Victoria is fascinated by the invention of theory and theoretical terms in ancient Greece: when Anaximander (c. 611-545 BC) first referred in his cosmological speculations to the 'indefinite,' he had moved from the level of observation and codified practice into the realm of theory and theoretical terms. Somehow, the Greeks had bootstrapped themselves into an entirely new way of looking at the world. And soon, they were involved in theoretical debates which displayed considerable methodological sophistication. One of these debates was the subject of Victoria's dissertation: the conflict between Stoic and Epicurean materialism which involved competing notions of science, nature, knowledge, and matter. To the question 'what is a body,' for example, the Epicureans provided an atomistic answer. The Stoics also wished to restrict themselves to a single level of material reality: for the benefit of a thoroughgoing causal account, they rejected the dualisms of force and matter, body and mind, etc. Grounded in empirical observations of baking and cooking or embryology, they proposed a conception of 'body' according to which bodies behave like 'forces,' pervading each other and rendering the cosmos one big living organism. Victoria's analyses of scientific texts carefully reconstruct underlying methodological standards, general conceptions of causality, etc. If you don't want to read her entire dissertation on "Recurrence and Teleology in Stoic Physics," an exemplary glimpse of her approach can be gotten from her article "Stoic Theology and the Supra-Moral Good" (The Journal of Theta Alpha Kappa, vol. 19:2, Fall 1995, pp. 2-16).
Victoria's historical researches are important not only because they alert us to the sophistication of Stoic or Epicurean science, not only because we are still grappling to understand the relation between force and matter. Our so-called post-modern age appears devoted to the undoing of the distinction between a 'good theory' and a 'mere story,' a distinction which Western culture has worked hard to create and preserve ever since its beginnings in ancient Greece.
Alfred Nordmann
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