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Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery in Early Modern Europe. By David B. Ruderman. Yale University Press: 1995. Pp. 392. $30, £20.

Thequestion of determining the genuine works of Hippocrates, a topic already much discussed by the ancient commentators, still continues to be actively debated, although the disagreements among scholars remain, it seems, almost as wide as ever. In comparatively recent times, Edelstein's IIEPI AEPQN and two subsequent studies of his written in the 1930s (Edelstein (b) and (c) marked a turning-point in that they presented a particularly clear and comprehensive statement of the sceptical view, according to which Hippocrates is, as Wilamowitz put it long ago, ‘ein beriihmter Name ohne den Hintergrund irgend einer Schrift’.

In a previous article (JHS lxxxii (1962) 56 ff.) I examined some of the theories and explanations which appear in Greek philosophy and medicine in the period down to Aristotle, in which reference is made to right and left or certain other pairs of opposites (light and darkness, male and female, up and down, front and back), and I argued that several of these theories are influenced by the symbolic associations which these opposites possessed for the ancient Greeks. In the present paper I wish to consider the use of the two pairs of opposites which are most prominent of all in early Greek speculative thought, the hot and the cold, and the dry and the wet. My discussion is divided into two parts. In the first I shall examine the question of the origin of the use of these opposites in Greek philosophy. How far back can we trace their use in various fields of speculative thought, and what was the significance of their introduction into cosmology in particular? And then in the second part of my paper I shall consider to what extent theories based on these opposites may have been influenced by assumptions concerning the values of the opposed terms. Are these opposites, too, like right and left, or male and female, sometimes conceived as consisting of on the one hand a positive, or superior pole, and on the other a negative, or inferior one? How far do we find that arbitrary correlations were made between these and other pairs of terms, that is to say correlations that correspond to preconceived notions of value, rather than to any empirically verifiable data?

This study traces Greek science through the work of the Pythagoreans, the Presocratic natural philosophers, the Hippocratic writers, Plato, the fourth-century B.C. astronomers, and Aristotle. G. E. R. Lloyd also investigates the relationships between science and philosophy and science and medicine; he discusses the social and economic setting of early Greek science; and he analyzes the motives and incentives of the different groups of writers.