La Revolución olvidada: aspectos lingüísticos de una pérdida y recuperación. Reflexiones sobre un ensayo de Lucio Russo

Abstract

This article offers some reflections on the linguistic dimension of scientific knowledge, starting from the reading of the stimulating essay “The forgotten revolution” by Lucio Russo, almost unknown in Spain despite its long editorial and reviews path in several countries, in journals on science and history, as well as philosophy or classical culture. The central argument proposed in Russo’s essay is that the singularity we know as modern science did not happen for the first time in history with Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler and Newton in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but originated from IVth century BC, in Alexandria and other eastern cities. The Hellenistic scientific and technological development, not always recognized by historiography, is outlined in detail by Russo, reframing the vision of this period in its relationship with the scientific revolution, a process more similar to the onset and development of humanism than we are used to think. Russo pays special attention to the distortions suffered by Hellenistic science in its transmission and, as the other side of the coin, the difficulty of reconstructing those ideas starting from classical sources, in an effort of appropriation that contributes decisively to shaping an identity of substance between the “ancient” and the “modern”. Under this perspective, scientific knowledge appears more fragile than the dazzling technological progress leaves us to assume, and poses the problem of the pressing responsibility of educators and science popularizers.