Greece and the Needham Question

The role of Greece in the analysis of the Needham Question has caused much confusion, the nature of which is encapsulated in the notion of the ‘West’ as a ‘trans-historical’ civilization beginning with Greece. In fact, Greece and Latin Europe were two different civilizations. But as Europe’s scientific developments began to overtake that of the Arabs, its previous intellectual debts to the Arabs came to be increasingly denied while Greece was declared to be its ‘childhood’. Science came to be seen as the ‘autochthonous’ development of this ‘trans-historical’ civilization. The notion of the ‘West’ as this ‘trans-historical’ civilization was invented in the 1840s. The Eurocentric view concerning the rise of modern science was formulated on the basis of this notion. Despite the restoration of the role of Arabic scholarship today, the notion of the ‘West’ still needs to be deconstructed if Eurocentrism is to be decisively rebutted.