1. Greek Science Its Meaning For Us (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1953), 311.
2. Plato’s Cosmology (New York: The Liberal Arts Press, 1957), 49.
3. The Mathematical Career of Pierre de Fermat (1601–1665) (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973), XII–XIII.
4. Ironically, the very works of FARRINGTON and MAHONEY mentioned above are cases in point for the very popular syndrome referred to by HEINE in the following phrase: ‘Sie predigen öffentlich Wasser, Und drinken heimlich Wein’; the difference being, however, that, in this instance, both the ‘preaching’ and the ‘drinking’ take place openly, in the public domain. For an analysis of FARRINGTON’S work see LUDWIG EDELSTEIN, ‘Recent Trends in the Interpretation of Ancient Science’, Roots of Scientific Thought A Cultural Perspective, P.P. WIENER A. NOLAND (eds.) (New York: Basic Books, 1957), 90–121; as to MAHONEY’S book, I will be dealing with it in a future essay review in FRANCIA-Forschungen zur westeuropäischen Geschichte, the journal of the Institut Historique Allemand in Paris.
5. ‘Impertinent Reflections on the History of Science’, Philosophy of Science,17 (1950), 63–73, at 64; it is also there that BRIDGMAN says (among other things): ‘It seems to me that there is a very real danger in a too assiduous devotion to the historical point of view…’ (ibid., 72). Without denying the pregnant philosophical problems stemming from the reconstruction of the past, and accepting the obvious conclusion that ‘the impartial recovery of the past’, etc. is indeed an impossible ideal, it does not follow that abandoning irrevocably this unattainable ideal is tantamount to an abandonment of the historical method. Indeed, to repeat a truism, the fact the historian knows that it is in principle impossible to relive the past and that his reconstruction is inherently deficient and inadequate represents for him the utmost challenge to try and look at the past through sympathetic and understanding eyes and to achieve a reconstruction which does no patent violence to that which is to be reconstructed. That there is something to be reconstructed and understood is taken for granted by any mentally healthy historian worth his salt.