Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-dzt6s Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-18T11:50:46.934Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Cold science: Seneca on hail and snow in Natural questions 4B*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2013

Gareth Williams
Gareth Williams
Affiliation:
Columbia University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

A familiar controversy in modern science centres on the problematic relationship between the ‘rhetoric’ and the ‘rationality’ of scientific argument. ‘From the dawn of modern science’, writes Philip Kitcher, ‘strenuous announcements have advocated that thinkers are not to be diverted from the conclusions that they ought to reach by the enchantments of language used to clothe a chain of reasoning. Hence the need for a restrained idiom that will “let the facts speak for themselves.” Science is to be a rhetoric-free zone.’ The broad aim of this paper is to suggest certain ways in which Seneca contributes to the ancient end of a controversy that Kitcher traces back to the beginning of the modern scientific era.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Cambridge Classical Journal , Volume 54 , 2008 , pp. 209 - 236
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s). Published online by Cambridge University Press 2008

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

WORKS CITED

Alexander, W. H. (1948) ‘Seneca's Naturales quaestiones: the text emended and explained’. University of California Publications in Classical Philology 13, 241–332.Google Scholar
Armisen-Marchetti, M. (1989) Sapientiae fades: étude sur les images de Sénèque, Paris.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Berno, F. R. (2003) Lo specchio, il vizio e la virtù: studio sulle Naturales quaestiones di Seneca, Bologna.Google Scholar
Bourgery, A. (1922) Sénèque prosateur. Études littéraires et grammaticales sur la prose de Sénèque le philosophe, Paris.Google Scholar
Bruns, C. G. (ed.) (1909) Fontes iuris Romani antiqui (7th edn.), Tübingen.Google Scholar
Codoñer Merino, C. (ed.) (1979) L. Annaei Senecae Naturales quaestiones, 2 vols., Madrid.Google Scholar
Codoñer Merino, C. (ed.) (1989) ‘La physique de Sénèque: ordonnance et structure des Naturales quaestiones’, ANRW 2.36.3, 1779–1822.Google Scholar
Conte, G. B. (1994) Genres and readers: Lucretius, love elegy, Pliny's Encyclopedia (trans. Most, G. W.), Baltimore and London.Google Scholar
Corcoran, T. H. (ed.) (1971, 1972) Seneca: Naturales quaestiones, 2 vols., Cambridge, Mass, and London.Google Scholar
Cornelissen, J. J. (1870) Coniectanea latina, Deventer.Google Scholar
Crawford, M. H. (ed.) (1996) Roman statutes. Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies Supplement 64, 2 vols., London.Google Scholar
Dickson, P. (1972) The great American ice cream book, New York.Google Scholar
Edelstein, L. (1967) The idea of progress in classical antiquity, Baltimore.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eden, P. T. (ed.) (1984) Seneca: Apocolocyntosis, Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics, Cambridge.Google Scholar
Frazer, J. G. (1898) Pausanias's description of Greece, 6 vols., London.Google Scholar
Funderburg, A. C. (1995) Chocolate, strawberry, and vanilla: a history of American ice cream, Bowling Green, OH.Google Scholar
Garrod, H. W. (1915) ‘Notes on the Naturales quaestiones of Seneca (continued)’, CQ 9, 39–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gauly, B. M. (2004) Senecas Naturales quaestiones: Naturphilosophie für die römische Kaiserzeit, Zetemata 122, Munich.Google Scholar
Gercke, A. (ed.) (1907) L. Annaei Senecae Naturalium quaestionum Libri VIII, Stuttgart.Google Scholar
Gilbert, O. (1907) Die meteorologischen Theorien des griechischen Altertums. Leipzig.Google Scholar
Gross, N. (1989) Senecas Naturales quaestiones: Komposition, naturphilosophische Aussagen und ihre Quellen, Palingenesia 27, Stuttgart.Google Scholar
Guthrie, W. K. C. (1965) A history of Greek philosophy, vol. 2: the Presocratic tradition from Parmenides to Democritus, Cambridge.Google Scholar
Hadot, P. (1995) Philosophy as a way of life: spiritual exercises from Socrates to Foucault (trans. Chase, M.), Oxford.Google Scholar
Hall, J. J. (1977) ‘Seneca as a source for earlier thought (especially meteorology)’, CQ 27, 409–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hine, H. M. (1980) ‘Seneca and Anaxagoras on snow’, Hermes 108, 503.Google Scholar
Hine, H. M. (ed.) (1981) An edition with commentary of Seneca, Natural questions, book 2, New York.Google Scholar
Hine, H. M. (ed.) (1996) L. Annaei Senecae Naturalium quaestionum libri, Stuttgart and Leipzig.Google Scholar
Hine, H. M. (1996a) Studies in the text of Seneca's Naturales quaestiones, Stuttgart and Leipzig.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hine, H. M. (2006) ‘Rome, the cosmos, and the emperor in Seneca's Natural questions’, JRS 96, 42–72.Google Scholar
Hofmann, J. B. (1951) Lateinische Umgangssprache (3rd edn.), Heidelberg.Google Scholar
Inwood, B. (2002) ‘God and human knowledge in Seneca's Natural questions’, in Frede, D., Laks, A. (eds.) Traditions of theology: studies in Hellenistic theology, its background and aftermath, Leiden. 119–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jarvie, I. C. and Agassi, J. (1967) ‘The problem of the rationality of magic’, The British Journal of Sociology 18, 55–74.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Repr. in Wilson, B. R. (ed.) (1970) Rationality, Oxford. 172–93.Google Scholar
Kennedy, G. (1963) The art of persuasion in Greece, Princeton.Google Scholar
Kidd, I. G. (1988) Posidonius, vol. 2: the commentary, Cambridge Classical Texts and Commentaries 14A. 14B, Cambridge.Google Scholar
Kidd, I. G. (1999) Posidonius, vol. 3: the translation of the fragments, Cambridge Classical Texts and Commentaries 36, Cambridge.Google Scholar
Kirk, G. S., Raven, J. E. and Schofield, M. (eds.) (1983) The Presocratic philosophers (2nd edn.), Cambridge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kitcher, P. (1995) ‘The cognitive functions of scientific rhetoric’, in Krips, H., McGuire, J. E., Melia, T. (eds.) Science, reason, and rhetoric, Pittsburgh-Konstanz Series in the Philosophy and History of Science 4, Pittsburgh and Konstanz, 47–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kühnen, F. J. (1962) Seneca unddie römische Geschichte, Cologne.Google Scholar
Lee, H. D. P. (ed.) (1952) Aristotle: Meteorologica, Cambridge, Mass, and London.Google Scholar
Lloyd, G. E. R. (1979) Magic, reason and experience: studies in the origins and development of Greek science, Cambridge.Google Scholar
Lloyd, G. E. R. (2004) Ancient worlds, modern reflections: philosophical perspectives on Greek and Chinese science and culture, Oxford.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Long, A. A. (1995) ‘Cicero's Plato and Aristotle’, in Powell, J. G. F. (ed.) Cicero the philosopher: twelve papers, Oxford, 37–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
MacKendrick, P. (1989) The philosophical books of Cicero, London.Google Scholar
Maltby, R. (1991) A lexicon of ancient Latin etymologies, Leeds.Google Scholar
Mazzoli, G. (1970) Seneca e la poesia, Milan.Google Scholar
Oltramare, P. (ed.) (1929) Sénèque: Questions naturelles, 2 vols., Paris.Google Scholar
Otto, A. (1890) Die Sprichwörter und sprichwörtlichen Redensarten der Römer, Leipzig (repr. Hildesheim 1965).Google Scholar
Palmer, A. (ed.) (1883) The Satires of Horace, London.Google Scholar
Parroni, P. (1992) review of Gross (1989), RFIC 120, 352–62.Google Scholar
Parroni, P. (ed.) (2002) Seneca: Ricerche sullu natura, Milan.Google Scholar
Pendrick, G. J. (ed.) (2002) Antiphon the. Sophist: the fragments, Cambridge Classical Texts and Commentaries 39, Cambridge.Google Scholar
Planhol, X. de (1995) L'eau de neige: le tiède et le frais. Histoire et géographie des boissons fraîches, Paris.Google Scholar
Rihll, T. E. (1999) Greek science, Greece & Rome New Surveys in the Classics 29, Oxford.Google Scholar
Rutherford, R. B. (1989) The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius: a study, Oxford.Google Scholar
Schenkeveld, D. M. (1999) ‘Language’, in Algra, K., Barnes, J., Mansfeld, J., Schofield, M. (eds.) The Cambridge history of Hellenistic philosophy, Cambridge, 177–225.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Scott, J. (1999) ‘The ethics of the physics in Seneca's Natural questions’, CB 75, 55–68.Google Scholar
Setaioli, A. (1981) ‘Elementi di sermo cotidianus nella lingua di Seneca prosatore’, SIFC 53, 5–49.Google Scholar
Setaioli, A. (1988) Seneca e i greci: citazioni e traduzioni nelle opere filosofiche, Bologna.Google Scholar
Setaioli, A. (2000) Facundus Seneca: aspetti della lingua e dell'ideologia senecana, Bologna.Google Scholar
Shackleton Bailey, D. R. (1979) ‘Notes on Seneca's Quaestiones naturales’, CQ 73, 448–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smith, P. R. (1995) ‘“A self-indulgent misuse of leisure and writing”? How not to write philosophy: did Cicero get it right?’, in Powell, J. G. F. (ed.) Cicero the philosopher: twelve papers, Oxford, 301–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Summers, W. C. (ed.) (1910) Select letters of Seneca, London.Google Scholar
Taub, L. (2003) Ancient meteorology, London.Google Scholar
Thomas, R. F. (ed.) (1988) Virgil: Georgics, Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics, 2 vols., Cambridge.Google Scholar
Toulmin, S. (1995) ‘Science and the many faces of rhetoric’, in Krips, H., McGuire, J. E., Melia, T. (eds.) Science, reason, and rhetoric, Pittsburgh-Konstanz Series in the Philosophy and History of Science 4, Pittsburgh and Konstanz, 3–11.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Turcan-Deleani, M. (1964) ‘Frigus amabile’, in Renard, M., Schilling, R. (eds.) Hommages à Jean Bayet, Collection Latomus 70, Brussels, 691–6.Google Scholar
Vottero, D. (ed.) (1989) Questioni naturali di Lucio Anneo Seneca, Turin.Google Scholar
Waiblinger, F. P. (1977) Senecas Naturales quaestiones: griechische Wissenschqft und römische Form, Munich.Google Scholar
Warner, M. (1989) Philosophical finesse: studies in the art of rhetorical persuasion, Oxford.Google Scholar
Williams, G. (ed.) (2003) Seneca: De otio, De breuitate uitae, Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics, Cambridge.Google Scholar
Williams, G. (ed.) (2006) ‘Greco-Roman seismology and Seneca on earthquakes in Natural questions 6’, JRS 96, 124–46.Google Scholar