Epistemology & Philosophy of Science

Volume 37, Issue 3, 2013

Vladimir Glebkin
Pages 164-178

ON THE COGNITIVE STYLE OF ANCIENT GREEK CULTURE

This study addresses the problem of cognitive development in phylogenesis. The concept of cognitive style of culture, or more exactly, the opposition “field_dependent – field_independent cognitive style” is the main methodological instrument for the analysis. The author argues that cognitive development from sympractical cultures to theoretical ones, and further within theoretical cultures, can be described as the emergence of novel cognitive modules which become less and less field_dependent. This statement is illustrated by parsing the Ancient Greek mathematics and historiography with the example of Euclid’s Elements and the historical treatises by Herodotus and Thucydides.