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- Title
Absent Archimedes – what?
- Authors
Morris, Ian
- Abstract
Reviel Netz offers a radically contingent counterfactual history in which the absence of Archimedes would have prevented early modern Europe's scientific revolution and perhaps the nineteenth-century industrial revolution too. I argue that we need to be more explicit about methods in counterfactual arguments. Techniques developed by economic historians and political scientists seem to point toward a more constrained range of possibilities, and also favor assigning more importance to external material forces. Absent Archimedes, I suggest, we would live in a different world from this one, but not very different.
- Subjects
ARCHIMEDES, ca. 287 B.C.-212 B.C.; IMAGINARY histories; INDUSTRIAL revolution; SCIENTIFIC Revolution; POLITICAL scientists; HISTORIANS
- Publication
Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, 2022, Vol 47, Issue 3/4, p440
- ISSN
0308-0188
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1080/03080188.2022.2124347