Otto Neugebauer (1899--1990)

Neugebauer is, in fact, a famous historian of ancient mathematics and astronomy. There is a biography of him at the St. Andrews Mathematics History Archive. He is certainly a real old German rigorist: well he was originally Austrian. A favorite quote from him---the point of which I disagree with is---is:

          This is a good illustration for the futility of any attempt to reconstruct ``reasons'' for the incidents of historical events. Similarly the absence of algebraic notations should not have prevented the Greek geometers from developing what was called in the 19th century ``synthetic'' and ``projective'' geometry since many of the basic concepts were ready at hand in the works of Apollonius. Again such a ``natural'' development did not take place and all that we may ever hope to establish in historical research is facts and conditions but never causes (Ne-225).

I think Lynn White (another eminent historian of science) is more on the mark:

          Historical explanation ... is seldom a matter of one billiard ball striking another, of `causes' in the narrow sense. It is much more often a process of gradual illumination of the fact to be explained by gathering around it other facts that, like lamps, seem to throw light on it. At last the historian arrives at a sense that the central fact on which he is focusing has become intelligible.

          [This is] the sort of explanation, necessarily common among historians dealing with large phenomena, that can neither be proved nor disproved with any rigor but that must be accepted or rejected on grounds of general coherence or incoherence (White 1978, p.~217, 333, taken from Co-517).

1. Neugebauer, O. 1969, The Exact Sciences in Antiquity (New York: Dover Publications, Inc.) (Ne)
   A short, but good, account of some facets of Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Greek mathematics and astronomy. Probably a bit dated and, to me, a bit extreme in its agnosticism about knowing cause in history. Look Otto, things have causes: therefore you should in principle be able to know something about them.