11 ms·

Remembering a Medieval Polymath Who Paved the Way for the Renaissance

70 points by dnetesn 2y ago

avodonosov 2y ago
Cool haircut on the first picture. Not only a polymath, but a stylish man also.
- drewcoo 2y ago
  If you mean his tonsure, the style was known as "a monk."
- greggsy 2y ago
  If you got past the picture, you would have read that he was a friar.
  - avodonosov 2y ago
    Well, that obvious from the picture as well :)
mdp2021 2y ago
I.e. "Albert the Great: Remembering a Medieval Polymath Who Paved the Way for the Renaissance and Holistic Thinking" The title edit made it "clickbaity".
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- greggsy 2y ago
  I don’t this it is
- baud147258 2y ago
  the edit was made because of the size limit on titles on HN
  - mdp2021 2y ago
    Of course. And when they come out strongly imperfect - in this case, that edit causes a critical removal of information - it may be helpful to place the full or fullest title in the posts - so people who visit the submission instead of the submitted find at a glance what it is.
bravura 2y ago
This is fascinating. I realized that a model I have for evaluating relationships is basically another take on Albertus Magnus's model of friendship. I'll start with Magnus: Albertus, following Aristotle, distinguished between different types of friendship. He identified three main types: Friendship of Utility: Based on mutual benefit, where individuals associate because they gain something from the relationship. Friendship of Pleasure: Based on shared enjoyment or pleasure, where friends take delight in each other's company. Friendship of Virtue: The highest form of friendship, where the bond is based on mutual respect and a shared commitment to moral goodness and virtue. This type of friendship is selfless and enduring. Now, I'll run through my model, which I have applied to dating. I call the three dimensions: friendship, sex, and romance. You can have varying compatibility on all three dimensions, but in a sense it basically works out to Magnus's version above. Friendship means shared interests. You like doing to same stuff and spending time together. Sex is the pleasure compatibility vector in Magnus's formulation. i.e. how much fun do you have when you're together. Don't think of it just as sex, but also just like "wow this is fun and pleasurable" Romance, people find this word tricky. I also don't think Magnus's idea of "virtue" hits it correctly either. It's basically a sense of tenderness and the deep-rooted feeling that you and the other person should have shared outcomes.
- 0xEF 2y ago
  I tend to eschew these categories and find that trying to collect human relationships into different buckets often confines them in ways their extremely fuzzy and dynamic edges don't want to conform to. As we get older and have more experiences, we grow and continue to evolve each of our relationships. I also find that you lose the "organicness" and some nuances that are present when one lets a relationship flow naturally, lets it be what it wants to be, instead of trying to define it. Heck, even our daily mood can have an impact on our perception of a relationship. In essence, there's often too much shift to make categorizing them useful, to me.
  - spacebacon 2y ago
    Correct, enter semiotics.
- 2y ago
gfdsgd 2y ago
[flagged]
29athrowaway 2y ago
They omitted the most important part. Albertus Magnus knew Arabic and his sources were the books left behind after the Spanish reconquista, that were mostly in Arabic and some translated to Latin. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_translations_of_the_12th_century https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_translations_of_the_12... The Arabic books were themselves translations in many cases (from Greek) but the West had no paper to print them until it was reintroduced by... again, the Islamic civilization. Albertus Magnus and his successors like Thomas Aquinas influenced the church enough so that the inquisition doesn't kill the practitioners of science, which has merit but their ideas were not 100% original, they built on top of others. Scholasticism is influenced by Averroism. The church still harassed scientists in the years to come, notably Galileo Galilei. Read this if you want a more unbiased view of the world, Leibniz at least was a fan of it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayy_ibn_Yaqdhan https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayy_ibn_Yaqdhan
- pavel_lishin 2y ago
  > Read this if you want a more unbiased view of the world, Leibniz at least was a fan of it. Reading the Wikipedia article, it seems like it would be more biased if anything, albeit by a different cultural context: > Hayy ibn Yaqdhan is an allegorical novel in which Ibn Tufail expresses philosophical and mystical teachings in a symbolic language in order to provide better understanding of such concepts. This
- digging 2y ago
  > The church still harassed scientists in the years to come, notably Galileo Galilei. This is kind of a popular oversimplification of what was likely to be a very personal and political matter at least as much as it was a matter of heresy, and it absolutely was not the case that the church held a simple antagonism toward science. Galileo worked for and published with the explicit permission of Pope Urban VIII initially.
- lo_zamoyski 2y ago
  It is true that Aristotelian texts made their way back to Europe by way of the Islamic world. Indeed, Averroes's and Avicenna's commentaries figure into the works of Thomas Aquinas. For example, he uses Avicenna's argument for the distinction between essence and existence to perfect the understanding of God as Ipsum Esse Subsistens, or self-subsisting being whose very essence is "to be". However, I wouldn't overstate the influence of Islamic civilization. Whereas the rationality of God and the created order, and thus its intelligibility, is central to Christianity (see John 1:1, where God in the second person of the Trinity is identified as the Logos), Islam is rooted in a voluntarist notion of God. The latter is quite hostile to any bold and sustained venture to grasp reality. Indeed, you don't see a sustained scientific enterprise anywhere in history save in the Christian West, and as Stanley Jaki among others argue, this is not an accident. Yes, you have sparks and flashes here and there across all sorts of civilizations, and yes, human beings by nature have a desire to know things, but as a sustained and confident enterprise, you need powerful convictions, like 1) the world is thoroughly and foundationally intelligible by virtue of its rational first cause, b) human beings are capable of grasping this intelligible world as rational agents, c) it is valuable to pursue such knowledge, d) we are "permitted" and morally justified in such pursuits, and e) progress in knowledge has a purpose. Most other civilizations lacked some ingredient that led to either lack of desire or some kind of timidity about the whole thing: capricious gods, a chaotic and absurd universe, the world as an endless cycle going nowhere, pantheistic notions that make examining the world seem categorically offensive and sacrilegious, hedonistic cultures hostile to reason, etc. Even the Greek enterprise basically fizzled after Aristotle. In the case of Islam, I am reminded of a description that is relevant: Allah is an exalted caliph who, coming upon a fork, does not know whether he will go left or right. Yes, we do find great Islamic scholars, but the development of Islam has not produced conditions favorable to such sustained pursuits. Where Scholasticism is concerned, it is not a singular view, of course, but a kind of enterprise with common features and shared foundational principles and one that also laid the intellectual groundwork for science, and sure, Averroes was studied, but that's also part of the point: the Christian tradition, best exemplified by the Catholic tradition, is omnivorous, interested in truth wherever it is found. The notion of logos spermatikos, or "seminal reason", is appropriate here. Truth is truth, wherever it comes from. To quote Philippians 4:8: "[W]hatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things." I will also add that it is untrue that "the Church" was in the business of "harassing scientists" or that the Inquisition was in the business of "killing the practitioners of science". Even the use of "scientist" or "science" in this was is anachronistic. You gave the stale example of Galileo as an example. This had nothing to do with science. Galileo was a man known for picking pointless fights, an irascible temperament, and a tendency to insult, and what we call the "Galileo affair" was not some oft-romanticized singular event caused by a clash between the Noble Galileo and the Mean Old Church, between the forces of Science and Enlightenment on the one hand and the forces of Darkness and Superstition on the other, but something that played out over decades of intermittent crankiness. It was, truth be told, incredibly boring, and one needs to go to great lengths of dishonesty to sex it up for IFLScience groupies. A better template for understanding what actually happened is the stereotype of bickering Italians with big egos than some cosmic battle between good and evil. In the case of men like the lecherous, arrogant, crank Giordano Bruno, he was not executed for "science", and he was hostile to the kinds of reasoned processes that science would employ, so it is absurd to canonize people like as some kind of "martyrs for science".
PoshStyles 2y ago
[dead]
PoshStyles 2y ago
[dead]

70 points by dnetesn 2y ago

avodonosov 2y ago

Cool haircut on the first picture. Not only a polymath, but a stylish man also.

drewcoo 2y ago
If you mean his tonsure, the style was known as "a monk."
greggsy 2y ago
If you got past the picture, you would have read that he was a friar.
- avodonosov 2y ago
  Well, that obvious from the picture as well :)

mdp2021 2y ago

I.e. "Albert the Great: Remembering a Medieval Polymath Who Paved the Way for the Renaissance and Holistic Thinking" The title edit made it "clickbaity".

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
greggsy 2y ago
I don’t this it is
baud147258 2y ago
the edit was made because of the size limit on titles on HN
- mdp2021 2y ago
  Of course. And when they come out strongly imperfect - in this case, that edit causes a critical removal of information - it may be helpful to place the full or fullest title in the posts - so people who visit the submission instead of the submitted find at a glance what it is.

bravura 2y ago

This is fascinating. I realized that a model I have for evaluating relationships is basically another take on Albertus Magnus's model of friendship. I'll start with Magnus: Albertus, following Aristotle, distinguished between different types of friendship. He identified three main types: Friendship of Utility: Based on mutual benefit, where individuals associate because they gain something from the relationship. Friendship of Pleasure: Based on shared enjoyment or pleasure, where friends take delight in each other's company. Friendship of Virtue: The highest form of friendship, where the bond is based on mutual respect and a shared commitment to moral goodness and virtue. This type of friendship is selfless and enduring. Now, I'll run through my model, which I have applied to dating. I call the three dimensions: friendship, sex, and romance. You can have varying compatibility on all three dimensions, but in a sense it basically works out to Magnus's version above. Friendship means shared interests. You like doing to same stuff and spending time together. Sex is the pleasure compatibility vector in Magnus's formulation. i.e. how much fun do you have when you're together. Don't think of it just as sex, but also just like "wow this is fun and pleasurable" Romance, people find this word tricky. I also don't think Magnus's idea of "virtue" hits it correctly either. It's basically a sense of tenderness and the deep-rooted feeling that you and the other person should have shared outcomes.

0xEF 2y ago
I tend to eschew these categories and find that trying to collect human relationships into different buckets often confines them in ways their extremely fuzzy and dynamic edges don't want to conform to. As we get older and have more experiences, we grow and continue to evolve each of our relationships. I also find that you lose the "organicness" and some nuances that are present when one lets a relationship flow naturally, lets it be what it wants to be, instead of trying to define it. Heck, even our daily mood can have an impact on our perception of a relationship. In essence, there's often too much shift to make categorizing them useful, to me.
- spacebacon 2y ago
  Correct, enter semiotics.
2y ago

gfdsgd 2y ago

[flagged]

29athrowaway 2y ago

They omitted the most important part. Albertus Magnus knew Arabic and his sources were the books left behind after the Spanish reconquista, that were mostly in Arabic and some translated to Latin. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_translations_of_the_12th_century https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_translations_of_the_12... The Arabic books were themselves translations in many cases (from Greek) but the West had no paper to print them until it was reintroduced by... again, the Islamic civilization. Albertus Magnus and his successors like Thomas Aquinas influenced the church enough so that the inquisition doesn't kill the practitioners of science, which has merit but their ideas were not 100% original, they built on top of others. Scholasticism is influenced by Averroism. The church still harassed scientists in the years to come, notably Galileo Galilei. Read this if you want a more unbiased view of the world, Leibniz at least was a fan of it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayy_ibn_Yaqdhan https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayy_ibn_Yaqdhan

pavel_lishin 2y ago
> Read this if you want a more unbiased view of the world, Leibniz at least was a fan of it. Reading the Wikipedia article, it seems like it would be more biased if anything, albeit by a different cultural context: > Hayy ibn Yaqdhan is an allegorical novel in which Ibn Tufail expresses philosophical and mystical teachings in a symbolic language in order to provide better understanding of such concepts. This
digging 2y ago
> The church still harassed scientists in the years to come, notably Galileo Galilei. This is kind of a popular oversimplification of what was likely to be a very personal and political matter at least as much as it was a matter of heresy, and it absolutely was not the case that the church held a simple antagonism toward science. Galileo worked for and published with the explicit permission of Pope Urban VIII initially.
lo_zamoyski 2y ago
It is true that Aristotelian texts made their way back to Europe by way of the Islamic world. Indeed, Averroes's and Avicenna's commentaries figure into the works of Thomas Aquinas. For example, he uses Avicenna's argument for the distinction between essence and existence to perfect the understanding of God as Ipsum Esse Subsistens, or self-subsisting being whose very essence is "to be". However, I wouldn't overstate the influence of Islamic civilization. Whereas the rationality of God and the created order, and thus its intelligibility, is central to Christianity (see John 1:1, where God in the second person of the Trinity is identified as the Logos), Islam is rooted in a voluntarist notion of God. The latter is quite hostile to any bold and sustained venture to grasp reality. Indeed, you don't see a sustained scientific enterprise anywhere in history save in the Christian West, and as Stanley Jaki among others argue, this is not an accident. Yes, you have sparks and flashes here and there across all sorts of civilizations, and yes, human beings by nature have a desire to know things, but as a sustained and confident enterprise, you need powerful convictions, like 1) the world is thoroughly and foundationally intelligible by virtue of its rational first cause, b) human beings are capable of grasping this intelligible world as rational agents, c) it is valuable to pursue such knowledge, d) we are "permitted" and morally justified in such pursuits, and e) progress in knowledge has a purpose. Most other civilizations lacked some ingredient that led to either lack of desire or some kind of timidity about the whole thing: capricious gods, a chaotic and absurd universe, the world as an endless cycle going nowhere, pantheistic notions that make examining the world seem categorically offensive and sacrilegious, hedonistic cultures hostile to reason, etc. Even the Greek enterprise basically fizzled after Aristotle. In the case of Islam, I am reminded of a description that is relevant: Allah is an exalted caliph who, coming upon a fork, does not know whether he will go left or right. Yes, we do find great Islamic scholars, but the development of Islam has not produced conditions favorable to such sustained pursuits. Where Scholasticism is concerned, it is not a singular view, of course, but a kind of enterprise with common features and shared foundational principles and one that also laid the intellectual groundwork for science, and sure, Averroes was studied, but that's also part of the point: the Christian tradition, best exemplified by the Catholic tradition, is omnivorous, interested in truth wherever it is found. The notion of logos spermatikos, or "seminal reason", is appropriate here. Truth is truth, wherever it comes from. To quote Philippians 4:8: "[W]hatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things." I will also add that it is untrue that "the Church" was in the business of "harassing scientists" or that the Inquisition was in the business of "killing the practitioners of science". Even the use of "scientist" or "science" in this was is anachronistic. You gave the stale example of Galileo as an example. This had nothing to do with science. Galileo was a man known for picking pointless fights, an irascible temperament, and a tendency to insult, and what we call the "Galileo affair" was not some oft-romanticized singular event caused by a clash between the Noble Galileo and the Mean Old Church, between the forces of Science and Enlightenment on the one hand and the forces of Darkness and Superstition on the other, but something that played out over decades of intermittent crankiness. It was, truth be told, incredibly boring, and one needs to go to great lengths of dishonesty to sex it up for IFLScience groupies. A better template for understanding what actually happened is the stereotype of bickering Italians with big egos than some cosmic battle between good and evil. In the case of men like the lecherous, arrogant, crank Giordano Bruno, he was not executed for "science", and he was hostile to the kinds of reasoned processes that science would employ, so it is absurd to canonize people like as some kind of "martyrs for science".

PoshStyles 2y ago

[dead]

PoshStyles 2y ago

[dead]