Meteorology

In Liba Taub (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Greek and Roman Science. Cambridge University Press. pp. 160-184 (2020)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

Greco-Roman meteorology will be described in four overlapping developments. In the archaic period, astro-meteorological calendars were written down, and one appears in Hesiod’s Works and Days; such calendars or almanacs originated thousands of years earlier in Mesopotamia. In the second development, also in the archaic period, the pioneers of prose writing began writing speculative naturalistic explanations of meteorological phenomena: Anaximander, followed by Heraclitus, Anaxagoras, and others. When Aristotle in the fourth century BCE mentions the ‘inquiry that all our predecessors have been calling meteorology’ (338a26), he is referring to these writers. In the third development, the first two enterprises were combined: empirical data collection about meteorological phenomena began to be married to naturalistic theoretical explanation. This innovation was prompted by Democritus and synthesised in its most influential form by Aristotle. At this point more sophisticated techniques of both short-term weather forecasting and long-term speculation about global climate change were also developed. In the fourth development, the wider implications of the naturalistic explanation of meteorological phenomena were contested. The views of ‘meteorologists’ had been controversial since the archaic period because they were perceived, and sometimes intended, to displace the divine prerogatives and undermine traditional religion. These controversies intensified throughout the classical and Hellenistic periods.

Other Versions

No versions found

Links

PhilArchive

External links

  • This entry has no external links. Add one.
Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

The Influence of Folk Meteorology in the Anaximander Fragment.Cameron Shelley - 2000 - Journal of the History of Ideas 61 (1):1-17.
Nationalizing provincial weather: meteorology in nineteenth-century Cornwall.Simon Naylor - 2006 - British Journal for the History of Science 39 (3):407-433.
Cosmology and meteorology.Liba Taub - 2009 - In James Warren (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Epicureanism. New York: Cambridge University Press. pp. 105.
Descartes and the Meteorology of the World.Patrick Brissey - 2012 - Society and Politics [Special Issue on God and the Order of Nature in Early Modern Thought: Topics in Metaphysics, Epistemology, and Science] 6 ( 2):88-100.

Analytics

Added to PP
2020-04-01

Downloads
789 (#24,337)

6 months
207 (#17,388)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Monte Johnson
University of California, San Diego

Citations of this work

No citations found.

Add more citations

References found in this work

Aristotle on teleology.Monte Ransome Johnson - 2005 - Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lucretius and the transformation of Greek wisdom.David N. Sedley - 1998 - New York: Cambridge University Press.
Aristotelian Explorations.G. E. R. Lloyd - 1996 - New York: Cambridge University Press.

View all 20 references / Add more references