10,618 research outputs found

    Aristotle's Journey to Europe: A Synthetic History of the Role Played by the Islamic Empire in the Transmission of Western Educational Philosophy Sources from the Fall of Rome through the Medieval Period

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    After the fall of Rome, how did the work and words of the ancient Greek philosophers make their way, textually and intellectually, into later European thought? There were two primary and obvious paths that this Greek literature could have taken to reach medieval Europe after the split of the Roman Empire into east and west sectors, but these two potential paths functionally became, instead, dual roadblocks to its transmission. In the western portion of the former Roman Empire, there was an overwhelming passive indifference to Greek philosophy coupled with a decline of culture generally in Western Europe during the so-called Dark Ages. In the eastern portion of the former Roman Empire, the attitude toward Greek philosophy was tempered by the imperial authority of Constantinople and eastern Christianity, and ranged from cautious acceptance to occasionally active censorship. In response to the research question, here is my thesis: The Islamic Empire of the Middle Ages was the primary and indispensable force behind the preservation, transmission and acceptance of the Greek philosophical tradition to later European thinking. I will contend that without the influence of Muslim scholars during the medieval period, the foundational impact of Greek philosophy on later Western philosophy (including specifically, Western sources of educational philosophy) may have been greatly reduced (or potentially lost), used differently, and/or forced to find other sources of transmittal. My research will pursue the historical connections between classical Greece and pre-Renaissance Europe on three interrelated levels--textual, philosophical, and cultural. First, I will examine the textual transmission of specific works by Plato and Aristotle, looking at the translation and transmission work done over time and through several language and cultural groups. Second, I will seek to find how the ideas of Plato and Aristotle were used and transmitted, moving from text to philosophical patterns of thinking. Third, I will look more broadly at the acceptance of philosophical inquiry and the development of critical thinking within culture itself, in Greek, Arabic, and Latin settings, to see how the often competing ideas of faith and reason play out over the course of our historical framework

    Medicine, Logic, or Metaphysics? : Aristotelianism and Scholasticism in the Fight Book Corpus

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    We tend to study fight books in isolation, which explains why it is so difficult to understand the precise place they occupy in the sociocultural and historical fabric of their time. By doing so, we may miss the many clues they contain about their owner, local society, and intended purpose.  In order to unlock this information, we need to study them in their broader sociocultural and historical context. This requires background and research skills that are not always easily accessible to everyone. To illustrate the point, in this article we show in some detail what is required to make sense of the claim that Aristotelian philosophy and science influenced the medieval fight books in relevant ways, and that understanding this influence helps us to better understand the fight books per se. we give an outline of the general historical framework, and apply it to a test case: Talhoffer’s Thott 290 2° Ms., with some interesting results. Our hope is that this framework may be of some use to other researchers in HEMA Studies who want to dig deeper into sources of interest to them

    Science in the middle ages

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    ISLAMIC CIVILIZATION IN SPAIN – A MAGNIFICIENT EXAMPLE OF INTERACTION AND UNITY OF RELIGION AND SCIENCE

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    Islam and its followers had created a civilization that played very important role on the world stage for more than a thousand years. One of the most important specific qualities of the Islamic civilization is that it is a well-balanced civilization that brought together science and faith, struck a balance between spirit and matter and did not separate this world from the Hereafter. This is what distinguishes the Islamic civilization from other civilizations which attach primary importance to the material aspect of life, physical needs and human instincts, and attach greater attention to this world by striving to instantly satisfy desires of the flesh, without finding a proper place for God and the Hereafter in their philosophies and education systems. The Islamic civilization drew humankind closer to God, connected the earth and heavens, subordinated this world to the Hereafter, connected spirit and matter, struck a balance between mind and heart, and created a link between science and faith by elevating the importance of moral development to the level of importance of material progress. It is owing to this that the Islamic civilization gave an immense contribution to the development of global civilization. Another specific characteristic of the Islamic civilization is that it spread the spirit of justice, impartiality and tolerance among people. The result was that people of different beliefs and views lived together in safety, peace and mutual respect, and that mosques stood next to churches, monasteries and synagogues in the lands that were governed by Muslims. This stems primarily from the commandments of the noble Islam according to which nobody must be forced to convert from their religion and beliefs since freedom of religion is guaranteed within the Islamic order. The Islamic civilization in Spain encompasses many fields that left a profound imprint in the Iberian Peninsula and Europe. The cultural climate of Spain in the era of Muslim rule (711-1492) brought about a prospering of different aspects of science and culture. Numerous schools and libraries were established and books were procured due to which the majority of the people were literate. Literature and art flourished. Buildings were constructed and Islamic art with its specific qualities was cultivated. As a result of that movement, Cordoba became the civilization capital of both Spain and the West in general. Many schools were established in it, such as medical and technical schools in addition to the general education and other vocational schools. Hospitals, chemical plants and observatories were also built. The university in Cordoba was a beacon of thought, education and culture, and it made Cordoba the home of science and of a great number of scholars and scientists in medicine, pharmacy, chemistry, astronomy, mathematics and botany. Scholarly disciplines such as philosophy and logic were also studied and busy translation activities were underway. For that reason travelers and people in quest for knowledge and science from different European countries used to come to Cordoba. This scientific and civilizational movement was not limited to Cordoba alone, but also spread into other cities of Spain, such as Granada, Toledo and other cities under Islamic rule. Relevant historical sources state that young men from Europe, particularly from Italy and France, competed to enroll some of the Islamic universities in Andalusia. One of the students of the university in Cordoba was Gerbert, who later became known as Pope Sylvester II. He introduced science of mathematics and Arabic numerals in Italy. The same historical sources also read that Europe was acquainted with Aristotle’s manuscripts via the city of Toledo which was a center of bustling translation work from the Arabic into the Latin language. It was in Toledo that many works of Plato and Galen were translated, as were the philosophy manuscripts by Ibn Sina, al-Farabi, Ibn Tufayl, Ibn Bajjah and Ibn Rushd, and the medical manuscripts by Ibn Sina and al-Razi. These manuscripts quickly spread all over Europe and became a mandatory literature at great European universities. Ibn Sina’s Al-QānĆ«n fi al-tibb was considered the fundamental reference book in studies of medicine in Europe for nearly six centuries and was called The Canon of Medicine. This paper cites numerous examples of interaction and unity of religion and science in the times when Islamic culture and civilization flourished in the Iberian Peninsula, the era that lasted for almost eight centuries

    Themistius and the Development of Averroes’ Noetics

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    Damnatio memoriae: On Deleting the East from Western History

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    The story we read in books about the Renaissance tells us that Petrarch and Poggio rediscovered the books of antiquity that had been copied for centuries in medieval abbeys. The re-introduction of Greek science and philosophy, however, began in the twelfth century but occurred mainly in the thirteenth century. These works were first translated into Syriac and Arabic in the eighth and ninth centuries and stored in the House of Wisdom in Baghdad. There they were read, used, and commented on by Arab philosophers, of whom the most famous was Averroes (1126–1198), who lived in Cordoba. The translation of his commentaries on Aristotle changed the European philosophical scene profoundly. Averroes, who also had a philosophy of his own, had followers in Latin Europe until the sixteenth century. His work was well-known and he appeared in histories of philosophy until the middle of the nineteenth century, when the Arabs were pushed out of the history books. One reason was the invention of the concept of the Renaissance

    Arab-Islamic reception of Hellenistic science

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    This article is an overview of the Arab-Islamic reception and development of Hellenistic science. It particularly refers to mathematics, physics and astronomy. It focuses on the following topics: 1) Two interpretative models of this reception in the 19th, 20th, and 21st century scholarship: the “Indo-European model” (which supposes a cultural heterogeneity between Greece and Islam) and the “cosmopolitan Hellenistic model” (which supposes homogeneity between the two). 2) The channels through which Hellenistic science was transmitted to the Islamic world: the philological channel, and the oral channel which implies the pre-existence of a common Greek-Semitic cultural ground that made this transmission possible. 3) Three features of the Arab-Islamic sciences that highlight their essential contribution to the emergence of modern science in 16th and 17th century Europe: 3.1. The “democratising” character of the Arab-Islamic sciences resulting from a larger diffusion of literacy. 3.2. The higher precision of measurements and calculations. 3.3. The experimental approach of Muslim scientists. A positive role in the accomplishment of these advances has been played by the non-metaphysical character of orthodox Islamic monotheism. According to Muslim orthodoxy, there are no Neo-Platonic intermediaries between the almighty God and his creation. The whole universe is submitted to the same physical laws. I argue that today it is important to open an interdisciplinary debate on the Arab-Islamic sciences. It would certainly lead to a better appreciation of their historical contribution. It could also suggest answers to contemporary epistemological impasses deriving from the growing gap between the humanities and the sciences.status: publishe

    The Latin Readers of Algazel, 1150-1600

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    This dissertation examines how Arabic works found an audience in medieval Europe and became a part of the Latin canon of philosophy. It focuses on a Latin translation of an Arabic philosophical work, Maqasid al-falasifa, by the Muslim theologian al-Ghazali, known as Algazel in Latin. This work became popular because it served as a primer for Arab philosophy and helped Latins understand a tradition that had built upon Greek scholarship for centuries. To find the translation’s audience, this project looks at two sets of evidence. It studies the works of Latin scholars who drew from Algazel’s arguments and illustrates that the translation’s influence was more extensive than historians have previously thought. It also examines copies of the translation in forty manuscripts and broadens the Latin audience of Arab philosophy beyond what historians typically study—the university—to include the anonymous scribes and readers who comprise the often-voiceless majority of medieval literate society. These codices yield details about Algazel’s readers, their interests and concerns, which cannot be gathered from other sources. Scholars spared little expense with these manuscripts since several are quite ornate or contain gold leaf. Many copies possess wide margins where scholars interacted with the text by writing notes, diagrams, pointing hands, warnings, and the occasional doodle. Scribes integrated the work into the established canon by placing Algazel in manuscripts with Christian philosophers from Augustine to Aquinas. The manuscripts also contain marginalia left by generations of readers, which give insight into how scholars read the text and what passages grabbed their attention. The notes indicate that a few readers agreed with ecclesiastical authorities who condemned Algazel’s work since some scholars wrote warnings in the margins alongside passages that they considered dangerous. Thus, Latins paradoxically expended great effort to understand Arab philosophers while simultaneously condemning ideas in the translations as errors. This study expands our understanding of the European interaction with the Arab tradition by examining reading practices with evidence drawn from the readers themselves. It demonstrates that Europeans read translated Arabic works alongside long-standing authorities and treated Arab authors as valuable members of the Latin canon
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