Greek Culture: Ancient Greek Science and Art

While I was writing my post on Thales of Miletus earlier this week, it got me thinking about how the Greeks classified intellectual and artistic endeavors. And the short answer to that is: not too strictly. The porous boundaries that existed between science, math, religion and art centered for the Greeks centered around their concept of music. Since music has a spiritual and emotional dimension, but involves mathematical intervals as well, the Greeks believed that all mental endeavors have a rational and a spiritual or non-rational side.

This is reflected in ancient Greek education, where physical education was taken extremely seriously, in part because merely intellectual training would lead to an imbalance between the rational and non-rational. Aristotle's books also indicate what we consider to be extremely flexible ideas about the limits of science and art. Although he is known as a philosopher, a fairly specific job title in our time, his works include literary criticism, biology, physics, linguistics and biography. Pin It