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There are so many examples it's maybe hard to know where to begin -- after all it happened for at least 1-5 centuries in modern/pre-modern history, and before t

There are so many examples it's maybe hard to know where to begin -- after all it happened for at least 1-5 centuries in modern/pre-modern history, and before then the Greeks and then the Romans, e.g. did it themselves. There are whole sub-fields of history of science about this process. Ask yourself why names like Al Kindi and Kandiaronk are unfamiliar or unlikely to be familiar to you -- or Western statecraft begins at Plato or Weber rather than its grounding in Chinese statecraft brought over mostly by Leibniz. Which Arab scientists inspired Kepler and his predecessors and why are you unlikely to have learned that history -- even though it's been known for over a century. If you're genuinely interested here are maybe some places to start: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0948GPBBH/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0948GPBBH/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?... (Dawn of Everything by Graeber) https://historyofphilosophy.net/series/islamic-world https://historyofphilosophy.net/series/islamic-world https://www.amazon.com/dp/B06XXY491X/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B06XXY491X/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?... (Orientalism by Said) edit: here's a popular article detailing an example of how concerted and conscious this process is and then 'lost to history' due to the layers of our educational environment: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/29/the-myth-of-whiteness-in-classical-sculpture https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/29/the-myth-of-wh...

pythagowannabe 4y ago
I know invoking astrology is a good way to discredit oneself, but that particular historic perspective attributes the origin of proto-scientific knowledge to the lost races from before the last cataclysm. This is generalizing a lot on my part, but trying to reveal the identity of Hermes Trismagestis will take you on a tour of the ancient world that crosses continents in ways you would never imagine. This is all to say that the Babylonians and Egyptians were extremely revered and cited this entire time for their scientific knowledge TO THIS DAY (take a look at our nation's symbolism).
- schuyler2d 4y ago
  How we view astrology is a good example of how our racial/ethnic imaginations and imagined 'heritage' distort the record. For people like Newton and Copernicus their obsessions with alchemy and astrology are sidelined/excused/footnotes that are charming as we offset it against their scientific contributions, while Arabic, Egyptian, Babylonian and other sources are dismissed because they "were only doing it for astrology" and couldn't have known/understood the 'real' science/scientific value of their work.
antognini 4y ago
I'm not entirely convinced by this. There is a common pattern in the biographies of the early Greek astronomers in which the biographer says that they traveled to Egypt or the East to learn their astronomy and mathematics. It's enough of a trope that scholars think that at least in some cases tales of traveling to the East were embellished to add credence to the astronomer's ideas. But in most cases it does seem that in many cases Greek astronomers really did travel to either Egypt or Babylonia to learn astronomy and mathematics and were quite open about it. There's a story about how Eudoxus, who was very poor for a Greek philosopher, had to raise funds from his friends to afford to travel to Egypt and study with the priests there. After seeing the observatory that the Egyptians used he decided to build one of his own in Cnidos. Ptolemy was also explicit about the fact that he used Babylonian records to validate his planetary model (though he complains about their quality in places). None of this is to say that by the early modern era Western scholars had neglected eastern influences. But the Greeks themselves were very willing to acknowledge their eastern influences.
- schuyler2d 4y ago
  I think it filters through multiple layers. So Greeks had a bias both engaging/naming locals rather than people from outside -- so much that we know a ton about Greek 'lost works' but notice that their sources when they learned from their travels weren't named in the same way. The Greeks, whether willful or lazy, didn't seem to reliably understand with much precision the cultures they discussed. A favorite example of mine is how we hear of the "Hanging Gardens of Bablyon" (edit: instead of Nineveh) seems mostly to be from the Greeks not caring much the difference between one city and another in the Middle East.[1] (where it also seems "Archimedes' Screw" should also be attributed to someone else). These sources mention they're not original, but both contemporary all the way to modern secondary sources then reference the Greek or other 'Western' person that introduced this concept. Even when conscious of the more complicated origin, it's justified by having a common reference or more easily pronounceable/culturally relevant name. As a ~sibling comment~ (edit: your comment) then mentions, later secondary critics become skeptical that the author really had a past attribution or were they trying to give better authority to their own ideas (or in Kondiaronk's case, to add deniability for possibly heretical or treasonous ideas). And then modern glosses use the excuse of summarizing the Western intellectual history -- so what if Al Kindi came up with the first correct understanding of how optics works -- what matters is what Europeans read in Aristotle and later in Newton, etc. Credit and real history are available, but they are discussed incredibly rarely -- when the idea of a scientist in the Middle Ages is evoked, it's not someone that has learned Arabic or depends on Arabic translations to learn, but in popular media, only the original (or locally original) things are favored (lens-making, etc). Those are often genuinely great things, or genuinely changed something in Europe. In science discourse, itself, we often favor the first named person we know that introduced a concept, but which names have been preferred goes back to that erased history that includes all of those biases. You might swim in texts that credit the original civilizations that we know discovered these texts, but in secondary education and popular accounts they're completely erased. [1]: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00CG3JMD0/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00CG3JMD0/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b... (small edits)
LiquidSky 4y ago
>or Western statecraft begins at Plato or Weber rather than its grounding in Chinese statecraft brought over mostly by Leibniz You're all over the place here, and simply factually wrong. Plato/Aristotle's writings on politics and statecraft predate Liebniz's interest in Chinese philosophy and politics by around 2,000 years. It is simply inarguable that the Western political tradition is grounded in them. If you mean to say that modern Western political theory and practice is more influenced by Chinese thought via Liebniz than is generally acknowledged, that is a much more defensible statement.
- schuyler2d 4y ago
  The latter is what I was saying and plenty of Chinese statecraft was contemporary or earlier than Plato/Artistotle, so if there's a reason to fetishize earlier sources, then there's still no need. I'm "all over the place" because modern accounts of political theory are "all over the place" -- sometimes start with Plato and some start with Weber, but very few, if any, start with Chinese sources -- why is that? Why isn't that the most common thing we should encounter when reading about political theory?
  - LiquidSky 4y ago
    >plenty of Chinese statecraft was contemporary or earlier than Plato/Artistotle Of course, but the West didn't have access to them until the early modern period. We're not discussing which came first, we're discussing influence. >Why isn't that the most common thing we should encounter when reading about political theory? This is what I meant by you being all over the place. The answer to this question really depends on the topic. If it's a general overview of political thought across time, it's true that Western works on the topic shamefully tend to ignore non-Western sources. If it's an overview of Western political thought, it makes sense to start with the sources of Western political thought and later discuss how the eventual encounters with Chinese thought changed things.

pythagowannabe 4y ago

I know invoking astrology is a good way to discredit oneself, but that particular historic perspective attributes the origin of proto-scientific knowledge to the lost races from before the last cataclysm. This is generalizing a lot on my part, but trying to reveal the identity of Hermes Trismagestis will take you on a tour of the ancient world that crosses continents in ways you would never imagine. This is all to say that the Babylonians and Egyptians were extremely revered and cited this entire time for their scientific knowledge TO THIS DAY (take a look at our nation's symbolism).

schuyler2d 4y ago
How we view astrology is a good example of how our racial/ethnic imaginations and imagined 'heritage' distort the record. For people like Newton and Copernicus their obsessions with alchemy and astrology are sidelined/excused/footnotes that are charming as we offset it against their scientific contributions, while Arabic, Egyptian, Babylonian and other sources are dismissed because they "were only doing it for astrology" and couldn't have known/understood the 'real' science/scientific value of their work.

antognini 4y ago

I'm not entirely convinced by this. There is a common pattern in the biographies of the early Greek astronomers in which the biographer says that they traveled to Egypt or the East to learn their astronomy and mathematics. It's enough of a trope that scholars think that at least in some cases tales of traveling to the East were embellished to add credence to the astronomer's ideas. But in most cases it does seem that in many cases Greek astronomers really did travel to either Egypt or Babylonia to learn astronomy and mathematics and were quite open about it. There's a story about how Eudoxus, who was very poor for a Greek philosopher, had to raise funds from his friends to afford to travel to Egypt and study with the priests there. After seeing the observatory that the Egyptians used he decided to build one of his own in Cnidos. Ptolemy was also explicit about the fact that he used Babylonian records to validate his planetary model (though he complains about their quality in places). None of this is to say that by the early modern era Western scholars had neglected eastern influences. But the Greeks themselves were very willing to acknowledge their eastern influences.

schuyler2d 4y ago
I think it filters through multiple layers. So Greeks had a bias both engaging/naming locals rather than people from outside -- so much that we know a ton about Greek 'lost works' but notice that their sources when they learned from their travels weren't named in the same way. The Greeks, whether willful or lazy, didn't seem to reliably understand with much precision the cultures they discussed. A favorite example of mine is how we hear of the "Hanging Gardens of Bablyon" (edit: instead of Nineveh) seems mostly to be from the Greeks not caring much the difference between one city and another in the Middle East.[1] (where it also seems "Archimedes' Screw" should also be attributed to someone else). These sources mention they're not original, but both contemporary all the way to modern secondary sources then reference the Greek or other 'Western' person that introduced this concept. Even when conscious of the more complicated origin, it's justified by having a common reference or more easily pronounceable/culturally relevant name. As a ~sibling comment~ (edit: your comment) then mentions, later secondary critics become skeptical that the author really had a past attribution or were they trying to give better authority to their own ideas (or in Kondiaronk's case, to add deniability for possibly heretical or treasonous ideas). And then modern glosses use the excuse of summarizing the Western intellectual history -- so what if Al Kindi came up with the first correct understanding of how optics works -- what matters is what Europeans read in Aristotle and later in Newton, etc. Credit and real history are available, but they are discussed incredibly rarely -- when the idea of a scientist in the Middle Ages is evoked, it's not someone that has learned Arabic or depends on Arabic translations to learn, but in popular media, only the original (or locally original) things are favored (lens-making, etc). Those are often genuinely great things, or genuinely changed something in Europe. In science discourse, itself, we often favor the first named person we know that introduced a concept, but which names have been preferred goes back to that erased history that includes all of those biases. You might swim in texts that credit the original civilizations that we know discovered these texts, but in secondary education and popular accounts they're completely erased. [1]: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00CG3JMD0/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00CG3JMD0/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b... (small edits)

LiquidSky 4y ago

>or Western statecraft begins at Plato or Weber rather than its grounding in Chinese statecraft brought over mostly by Leibniz You're all over the place here, and simply factually wrong. Plato/Aristotle's writings on politics and statecraft predate Liebniz's interest in Chinese philosophy and politics by around 2,000 years. It is simply inarguable that the Western political tradition is grounded in them. If you mean to say that modern Western political theory and practice is more influenced by Chinese thought via Liebniz than is generally acknowledged, that is a much more defensible statement.

schuyler2d 4y ago
The latter is what I was saying and plenty of Chinese statecraft was contemporary or earlier than Plato/Artistotle, so if there's a reason to fetishize earlier sources, then there's still no need. I'm "all over the place" because modern accounts of political theory are "all over the place" -- sometimes start with Plato and some start with Weber, but very few, if any, start with Chinese sources -- why is that? Why isn't that the most common thing we should encounter when reading about political theory?
- LiquidSky 4y ago
  >plenty of Chinese statecraft was contemporary or earlier than Plato/Artistotle Of course, but the West didn't have access to them until the early modern period. We're not discussing which came first, we're discussing influence. >Why isn't that the most common thing we should encounter when reading about political theory? This is what I meant by you being all over the place. The answer to this question really depends on the topic. If it's a general overview of political thought across time, it's true that Western works on the topic shamefully tend to ignore non-Western sources. If it's an overview of Western political thought, it makes sense to start with the sources of Western political thought and later discuss how the eventual encounters with Chinese thought changed things.