11 - Ancient Greek Mechanics and the Mechanical Hypothesis

Summary

There is a real danger, in approaching the topic of the history of mechanics in antiquity, of becoming entangled in modern terminology. E. J. Dijksterhuis, in his 1961 classic study The Mechanization of the World Picture, approached the ancient antecedents to his topic by looking at the history of atomist thought; it could be equally misleading to suppose that the history of mechanics in antiquity coincides with the development of mathematical laws to describe the motion of heavy bodies. If we look instead at the history of the body of technology that the ancient Greeks called ‘mechanics’ – ta mêchanika or hê mêchanikê technê – and the theories evolved to explain their workings, we would be tracing a different story. That is the topic of this chapter.