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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
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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

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References

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