By Justine Murray
Interdisciplinary studies are a combination of two subjects or disciplines to make one learning experience. This is a technique that has been in existence for thousands of years. In the world of Ancient Greece, proof of interdisciplinary studies is obvious in many areas. Plato and Aristotle, two of the most famous philosophers from this time period, were certainly polymaths. A polymath is a person who is skilled in many varying subjects. Plato was a talented writer, and a teacher of a wide range of subjects such as mathematics, religion, and ethics.
Plato’s student, Aristotle, was equally as knowledgeable as he was. Aristotle’s skills lay in poetry, and an outstanding knowledge of ethics, politics, theatre, and science. Aristotle and Plato were dazzling for their time periods, but they were not the only geniuses from Ancient Greece. Pythagoras, famous for the Pythagorean theory, founded a cult of sorts whose members were brilliant, but bizarre. They believed that numbers had special purpose in nature and science. For example, “4 they equated with justice; 5 represented marriage; and 7 was a mystical number” (Fowler).
Perhaps it was their belief in positive integers that led to the discovery of irrational numbers. The Babylonians and the Egyptians had experimented with fractions and mixed numbers thousands of years before the Pythagoreans, but that was only a stepping stone. The Pythagoreans wondered, “Is this list of fractions all the numbers there are between one and ten?” (Fowler). They discovered irrational numbers through the Pythagorean theory. They simply took a triangle whose sides had a square of one, and whose hypotenuse had a square of two and attempted to find the square root of the hypotenuse using fractions.
When their logical argument failed, they were left to believe that irrational numbers existed, a discovery that was uniquely theirs. This discovery included a new way of thinking in logic to the Ancient Greeks. It became a trademark of scientific thinking that we use to this day in physical science. The Pythagoreans began the tradition of abstract thinking in logic as well as emphasizing the importance of numbers in the universe. Eventually, Plato began a new theory from abstract logic, similar to atomic or molecular theory. His theory that everything can be simplified into one simple form is an early rendition of something we are still looking for. It was the beginning of the “Theory of Everything,” an idea that everything in the universe is connected in one way or another.
Works Cited
Fowler, Michael. “Early Greek Science: Thales to Plato.” Galileo and Einstein: Overview and Lecture
Index. 23 Aug. 2008. Web. 2 Mar. 2015.
“Interdisciplinarity.” Connecticut College. Web. Mar. 2015. <http://www.conncoll.edu/academics/>.
Image: School of Athens [detail] by Raphael via the Wikimedia Commons