7 ms·

Yacob and Amo: African precursors to Enlightenment thinkers

149 points by acsillag 9y ago

corporateguy5 9y ago
Propaganda piece
ryanx435 9y ago
The palm pilot was years ahead of the iPhone, but it doesn't matter. Apple is who brought us into the age of mobile devices with the iPhone. These guys may have had the same ideas before everyone else, but it doesn't matter. Their effect was minimal and the enlightenment didn't catch on in Ethiopia.
- dang 9y ago
  Would you please not post shallow dismissals to Hacker News? This is just the sort of curiosity-killing comment we don't need here, particularly as the first post to a thread. Historical material is interesting for plenty of reasons beyond "who won", and has always been welcome on Hacker News. So are things whose "effect was minimal", as long as they're interesting. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- heavenlyblue 9y ago
  Or, Apple had piggybacked off the mistakes of Palm Pilot. The same thinking will lead you to a belief that all of the things Apple had ever done were perfect and there was only one way of doing it (since they did win in the end), when the situation should account for all of the players in the act. Also, let's not forget that Steve Jobs had repeateadedly refused to do chemo instead prefering homeopathy; and there's a huge chance the only reason those products are here are due to his highly pumped up ego, rather than the deeply thought-through design. Or in other words, "Those who don't know history, are doomed to repeat it".
- anigbrowl 9y ago
  That's a strange argument. Apple had also had an earlier failure of mobile computing with the Newton, which was beaten in the market by the Palm Pilot. Palm did well for a few years, then ran into limitations of its own. Apple made a breakthrough with the iPhone, but nowadays lower-cost products built around Android arguably dominate the market. Of course, it depends on whether you measure success by unit sales, profit, device performance, or app store depth.
nickysielicki 9y ago
We don't study philosophy simply based on who is first, we study texts because they are thorough and influential on future philosophical and political development. We know this because future scholars directly cite them. Before all the aforementioned authors, it's all but certain that many of these thoughts were had by unknown people without the ability to archive them in depth. The Bible alone is evidence of this; for someone to write that denial of religion deserves death, they must consider religion as a choice in the first place. This just feels like someone is shoehorning a narrative that they like.
- dang 9y ago
  This isn't as cheap as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16200064 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16200064 but it's still a shallow dismissal of a straw view of the article. What's interesting here is not that these guys did or didn't have historical influence—obviously they didn't, end of story. It's that their ideas were surprisingly similar to later, more famous thinkers in a place few would have expected. That easily clears the bar for interest on Hacker News. When the HN guidelines say the following, it applies to articles as well: Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - nickysielicki 9y ago
    > What's interesting here is not that these guys did or didn't have historical influence—obviously they didn't, end of story. It's that their ideas were surprisingly similar to later, more famous thinkers in a place few would have expected. That easily clears the bar for interest on Hacker News. I agree with you on this-- it's definitely interesting, but the point you're making here is very different from the thesis of the link. The thesis restatement in the last paragraph of the article makes the case that these authors have high historical relevance in philosophy, and that argument is what I was responding to. I understand the goal of the guideline, but as a starting point it's unreasonable to expect someone to respond to an argument as it could be rather than as it really is. I think we're on the same page.
angersock 9y ago
Other than the obvious difference of being done by a hermit in a cave, it might be interesting to try and logic out where those other philosophers got more purchase in their own countries than did the subject of the article in Ethiopia.
bhritchie 9y ago
It's been a few years since I updated it, but I probably still have the only blog dedicated to Ethiopian philosophy: https://ethiopianphilosophy.wordpress.com/ https://ethiopianphilosophy.wordpress.com/
- mlinksva 9y ago
  Thanks! I was just looking at it from a link in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zera_Yacob_(philosopher) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zera_Yacob_(philosopher) Do you know whether Yacob's writings have been continuously studied in Ethiopia or "lost" and then found, and how? I guess the latter since your "very brief introduction" includes "As Claude Sumner has said, Zera Yacob’s treatise is “an absolutely original work,” and if philosophy in Ethiopia starts with Zera Yacob it also ends with [his student] Walda Heywat." I see from your bibliography there is a 1904 Latin translation of Yacob's work. How did that come about?
  - bhritchie 9y ago
    As far as I can recall, the texts did not get any recognition within Ethiopia until the last century or so. A manuscript of the texts was originally found (in a monastery, I believe) and translated by an Italian scholar in the 19th century, and there were several translations and scholarly works discussions published over the next few decades. Then in the 20s and 30s a couple of scholars argued on textual and circumstantial grounds that this Italian scholar had in fact forged the original manuscripts himself. Basically everyone was convinced and lost interest at that point. Claude Sumner and some Ethiopian scholars have more recently taken up the whole issues again and argued that the texts are authentic, but they remain very obscure. I probably should have talked about this a bit in my introduction, but none of that stuff is in English and I guess I found Sumner's discussion compelling. But really I'm not qualified to judge, and the forgery theory would certainly account for the sudden emergence.
    - gwern 9y ago
      > Then in the 20s and 30s a couple of scholars argued on textual and circumstantial grounds that this Italian scholar had in fact forged the original manuscripts himself. Basically everyone was convinced and lost interest at that point. Claude Sumner and some Ethiopian scholars have more recently taken up the whole issues again and argued that the texts are authentic, but they remain very obscure. Wow, seriously? You know, I was reading this a few weeks ago when it first popped up, and I thought to myself, this smells a bit like an Afrocentrism hoax like 'Aristotle stole Greek philosophy from Africans in the Library of Alexandria who invented it all before him' - I've never seen it mentioned despite the considerable interest it should have, the sources are all ascribed to some very rare book you're told you have no chance of getting your hands on, the claimed views sound impossibly modern/anachronistic with no extremely weird claims thrown in (if you look at forward thinkers like Bentham or Lucretius, despite some extremely prescient arguments like defenses of sodomy, they still have some bizarre beliefs, they don't sound like a NYC liberal)... But I thought it would be rude to be skeptical because it's not like I know much about Ethiopian Christian philosophy so maybe they really did have a Greek tradition which could produce such a philosopher. And now you tell me that not only is there no provenance of the original texts more recent than the 1800s, they've actually been debunked as European forgeries, and OP just happened to not see fit to mention these minor little details?! EDIT: I see this comes up in the comments as well, and his arguments are mostly bluster: 'no one could have forged a genius book like this! Look at all the Enlightenment in there [but obviously it'd be easy for an Italian centuries later to write such a book...] There are peer-reviewed books on this topic! Peer-reviewed!'
j9461701 9y ago
>In short: many of the highest ideals of the later European Enlightenment had been conceived and summarised by one man, working in an Ethiopian cave from 1630 to 1632. All of the highest ideals of the European enlightenment had been conceived by dozens of people all throughout human history. I fail to see what makes Yacob special in this regard. For example: >He believed in the supremacy of reason So did Aristotle. So did Socrates. So did most major Greek philosophers. Also the supremacy of reason was part of the problem with the Athenian school of philosophical thought - Aristotle reasoned the octopus was a stupid animal because it was extremely curious, and he reasoned women had fewer teeth than men did, and he reasoned many things that were flatly wrong. Empericism is what changed the world, with rationalism as a supporting pillar, not pure logic itself divorced from evidence and experiment. >In this way, Yacob opens up an enlightened discourse on the subjectivity of religion, while still believing in some kind of universal Creator. Again, why does this make him special? Socrates was famously made to drink hemlock for his incessant questioning of the gods and the validity of religion. >Yacob is also more enlightened than his Enlightenment peers when it comes to slavery. In chapter five, he argues against the idea that one can ‘go and buy a man as if he were an animal’. "He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where Men should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce. And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he has obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed again the Liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another." -Thomas Jefferson, clause from first draft of the Declaration of Independence, removed due to Southern opposition (note: Jefferson owned a lot of slaves, and kept them his whole life) Englithenment thinkers did not condone slavery, they were just willing to profit off it. Which is a cowardly and immoral thing to do, but again Yacob's thinking is not unique here. >Within the discipline of history, new studies have shown that the most successful revolution to spring from the Enlightenment ideas of liberty, equality, and fraternity was in Haiti rather than in France. 'Most successful' here meaning it ended in ethnic cleansing, frequent atrocity (including a castle "built on the bones of children"), and centuries of misery and death that continues to the present day while France....is one of the most prosperous nations on Earth. At the risk of being reductionist, this article strikes me as being in a similar vein to "Ancient Egyptians were black!". That is, an attempt to elevate a modern minority group to higher prestige by attributing to them historical achievements they didn't really have any part in.
superquest 9y ago
The comments section on aeon.co is very good. Encourage you guys to read the comments.
Buttes14 9y ago
I like how mods had to change the title cuz HN readers aren't even familiar with famous Western philosophers.
- dang 9y ago
  It's the opposite. I changed the title to take out the celebrity names because in our experience those tend to trigger poorer discussion.
eveningcoffee 9y ago
It is interesting that similar ideas tend to pop up around the same time. Based on this, Yacob was more secular, rational and humane than European thinkers at the same time and would feel himself most likely comfortably in the modern world. I think it is always important to know if something was worked on independently in multiple places. I believe that this demonstrates that this something was bound to happen. I would not call Amo as an African philosopher though, as he was raised and educated in Europe. Perhaps an African-European philosopher if you insist to stress on his origin. I think that he was and was perceived as much European as his other contemporaries.
- wallace_f 9y ago
  >It is interesting that similar ideas tend to pop up around the same time. I've heard 'enlightenment ideas' pop up in music and conversation going back to my teens. I would personally bet that similar ideas (such as 'all men are created equal,' as is highlighted in the article) had been proposed countless times in the minds of people long before any enlightenment, or even Christian, thinker. The problem is the willingness of people to tolerate such ideas. The fact that even though in 2018, with the benefit of hindsight, we can see great civilization and prosperity has been made possible by these ideas, people don't always want to believe them--and in America one does not need to look for very long at our legal system, government & politics, and social behaviors to see this. Maybe we need another enlightenment, and one more inclusive of the liberties and freedoms of all people.
stareatgoats 9y ago
Someone who does any study of the history of ideas will run into the still ubiquitous and somewhat self-aggrandizing paradigm in the discipline. In coarse outline: that rational thinking is something which started with the Greeks and was carried like a torch through various high-watermarks in western history, and in essence is one of the things that distinguishes (and elevates) the west from the rest of the world. Granted, some tips of the hat have been granted the ancient philosophies of India, China and the Muslim world, but these are mainly noted as they have contributed to the forward march of western ideas. The linked article could be largely interpreted to be in the same vein: i.e. great because it coincides with a major western thought tradition. Still, interesting to learn that Ethiopia had a scholarly tradition of which we have heard very little. Also interesting that enlightenment ideas seem to have surfaced at approximately the same time, in totally separate places. I dare say we tend to believe that ideas spread via diffusion, maybe that is not so at all.
- empath75 9y ago
  The Greeks benefited by creating systems of thought that were propagated by academies and books, and were supported and protected by a vast, powerful empire for over a thousand years. They happened to have laid the foundation for university education in the west, where the industrial revolution took off first. It doesn’t take much to imagine a world where the industrial revolution happened in China first and we’d all be talking about how everyone considers confuscious the only important philosopher while overlooking Plato and Aristotle. Hell in a hundred years that could still happen.
- UweSchmidt 9y ago
  Of course our own history is more important to us than others' (which are extensively studied in the west as well), and cherry picking and narrative writing is also an ethical statement: We point to the values of ancient Greek democracy as our own democracy is in danger. We refer to the thinkers in our past as scientific thinking is questioned today. Especially when dealing with Greeks (and Romans), it is amazing how much of what is going on today was established and founded back then (e.g. German law is based on Roman law, therefore a law professor might look for clues in Roman values, not in Chinese values).
brighteyes 9y ago
Yacob was a remarkable thinker, to be sure, but there is no reason to connect him to the Enlightenment: He didn't influence it, nor was he influenced by it, as far as we can tell. The only reason the article seems to connect Yacob to the Enlightenment is because he wrote around the time of Descartes, and on similar themes. But that's not enough of a connection - without a causal interaction between him and the Enlightenment, the timing is just a coincidence. Other rational and secular philosophers have lived in various times and places (China, ancient Greece, India, etc.). Yacob deserves a place of honor among them, but none of them are part of the Enlightenment. It's odd how the article tries to connect Yacob to the Enlightenment - it doesn't make logical sense, and so seems more out of the author's desire to see that connection.
twouhm 9y ago
There is also Ibn Khaldûn[0]. [0]: https://qz.com/1008371/an-arab-thinker-invented-economic-theory-400-years-before-adam-smith-did/ https://qz.com/1008371/an-arab-thinker-invented-economic-the...
harmlessposter 9y ago
WE
barry-cotter 9y ago
If you read the comments you’ll see that there’s no evidence of Yacob’s existence prior to the 1800s and Italian scholars came to the conclusion in the early 20th century the whole thing was a forgery. It might be real but it would be unwise to base any serious efforts on this without at the least carbon dating of an original manuscript.
- wahern 9y ago
  I suspect you're overstating the conclusion that it was a forgery. I cannot see enough context to determine the source, but FWIW, ... The first argument is that Giusto d'Urbino himself clearly indicated that the manuscripts are not of his own. And I do not see any reason why a European thinker of such caliber produces such a refined philosophical work and at the end ascribes it to some 'Ethiopian Philosopher' that never existed. I could not possibly think of any not to believe Giusto d'Urbino himself who tells us clearly that he bought the manuscripts. ... The second argument is linguistic in nature. Here we should note that Giusto d'Urbino, though he did manage to learn Ge'ez, was in no position to write such a manuscript. Still some accept the fact that Giusto d'Urbino could have dictated his ideas to an Ethiopian scribe who could have captured his ideas in refined Ge'ez. Yes, even the argument does not hold true. You see there is a manuscript--Les Soirees de Carthage de Francois Bourgade. Both Giusto d'Urbino and his Ethiopian Scribe write this manuscript. The first part is written by Giusto d'Urbino himself and the second part by his clerk. A thorough study of these writings by a prominent instructor of Ge'ez literature at Addis Ababa University, Alemayehu Moges, has clearly indicated that, primarily, Giusto d'Urbino's writing in Ge'ez is full of mistakes. The scribe's writing was found to be free of errors but the type of languages used by Giusto d'Urbino scribe and the language of Zara Yacob were completely different. This clearly shows that neither Giusto d'Urbino nor his scribe could have possibly been the author of the manuscript that I strongly insist to be of Zara Yacob. Excerpt of quotation from Teodros Kiros, "Zara Yacob: Rationality of the Human Heart", pp148-149 (https://books.google.com/books?id=z4-HgXftrcYC&lpg=PA148&ots=urDBIoK23z&dq=yacob%20d%E2%80%99Urbino&pg=PA148#v=onepage&q=yacob%20d%E2%80%99Urbino&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=z4-HgXftrcYC&lpg=PA148&ots...)
  - 9y ago
oblib 9y ago
This is a great read. I've not studied philosophy so I won't go there, but I did really enjoy learning about these two men and their place in the history of thinkers.

149 points by acsillag 9y ago

Propaganda piece

The palm pilot was years ahead of the iPhone, but it doesn't matter. Apple is who brought us into the age of mobile devices with the iPhone. These guys may have had the same ideas before everyone else, but it doesn't matter. Their effect was minimal and the enlightenment didn't catch on in Ethiopia.

dang 9y ago
Would you please not post shallow dismissals to Hacker News? This is just the sort of curiosity-killing comment we don't need here, particularly as the first post to a thread. Historical material is interesting for plenty of reasons beyond "who won", and has always been welcome on Hacker News. So are things whose "effect was minimal", as long as they're interesting. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
heavenlyblue 9y ago
Or, Apple had piggybacked off the mistakes of Palm Pilot. The same thinking will lead you to a belief that all of the things Apple had ever done were perfect and there was only one way of doing it (since they did win in the end), when the situation should account for all of the players in the act. Also, let's not forget that Steve Jobs had repeateadedly refused to do chemo instead prefering homeopathy; and there's a huge chance the only reason those products are here are due to his highly pumped up ego, rather than the deeply thought-through design. Or in other words, "Those who don't know history, are doomed to repeat it".
anigbrowl 9y ago
That's a strange argument. Apple had also had an earlier failure of mobile computing with the Newton, which was beaten in the market by the Palm Pilot. Palm did well for a few years, then ran into limitations of its own. Apple made a breakthrough with the iPhone, but nowadays lower-cost products built around Android arguably dominate the market. Of course, it depends on whether you measure success by unit sales, profit, device performance, or app store depth.

nickysielicki 9y ago

We don't study philosophy simply based on who is first, we study texts because they are thorough and influential on future philosophical and political development. We know this because future scholars directly cite them. Before all the aforementioned authors, it's all but certain that many of these thoughts were had by unknown people without the ability to archive them in depth. The Bible alone is evidence of this; for someone to write that denial of religion deserves death, they must consider religion as a choice in the first place. This just feels like someone is shoehorning a narrative that they like.

dang 9y ago
This isn't as cheap as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16200064 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16200064 but it's still a shallow dismissal of a straw view of the article. What's interesting here is not that these guys did or didn't have historical influence—obviously they didn't, end of story. It's that their ideas were surprisingly similar to later, more famous thinkers in a place few would have expected. That easily clears the bar for interest on Hacker News. When the HN guidelines say the following, it applies to articles as well: Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- nickysielicki 9y ago
  > What's interesting here is not that these guys did or didn't have historical influence—obviously they didn't, end of story. It's that their ideas were surprisingly similar to later, more famous thinkers in a place few would have expected. That easily clears the bar for interest on Hacker News. I agree with you on this-- it's definitely interesting, but the point you're making here is very different from the thesis of the link. The thesis restatement in the last paragraph of the article makes the case that these authors have high historical relevance in philosophy, and that argument is what I was responding to. I understand the goal of the guideline, but as a starting point it's unreasonable to expect someone to respond to an argument as it could be rather than as it really is. I think we're on the same page.

angersock 9y ago

Other than the obvious difference of being done by a hermit in a cave, it might be interesting to try and logic out where those other philosophers got more purchase in their own countries than did the subject of the article in Ethiopia.

bhritchie 9y ago

It's been a few years since I updated it, but I probably still have the only blog dedicated to Ethiopian philosophy: https://ethiopianphilosophy.wordpress.com/ https://ethiopianphilosophy.wordpress.com/

mlinksva 9y ago
Thanks! I was just looking at it from a link in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zera_Yacob_(philosopher) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zera_Yacob_(philosopher) Do you know whether Yacob's writings have been continuously studied in Ethiopia or "lost" and then found, and how? I guess the latter since your "very brief introduction" includes "As Claude Sumner has said, Zera Yacob’s treatise is “an absolutely original work,” and if philosophy in Ethiopia starts with Zera Yacob it also ends with [his student] Walda Heywat." I see from your bibliography there is a 1904 Latin translation of Yacob's work. How did that come about?
- bhritchie 9y ago
  As far as I can recall, the texts did not get any recognition within Ethiopia until the last century or so. A manuscript of the texts was originally found (in a monastery, I believe) and translated by an Italian scholar in the 19th century, and there were several translations and scholarly works discussions published over the next few decades. Then in the 20s and 30s a couple of scholars argued on textual and circumstantial grounds that this Italian scholar had in fact forged the original manuscripts himself. Basically everyone was convinced and lost interest at that point. Claude Sumner and some Ethiopian scholars have more recently taken up the whole issues again and argued that the texts are authentic, but they remain very obscure. I probably should have talked about this a bit in my introduction, but none of that stuff is in English and I guess I found Sumner's discussion compelling. But really I'm not qualified to judge, and the forgery theory would certainly account for the sudden emergence.
  - gwern 9y ago
    > Then in the 20s and 30s a couple of scholars argued on textual and circumstantial grounds that this Italian scholar had in fact forged the original manuscripts himself. Basically everyone was convinced and lost interest at that point. Claude Sumner and some Ethiopian scholars have more recently taken up the whole issues again and argued that the texts are authentic, but they remain very obscure. Wow, seriously? You know, I was reading this a few weeks ago when it first popped up, and I thought to myself, this smells a bit like an Afrocentrism hoax like 'Aristotle stole Greek philosophy from Africans in the Library of Alexandria who invented it all before him' - I've never seen it mentioned despite the considerable interest it should have, the sources are all ascribed to some very rare book you're told you have no chance of getting your hands on, the claimed views sound impossibly modern/anachronistic with no extremely weird claims thrown in (if you look at forward thinkers like Bentham or Lucretius, despite some extremely prescient arguments like defenses of sodomy, they still have some bizarre beliefs, they don't sound like a NYC liberal)... But I thought it would be rude to be skeptical because it's not like I know much about Ethiopian Christian philosophy so maybe they really did have a Greek tradition which could produce such a philosopher. And now you tell me that not only is there no provenance of the original texts more recent than the 1800s, they've actually been debunked as European forgeries, and OP just happened to not see fit to mention these minor little details?! EDIT: I see this comes up in the comments as well, and his arguments are mostly bluster: 'no one could have forged a genius book like this! Look at all the Enlightenment in there [but obviously it'd be easy for an Italian centuries later to write such a book...] There are peer-reviewed books on this topic! Peer-reviewed!'

j9461701 9y ago

>In short: many of the highest ideals of the later European Enlightenment had been conceived and summarised by one man, working in an Ethiopian cave from 1630 to 1632. All of the highest ideals of the European enlightenment had been conceived by dozens of people all throughout human history. I fail to see what makes Yacob special in this regard. For example: >He believed in the supremacy of reason So did Aristotle. So did Socrates. So did most major Greek philosophers. Also the supremacy of reason was part of the problem with the Athenian school of philosophical thought - Aristotle reasoned the octopus was a stupid animal because it was extremely curious, and he reasoned women had fewer teeth than men did, and he reasoned many things that were flatly wrong. Empericism is what changed the world, with rationalism as a supporting pillar, not pure logic itself divorced from evidence and experiment. >In this way, Yacob opens up an enlightened discourse on the subjectivity of religion, while still believing in some kind of universal Creator. Again, why does this make him special? Socrates was famously made to drink hemlock for his incessant questioning of the gods and the validity of religion. >Yacob is also more enlightened than his Enlightenment peers when it comes to slavery. In chapter five, he argues against the idea that one can ‘go and buy a man as if he were an animal’. "He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where Men should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce. And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he has obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed again the Liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another." -Thomas Jefferson, clause from first draft of the Declaration of Independence, removed due to Southern opposition (note: Jefferson owned a lot of slaves, and kept them his whole life) Englithenment thinkers did not condone slavery, they were just willing to profit off it. Which is a cowardly and immoral thing to do, but again Yacob's thinking is not unique here. >Within the discipline of history, new studies have shown that the most successful revolution to spring from the Enlightenment ideas of liberty, equality, and fraternity was in Haiti rather than in France. 'Most successful' here meaning it ended in ethnic cleansing, frequent atrocity (including a castle "built on the bones of children"), and centuries of misery and death that continues to the present day while France....is one of the most prosperous nations on Earth. At the risk of being reductionist, this article strikes me as being in a similar vein to "Ancient Egyptians were black!". That is, an attempt to elevate a modern minority group to higher prestige by attributing to them historical achievements they didn't really have any part in.

superquest 9y ago

The comments section on aeon.co is very good. Encourage you guys to read the comments.

Buttes14 9y ago

I like how mods had to change the title cuz HN readers aren't even familiar with famous Western philosophers.

dang 9y ago
It's the opposite. I changed the title to take out the celebrity names because in our experience those tend to trigger poorer discussion.

eveningcoffee 9y ago

It is interesting that similar ideas tend to pop up around the same time. Based on this, Yacob was more secular, rational and humane than European thinkers at the same time and would feel himself most likely comfortably in the modern world. I think it is always important to know if something was worked on independently in multiple places. I believe that this demonstrates that this something was bound to happen. I would not call Amo as an African philosopher though, as he was raised and educated in Europe. Perhaps an African-European philosopher if you insist to stress on his origin. I think that he was and was perceived as much European as his other contemporaries.

wallace_f 9y ago
>It is interesting that similar ideas tend to pop up around the same time. I've heard 'enlightenment ideas' pop up in music and conversation going back to my teens. I would personally bet that similar ideas (such as 'all men are created equal,' as is highlighted in the article) had been proposed countless times in the minds of people long before any enlightenment, or even Christian, thinker. The problem is the willingness of people to tolerate such ideas. The fact that even though in 2018, with the benefit of hindsight, we can see great civilization and prosperity has been made possible by these ideas, people don't always want to believe them--and in America one does not need to look for very long at our legal system, government & politics, and social behaviors to see this. Maybe we need another enlightenment, and one more inclusive of the liberties and freedoms of all people.

stareatgoats 9y ago

Someone who does any study of the history of ideas will run into the still ubiquitous and somewhat self-aggrandizing paradigm in the discipline. In coarse outline: that rational thinking is something which started with the Greeks and was carried like a torch through various high-watermarks in western history, and in essence is one of the things that distinguishes (and elevates) the west from the rest of the world. Granted, some tips of the hat have been granted the ancient philosophies of India, China and the Muslim world, but these are mainly noted as they have contributed to the forward march of western ideas. The linked article could be largely interpreted to be in the same vein: i.e. great because it coincides with a major western thought tradition. Still, interesting to learn that Ethiopia had a scholarly tradition of which we have heard very little. Also interesting that enlightenment ideas seem to have surfaced at approximately the same time, in totally separate places. I dare say we tend to believe that ideas spread via diffusion, maybe that is not so at all.

empath75 9y ago
The Greeks benefited by creating systems of thought that were propagated by academies and books, and were supported and protected by a vast, powerful empire for over a thousand years. They happened to have laid the foundation for university education in the west, where the industrial revolution took off first. It doesn’t take much to imagine a world where the industrial revolution happened in China first and we’d all be talking about how everyone considers confuscious the only important philosopher while overlooking Plato and Aristotle. Hell in a hundred years that could still happen.
UweSchmidt 9y ago
Of course our own history is more important to us than others' (which are extensively studied in the west as well), and cherry picking and narrative writing is also an ethical statement: We point to the values of ancient Greek democracy as our own democracy is in danger. We refer to the thinkers in our past as scientific thinking is questioned today. Especially when dealing with Greeks (and Romans), it is amazing how much of what is going on today was established and founded back then (e.g. German law is based on Roman law, therefore a law professor might look for clues in Roman values, not in Chinese values).

brighteyes 9y ago

Yacob was a remarkable thinker, to be sure, but there is no reason to connect him to the Enlightenment: He didn't influence it, nor was he influenced by it, as far as we can tell. The only reason the article seems to connect Yacob to the Enlightenment is because he wrote around the time of Descartes, and on similar themes. But that's not enough of a connection - without a causal interaction between him and the Enlightenment, the timing is just a coincidence. Other rational and secular philosophers have lived in various times and places (China, ancient Greece, India, etc.). Yacob deserves a place of honor among them, but none of them are part of the Enlightenment. It's odd how the article tries to connect Yacob to the Enlightenment - it doesn't make logical sense, and so seems more out of the author's desire to see that connection.

twouhm 9y ago

There is also Ibn Khaldûn[0]. [0]: https://qz.com/1008371/an-arab-thinker-invented-economic-theory-400-years-before-adam-smith-did/ https://qz.com/1008371/an-arab-thinker-invented-economic-the...

harmlessposter 9y ago

barry-cotter 9y ago

If you read the comments you’ll see that there’s no evidence of Yacob’s existence prior to the 1800s and Italian scholars came to the conclusion in the early 20th century the whole thing was a forgery. It might be real but it would be unwise to base any serious efforts on this without at the least carbon dating of an original manuscript.

wahern 9y ago
I suspect you're overstating the conclusion that it was a forgery. I cannot see enough context to determine the source, but FWIW, ... The first argument is that Giusto d'Urbino himself clearly indicated that the manuscripts are not of his own. And I do not see any reason why a European thinker of such caliber produces such a refined philosophical work and at the end ascribes it to some 'Ethiopian Philosopher' that never existed. I could not possibly think of any not to believe Giusto d'Urbino himself who tells us clearly that he bought the manuscripts. ... The second argument is linguistic in nature. Here we should note that Giusto d'Urbino, though he did manage to learn Ge'ez, was in no position to write such a manuscript. Still some accept the fact that Giusto d'Urbino could have dictated his ideas to an Ethiopian scribe who could have captured his ideas in refined Ge'ez. Yes, even the argument does not hold true. You see there is a manuscript--Les Soirees de Carthage de Francois Bourgade. Both Giusto d'Urbino and his Ethiopian Scribe write this manuscript. The first part is written by Giusto d'Urbino himself and the second part by his clerk. A thorough study of these writings by a prominent instructor of Ge'ez literature at Addis Ababa University, Alemayehu Moges, has clearly indicated that, primarily, Giusto d'Urbino's writing in Ge'ez is full of mistakes. The scribe's writing was found to be free of errors but the type of languages used by Giusto d'Urbino scribe and the language of Zara Yacob were completely different. This clearly shows that neither Giusto d'Urbino nor his scribe could have possibly been the author of the manuscript that I strongly insist to be of Zara Yacob. Excerpt of quotation from Teodros Kiros, "Zara Yacob: Rationality of the Human Heart", pp148-149 (https://books.google.com/books?id=z4-HgXftrcYC&lpg=PA148&ots=urDBIoK23z&dq=yacob%20d%E2%80%99Urbino&pg=PA148#v=onepage&q=yacob%20d%E2%80%99Urbino&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=z4-HgXftrcYC&lpg=PA148&ots...)
- 9y ago

oblib 9y ago

This is a great read. I've not studied philosophy so I won't go there, but I did really enjoy learning about these two men and their place in the history of thinkers.