5 ms·

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 wor

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".

29athrowaway 2y ago
Without those arrogant individuals the food surplus that made your existence possible would not have occurred and you would not exist. And if for some reason you made it into existence, you would be working in a farm without motorized equipment spending all your time trying to generate the calories you would then be eating right away because refrigeration would not exist either. And everyone else would be spending all their time in the exact same way so all the innovations that make you happy would not exist. Also, paper was as important as the translations, and you tend to trivialize the fact that if you have nothing to write on you cannot really have a school, library or university. And if you did there would be no material to study from. You would have to write on animal skin (parchment) and that doesn't scale at all. Paper is a really big deal but you seem to take it for granted.
- doodlebugging 2y ago
  > you tend to trivialize the fact that if you have nothing to write on you cannot really have a school, library or university. And if you did there would be no material to study from. This ignores the fact that for most of human history, everything that we collectively knew about our world and our place in it and how things worked so that we could make plans that guaranteed our survival across the changing seasons was passed on from one generation to the next orally. No one needed paper. Indeed, paper was supposedly first developed in China, a long time before any Christian or Islamic scholars were born or chose to write things down. In fact, if you believe wikipedia then by the time any of these scholars began transcribing ancient knowledge on paper it was in use as toilet paper in China because it was so common. [0] Even considering this, their development of and wide adoption of paper didn't help them preserve everything they knew so that later generations could benefit. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_paper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_paper Our distant ancestors had an encyclopedic understanding of their natural world because they lived in it all day, every day of their lives. Their capacity for learning and retaining the stories across generations guaranteed our own existence today as a kaleidoscope of cultures scattered across earth's various ecosystems. We all have something to offer each other and getting hung up on who was first to do something is really unproductive and more than anything, tends to divide us along cultural boundaries. We should celebrate the fact that we have collectively made it this far and continue to work to see that every one of us, no matter where they are, has an opportunity to enjoy the technological changes that have occurred and to benefit from the advancements in knowledge on all subjects. We have no way of knowing how many times some useful tool or bit of knowledge was developed only to be lost for generations because the small group that found that knowledge was later wiped out in some calamity that they had no skills to manage. The paper historical record, though brief relative to our own long history, is incomplete. I would suggest that if our recent ancestors had dedicated as much time to listening to their elders relate the oral histories of their groups then many of the paper gaps would be irrelevant since our oral histories would fill those gaps. And, in closing, if we had maintained a strong appreciation for storytelling across generations and a respect for other cultures different from our own we would not need archaeologists and anthropologists to speculate about anything. There would be no more need for every item, image, or structure discovered to be assigned a role in some past worship ritual. Seriously guys, that shit gets old. Treating our ancestors like they were all dumb-ass cretins lucky to survive from one day to the next is doing them a great disservice when the real answer is that they were the masters of their environments, uniquely qualified among living things to spread and conquer all other species in their paths. They were more daring explorers than anyone in our living history and the tales of their exploits, told to all they encountered, allowed others to follow in their paths spreading farther and faster than any present-day archaeologist would like to give them credit. Looks like I got off topic. LOL Anyway, paper is not such a big deal. If our earliest ancestors were as dull-witted as some archaeologists would suggest then those storytellers would inevitably have been met with cries of "Please stop! My brain is full!" from their dullard audiences and we would all never have existed anyway as all our ancestors ended up as lion or cheetah turds.

29athrowaway 2y ago

Without those arrogant individuals the food surplus that made your existence possible would not have occurred and you would not exist. And if for some reason you made it into existence, you would be working in a farm without motorized equipment spending all your time trying to generate the calories you would then be eating right away because refrigeration would not exist either. And everyone else would be spending all their time in the exact same way so all the innovations that make you happy would not exist. Also, paper was as important as the translations, and you tend to trivialize the fact that if you have nothing to write on you cannot really have a school, library or university. And if you did there would be no material to study from. You would have to write on animal skin (parchment) and that doesn't scale at all. Paper is a really big deal but you seem to take it for granted.

doodlebugging 2y ago
> you tend to trivialize the fact that if you have nothing to write on you cannot really have a school, library or university. And if you did there would be no material to study from. This ignores the fact that for most of human history, everything that we collectively knew about our world and our place in it and how things worked so that we could make plans that guaranteed our survival across the changing seasons was passed on from one generation to the next orally. No one needed paper. Indeed, paper was supposedly first developed in China, a long time before any Christian or Islamic scholars were born or chose to write things down. In fact, if you believe wikipedia then by the time any of these scholars began transcribing ancient knowledge on paper it was in use as toilet paper in China because it was so common. [0] Even considering this, their development of and wide adoption of paper didn't help them preserve everything they knew so that later generations could benefit. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_paper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_paper Our distant ancestors had an encyclopedic understanding of their natural world because they lived in it all day, every day of their lives. Their capacity for learning and retaining the stories across generations guaranteed our own existence today as a kaleidoscope of cultures scattered across earth's various ecosystems. We all have something to offer each other and getting hung up on who was first to do something is really unproductive and more than anything, tends to divide us along cultural boundaries. We should celebrate the fact that we have collectively made it this far and continue to work to see that every one of us, no matter where they are, has an opportunity to enjoy the technological changes that have occurred and to benefit from the advancements in knowledge on all subjects. We have no way of knowing how many times some useful tool or bit of knowledge was developed only to be lost for generations because the small group that found that knowledge was later wiped out in some calamity that they had no skills to manage. The paper historical record, though brief relative to our own long history, is incomplete. I would suggest that if our recent ancestors had dedicated as much time to listening to their elders relate the oral histories of their groups then many of the paper gaps would be irrelevant since our oral histories would fill those gaps. And, in closing, if we had maintained a strong appreciation for storytelling across generations and a respect for other cultures different from our own we would not need archaeologists and anthropologists to speculate about anything. There would be no more need for every item, image, or structure discovered to be assigned a role in some past worship ritual. Seriously guys, that shit gets old. Treating our ancestors like they were all dumb-ass cretins lucky to survive from one day to the next is doing them a great disservice when the real answer is that they were the masters of their environments, uniquely qualified among living things to spread and conquer all other species in their paths. They were more daring explorers than anyone in our living history and the tales of their exploits, told to all they encountered, allowed others to follow in their paths spreading farther and faster than any present-day archaeologist would like to give them credit. Looks like I got off topic. LOL Anyway, paper is not such a big deal. If our earliest ancestors were as dull-witted as some archaeologists would suggest then those storytellers would inevitably have been met with cries of "Please stop! My brain is full!" from their dullard audiences and we would all never have existed anyway as all our ancestors ended up as lion or cheetah turds.