Was Hypatia a “scientist”? eSkeptic investigates

July 28, 2010 | Filed under: In Brief,Reviews | Posted by:

Dr. S. James Killings reviews the film “Agora” and discusses whether it’s likely the historical Hypatia was the empirical scientist of the film and of legend.

Writes Killings,

In the 18th century, the Enlightenment thinkers John Toland and particularly Voltaire seized on Damascius’ story of Hypatia’s death as symbolic of the antagonistic nature the Christian religion had toward the freedom of inquiry. They imagined her as a martyred symbol of free thought who was destroyed by the irrational dogmas of the growing ecclesiastical patriarchy. Her death, according to her blossoming legend, set back free inquiry a thousand years and ended the scientific hopes of the Hellenistic Age.

Rachel Weisz as Hypatia. Image: Newmarket Films

The movie (and legendary) version of Hypatia is depicted as an empiricist; one who relies upon empirical observation, a key component of the modern scientific method. Killings lays out for us what is known of Hypatia — that she was a philosopher and mathematician, and that being a Platonist, she distrusted physical observation — and what this means to the legendary character depicted in the film, particularly the shipboard gravity experiment key to the film character’s discoveries.

Killings’ review may be read in full HERE.

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One Response to Was Hypatia a “scientist”? eSkeptic investigates

  1. avatar faithljustice July 28, 2010 - 2:27 pm

    Thanks for the link to Dr. Killings' review of Agora. I saw the film when it first came out in NYC and loved Weisz' performance as Hypatia, but his discussion clarified something in the movie that bothered me. I've read the biography "Hypatia of Alexandria" by Maria Dzielska (Harvard University Press, 1995) and have a series of posts on the historical events and characters in the film at my blog – not a movie review, just a "reel vs. real" discussion. But people keep insisting that Hypatia "could have" studied heliocentricsm and experimented as shown in the film. As much as I adore the idea of Hypatia, that just didn't work for me, given the times she lived. Dr. Killings did a great job of showing how logically that would not have happened without denigrating Hypatia as a historical character.

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