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AESTIMATIO Critical Reviews in the History of Science Aestimatio Critical Reviews in the History of Science Editor Alan C. Bowen, IRCPS Associate Editor Andrea Falcon, Concordia University Publication Manager Pamela A. Cooper, IRCPS Charles Burnett The Warburg Institute Serafina Cuomo Birkbeck College Bruce S. Eastwood University of Kentucky Gad Freudenthal CNRS, Paris Bernard R. Goldstein University of Pittsburgh Stephen Johnston Oxford University Richard Kieckhefer Northwestern University Advisory Editors Daryn Lehoux Queen’s University William Newman Indiana University Vivian Nutton University College London Kim Plofker Union College Eileen A. Reeves Princeton University Francesca Rochberg University of California, Berkeley Ken Saito Osaka Prefecture University Nancy Siraisi Hunter College John M. Steele Brown University Robert B. Todd Toronto, Ontario, Canada Christian Wildberg University of Pittsburgh AESTIMATIO Critical Reviews in the History of Science Volume 13 2016–2018 Edited by Alan C. Bowen A Publication of the Institute for Research in Classical Philosophy and Science Baysville, Ontario, Canada © 2018 Institute for Research in Classical Philosophy and Science All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this volume may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher, the Institute for Research in Classical Philosophy and Science. All inquiries should be addressed to the Institute for Research in Classical Philosophy and Science. ISSN 1549–4470 ISBN 978–1–60724–617–6 This volume is printed on acid-free paper that meets ANSI standard Z39.48, Permanence of Paper for Publications and Documents in Libraries and Archives. Printed in Toronto, Canada Aestimatio: Critical Reviews in the History of Science is distributed electronically free of charge at http://www.ircps.org/aestimatio. To receive automatic notices of reviews by email as they are posted on the Institute website, readers are invited to go to http://www.ircps.org/aestimatio and, by following the links given there, to establish a user account or to subscribe to the RSS feed. Though many of the reviews published in Aestimatio are solicited by special invitation, read- ers are welcome to volunteer to write a review by sending an email message to the Editor ([email protected]) listing the title and author of the book that they wish to review with a brief indication of their qualifications to undertake it. The front cover includes a modified version of a digital image (to be found online at https://com- mons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ptolemaicsystem-small.png) that is a faithful photographic re- production of a two-dimensional, work of art. This work is in the public domain in its coun- try of origin and elsewhere where the term of copyright is the author’s life plus 100 years [PD-Art|PD-old-100]. Contents Preface ........................ xi 1. Robert Hannah on The Inscriptions of the Antikythera Mechanism by Martin Allen, W. Ambrisco, Magdalini Anastatsiou, D. Bate, Yanis Bitsakis, A. Craw- ley, Mike Edmunds, D. Gelb, R. Hadland, P. Hockley, Alexander Jones, T. Malzbender, Helen Mangou, Xenophon Moussas, Andrew Ramsey, John Seiradakis, John M. Steele, Agamemnon Tselikas, and Mary Zafeiropoulou . 1 2. Eileen Reeves on Hermes and the Telescope: In the Crucible of Galileo’s Life-World by Paolo Palmieri . 10 3. Glen Van Brummelen on Essays on Medieval Computational Astronomy by José Chabás andBernardR.Goldstein . 19 4. Fernando Q. Gouvêa on Research in the History and Philosophy of Mathematics: The CSHPM 2014 Annual Meeting in St. Catherine’s, Ontario edited by Maria Zack and Elaine Landry . 26 5. Richard Lorch on Islamic Astronomy and Geography by David A. King . 30 6. Roger Beck on Recherches Mithriaques. Quarante ans de questions et d’investiga- tions by Robert Turcan . 32 7. Matjaž Vesel Before Copernicus and Copernicus . 37 8. Harry Hine on Metaphorical Coherence: Studies in Seneca’s Epistulae Morales by Aron Sjöblad . 80 viii 9. Joshua J. Reynolds on Divination and Human Nature: A Cognitive History of Intuition in Classical Antiquity by Peter T. Struck . 85 10. Fabio Tutrone on La rivoluzione culturale di Lucrezio. Filosofia e scienza nell’anti- ca Roma by Marco Beretta . 93 11. Levente László on The Daimon in Hellenistic Astrology: Origins and Influence by Dorian Gieseler Greenbaum . 101 12. Jacqueline Feke on The Circulation of Astronomical Knowledge in the Ancient World by John M. Steele . 115 13. Satyanad Kichenassamy on Les mathématiques de l’autel védique. Le Baudhāyana Śulbasūtra et son commentaire Śulbadīpikā, edited by Jean-Michel Delire . 119 14. Nicola Polloni on The Attitude of the Medieval Latin Translators towards the Arabic Sciences by José Martínez Gázquez . 141 15. William Wians on Aristotle on Knowledge and Learning: The Posterior Analytics by David Bronstein . 145 16. Malcolm Wilson on Plutarch’s Science of Natural Problems: A Study with Commentary on Quaestiones Naturales by Michiel Meeussen ....... 154 17. Paul T. Keyser on Science in the Forest, Science in the Past edited by Geoffrey Lloyd and Aparecida Vilaça . 158 18. Philip Thibodeau on The Metaphysics of the Pythagorean Theorem: Thales, Pythagoras, Engineering, Diagrams, and the Construction of the Cosmos out of Right Triangles by Robert Hahn . 177 ix 19. Elizabeth M. Craik on En marge du Serment hippocratique. Contrats et serments dans le monde gréco-romain edited by Marie-Hélène Marganne and Antonio Ricciardetto . 185 20. Marilù Papandreou on Aristotelismo by Andrea Falcon . 187 21. Jennifer Clarke Kosak on The ‘Hippocratic’ Corpus: Content and Context by Elizabeth M. Craik . 192 22. Alessandra Foscati on Summa doctrina et certa experientia. Studi su medicina e filosofia per Chiara Crisciani edited by Gabriella Zuccolin . 195 2016–2018 Books Received ................ 205 Preface This is the last year in which complete volumes of Aestimatio will be pub- lished separately online. We will, of course, continue to put individual reviews online as they become ready. Starting later this year, however, the content of complete volumes of Aestimatio will be included in volumes in print and online that collect articles published separately online in Interpretatio Series A. For more information about Interpretatio A, please go to the IRCPS website (https://ircps.org/interpretatio/about-A). Alan C. Bowen Editor, Aestimatio The Inscriptions of the Antikythera Mechanism by Martin Allen, W. Am- brisco, Magdalini Anastatsiou, D. Bate, Yanis Bitsakis, A. Crawley, Mike Ed- munds, D. Gelb, R. Hadland, P. Hockley, Alexander Jones, T. Malzbender, He- len Mangou, Xenophon Moussas, Andrew Ramsey, John Seiradakis, John M. Steele, Agamemnon Tselikas, and Mary Zafeiropoulou Turnhout, BE: Brepols, 2016. Pp. 310. Special edition: Almagest 7.1, Paper €33.00 Reviewed by Robert Hannah University of Waikato [email protected] In 1900, Greek sponge-divers, on their way back home to Symi in the eastern Aegean from working the sponge-beds off the Libyan coast of Africa, found by chance the wreck of an ancient ship in deep water at the bottom of the sea off the coast of the small island of Antikythera, south of the Greek mainland. The recovery of the contents of the wreck constitutes one of the first concerted underwater excavations and it brought to the surface a significant collection of Greek sculptures in bronze and marble. These remains, some well known, others not so, recently became the focus of their own special exhibition in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens [Kaltsas, Vlachogianni, and Bouyia 2012]. One particular part of the cargo has attracted the interests of historians of science: the remains of a technical instrument, which were recognized soon after discovery. (The details of the recognition in 1902, attributed to Spyridon Staïs, the Minister of Education in the Greek government, are given in the book under review [38–41]; see Kaltsas, Vlachogianni, and Bouyia 2012, 18–31 and 228 for a description of the discovery of all the finds in 1901–1902 and for the recognition of the instrument.) In 1972, X-rays were taken of the Mechanism by radiographer Charalambos Karakalos for the physicist Derek de Solla Price. These showed that it origi- nally comprised over 30 interlocking, toothed gears and several plates that were interrelated by their capacity to mark time in various ways: an Egyptian calendar; a zodiac-dial; and a star-calendar (parapegma). These discoveries led Price to attempt a reconstruction and ultimately to publish his findings © 2018 Institute for Research in Classical Philosophy and Science All rights reserved issn 1549–4497 (online) issn 1549–4470 (print) Aestimatio 13 (2016–2018) 1–9 2 Aestimatio in a monograph [de Solla Price 1974]. For him, the instrument was a type of calendar-computer, a loose term nowadays since it was not programmable, but adequate for his time. Ground-breaking though this research was and fundamentally important for our appreciation of the complexity and sophistication of the Antikythera Mechanism, more intensive techniques and ongoing physical reconstructions have been undertaken and have allowed investigators to refine or correct much of Price’s interpretation and model. In the 1990s, Michael Wright at the Science Museum in London and Allan Bromley at the University of Sydney became collaborators, working ini- tially from the 1970s’ X-rays but then developing their own. Since Bromley’s untimely death, Wright has continued his research, in the process manu- facturing the most detailed physical reconstructions of the Mechanism and explaining its underlying theory in a long series of publications. In its time, Mogi Vicentini’s [2009] virtual reconstruction of Wright’s model version 2 provided a brilliant opportunity to imagine the device as a whole and yet also to appreciate the extraordinary engineering skill that lies behind its construction. I have had the pleasure of seeing Wright’s workshop and tools, which, barring a modern metal-working lathe, have largely adhered to the type of hand-tools available to an ancient craftsman.