Committed to the same Aristotelian and Ptolemaic principles as their European counterparts, Arab astronomers produced highly accurate records of celestial motions and sought solutions to the same discrepancies between observation and theory. But none of these involved questioning geocentrism; astronomy was often pursued as an aid to religious observance, giving accurate times for holidays and rituals. Copernicus drew on Islamic writings as on many others, but claims that his heliocentrism in some way depended on them are unacceptable, given their unquestioning geocentrism. In his great work on Chinese science, Joseph Needham showed that it was often superior to Western natural philosophy both empirically and in its understanding of basic natural processes. He attributed its failure to produce a Copernican-Newtonian revolution to various external factors. But the notion that it had such potential rests on the false assumption that its strengths were the ground out of which a science capable of overturning the bases of its own practices might emerge. Such a capacity depends instead on the presence of conditions favorable to rendering the sphere of science autonomous. Only in the nineteenth century, spurred by modern chemistry, biology and physics brought by Western medical missionaries, would Chinese science take this turn.

This chapter is devoted to what I call textual anachronism. By this expression, I refer to forms of anachronism that lead to interpreting ancient texts on the basis of anachronistic assumptions with respect to how these texts made sense for the ancient actors. This is, for instance, the case when historians take the textual components that they find in ancient documents (like a mathematical problem, an algorithm, a proof, and a diagram), as they would take what they consider to be modern counterparts, and interpret these components on that basis. I argue that this form of anachronism has caused misinterpretations of several kinds, which I identify and analyze, using examples from four historical contexts. I further discuss the historiographical implications of this type of anachronism. I conclude with the thesis that one can limit the effects of this form of anachronism by using a historical approach to forms of text. Moreover, a historical approach of this kind sheds light on the fact that anachronism has a history that might also be interesting to consider.