The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Greek and Roman Science

Liba Taub is Director of the Whipple Museum of the History of Science and Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. She is the author of Ancient Meteorology (2003), Aetna and the Moon: Explaining Nature in Ancient Greece and Rome (2008), and Science Writing in Greco-Roman Antiquity (Cambridge, 2017).

• Introduction Liba Taub; 1. Presocratic natural philosophy Patricia Curd; 2. Reason, experience and art: the Gorgias and On Ancient Medicine James Allen; 3. Towards a science of life: the cosmological method, teleology and living things Klaus Corcilius; 4. Aristotle on the matter for birth, life and the elements David Ebrey; 5. From craft to nature: the emergence of natural teleology Thomas Johansen; 6. Creationism in antiquity David Sedley; 7. What's a plant? Laurence M. V. Totelin; 8. Meteorology Monte Ransome Johnson; 9. Ancient Greek mathematics Nathan Sidoli; 10. Astronomy in its contexts Liba Taub; 11. Ancient Greek mechanics and the mechanical hypothesis Sylvia Berryman; 12. Measuring musical beauty: instruments, reason and perception in ancient harmonics Massimo Raffa; 13. Ancient Greek historiography of science Leonid Zhmud.

'… this Cambridge Companion is an excellent introductory guide to many areas of science-style inquiry in classical antiquity, and it is especially useful for less well known domains like botany, music, mechanics, or meteorology. In another way its authors' diverse choices offer a snapshot of our current relationship to Greco-Roman philosophical and scientific activity: our questions about its history are open-ended, even if a high proportion of them are still about Aristotle.' Philippa Lang Isis, Isis, a Journal of the History of Science Society