The Handmaiden

James Hannam at Quodlibeta: Ethics and its importance to ancient Greek science -- "...The primacy of ethics and the belief in objective moral values explains both the multiplicity of Greek natural philosophies and the differences between them. It also shows us how utterly unlike modern science Greek natural philosophy was. Finally, it illustrates that the Greek attitude towards science was identical to that of early and medieval Christians. David Lindberg was fond of a metaphor he found in the work of Roger Bacon – that natural philosophy was the handmaiden of Christian theology. For the pagan Greek philosophers, whether they were theists or not, science was the servant of ethics."