Adversaries and authorities

Abstract

The strategic aim of the set of studies I have embarked on in collaboration with the sinologist Nathan Sivin is to examine Greek and Chinese philosophy and science afresh. Limiting our main inquiries to the period down to about A.D. 300, when Christianity came to be a major factor in the Graeco-Roman world and Buddhism began to be an important influence in China, we aim to ask questions concerning the differences in the ways in which philosophy and science were done in ancient Greece and China, why there should have been such differences, and what the philosophy and science done owed to the social, political and institutional background of the circumstances in which they were produced. It is high time that historians of Greek and Chinese science stopped treating their subjects principally as happy hunting grounds for point-scoring, chalking up anticipations of modern science, and especially priority claims as to who did what first. For they could clearly not have been a preoccupation of the ancients themselves.