Aristotle is generally seen as promoting medieval science (Roger Bacon was a fan), but at the very least he didn’t interfere with reading Archimedes. There was a decline of science and civilization generally when Petrarch translated Plato, but I think that’s a coincidence, really the fault of the Black Death.
But Plato and Aristotle came before Archimedes! How is this an answer? Bad ideas can retard progress, but they didn’t hurt Archimedes.
This is complete garbage. The Hellenistic period after Aristotle was much better than the “heroic” period before him. Aristotle appears to have created science. While there were some scientific Presocratics (Thales, Democritus), Koestler’s Pythagoras is a fantasy. Aside from inflating the achievements of the Pythagoreans, relying too much on Simplicius a thousand years later, he also gerrymanders the real achievements of real people, arbitrarily crediting the Pythagoreans. Maybe Herakleides was a Pythagorean, but he was also a student of Plato, as Koestler mentions in passing, but fails to credit. Classifying Aristarchus as Pythagorean rather than Hellenistic is crazy.
Hellenistic science didn’t decay, but abruptly collapsed, with civil war in Alexandria in 144BC and, more mysteriously, with the peaceful Roman annexation of Pergamon in 133BC.
Koestler says a bunch of contradictory things about Plato. He recognizes that there are a bunch of different time periods to explain, so he seems to recognize that his explanations don’t fit together.
One place he says that it’s not Plato’s fault, but the fault of the Neoplatonists. Maybe that could explain the decline after Ptolemy and the lack of interest of the Byzantines in science, but in the quote above he’s talking about decline before Ptolemy, so Plato proper. He specifically notes a gap between Hipparchus and Ptolemy, so he is talking about a fast fall, not decay past Ptolemy.
He recognizes that the Western Dark Age didn’t have Plato or Aristotle. He specifically mentions that the West got Aristotle before Plato. In between it got Archimedes and science exploded. Aristotle is generally seen as promoting medieval science (Roger Bacon was a fan), but at the very least he didn’t interfere with reading Archimedes. There was a decline of science and civilization generally when Petrarch translated Plato, but I think that’s a coincidence, really the fault of the Black Death.