[HN Gopher] Remembering a Medieval Polymath Who Paved the Way fo...
___________________________________________________________________
Remembering a Medieval Polymath Who Paved the Way for the
Renaissance
Author : dnetesn
Score : 61 points
Date : 2024-08-13 12:48 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (worldsensorium.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (worldsensorium.com)
| avodonosov wrote:
| Cool haircut on the first picture.
|
| Not only a polymath, but a stylish man also.
| drewcoo wrote:
| If you mean his tonsure, the style was known as "a monk."
| greggsy wrote:
| If you got past the picture, you would have read that he was a
| friar.
| avodonosov wrote:
| Well, that obvious from the picture as well :)
| mdp2021 wrote:
| 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".
| greggsy wrote:
| I don't this it is
| baud147258 wrote:
| the edit was made because of the size limit on titles on HN
| bravura wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Correct, enter semiotics.
| pantalaimon wrote:
| This goes into a similar direction:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_words_for_love
| agumonkey wrote:
| I find Greek sense of categorization so nice. Same goes for
| their prefixes and suffixes.
| graemep wrote:
| My immediate reaction was that the appropriate word is
| "eros".
|
| A variant of the Greek divisions is the one in CS Lewis's
| book "The Four Loves": affection, friendship, eros and
| charity.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| What is love? Love is anything that advances the good of a
| person. So there are, at base, only two kinds of love: act
| for the sake of one's own good, and act for the sake of the
| good of another. The first is called _eros_ , the second is
| called _agape_. Everything else either isn 't love per se,
| though may be something experienced in the course of love
| (like some affect), or is a particular determination of
| these loves conditioned by the proper good in view. Thus,
| to desire food and to desire knowledge are both
| manifestations of _eros_ , but the good desire is
| different. They perfect or satisfy different aspects of
| your being.
| qwertygerty wrote:
| I appreciate your comments. I find it interesting though, that
| from that article that has one mention of relationships ("His
| belief in the importance of shared understanding is evident in
| his studies of friendship, where he described the harmony of
| goodwill and love between individuals."), amongst many others,
| this is what stuck with you ;)
| bitwize wrote:
| > 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.
|
| You kind of reinvented Robert Sternberg's "triangular model of
| love". He called the dimensions intimacy, passion, and
| commitment. Intimacy means deep familiarity with the other
| person. You know them so well you are completely comfortable
| with each other. Passion means pleasure -- emotional and sexual
| -- from being with them. And commitment, well, that's where the
| virtue bit comes in. Your shit's so entangled with your
| partner's that separating from them would be harmfully
| disruptive to both you and them... so you stick together,
| because you care about them and it's good for your soul too.
| Sternberg believed that a successful relationship had all three
| in abundance.
| jackstraw14 wrote:
| you should write a book on friendship. we kinda need it.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| 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_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
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| > _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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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
|
| 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.
| kragen wrote:
| paper is great, as explained in
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41268837, but other
| commonly used writing media have included papyrus (dominant
| in europe before paper), clay tablets (great for
| cuneiform), wax tablets, bamboo slips, silk cloth, and palm
| leaves. many older texts have survived only in one of these
| forms. also, universities in india date back to before the
| introduction of any of them; the texts to study were put
| into poetic meter, memorized, and sung to music, permitting
| preservation for millennia. the first table of sines in the
| aryabhatiya is in such a form even though it postdates the
| widespread adoption of writing materials
|
| finding ways to preserve calories for long periods of time
| was necessary for human migration to regions that have
| winter, an event that happened tens of millennia before
| refrigeration. techniques have included salting (used for
| salt pork, salt beef, bread, most cheeses and sausages),
| acidification (either by adding vinegar or through lactic-
| acid fermentation as with sauerkraut and pickles), smoking,
| preservation in sugar (jam, jelly), simple dehydration
| (jerky, pemmican, raisins, dates, hardtack and other
| crackers, nuts, wheat berries, flour, other dried grains,
| dried pulses, sesame, poppy seeds, and perhaps most
| importantly, olive oil), fungal growth (used by some
| cheeses and sausages), leaving root vegetables in the
| ground, and encasement in something defended by one of the
| above (other sausages, pies and other empanadas)
| kragen wrote:
| if you read the charges against galileo or bruno,
| specifically what they're accused of is dissent from church
| dogma, and many of the specific dissenting opinions were in
| fact scientific truth. in galileo's case, their
| epistemological grounding was also entirely scientific in the
| modern sense
|
| it's probably true that if they'd been easier to get along
| with, they would have gotten away with it. but a reasonable
| crude definition of 'scientist' is someone who cares more
| about the truth than about getting along with people
|
| so your argument boils down to 'the church wasn't harassing
| scientists [and burning them at the stake], but rather
| harassing scientists [and burning them at the stake]'. and
| that's because they were not, in fact, interested in truth
| wherever it was found; specifically, as you acknowledge, they
| were not interested in finding truth in the opinions of
| bickering italians with good egos. in galileo's case, the
| church very much failed to live up to philippians 4:8, and
| continued to do so until 01992. bruno's case is still live
|
| other authors in whose writings the church was not interested
| in finding truth, and in fact in whose writings it prohibited
| its adherents from seeking truth, include machiavelli,
| pascal, descartes, francis bacon, diderot, gibbon, erasmus
| darwin, and kant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_autho
| rs_and_works_on_t...
|
| we're not talking about the period until 01758 (at which
| point heliocentrism officially stopped being heretical) but
| until _01966_
|
| that's not even including the authors whose inclusion in the
| index librorum prohibitorum was eventually reversed,
| including galileo himself, copernicus, and kepler
|
| here in my own country of argentina, public education could
| not be instituted until 01862 because of the strenuous
| opposition of the catholic church
|
| in short, your account of a church that did not oppose the
| forces of science and enlightenment is entirely false from
| beginning to end
|
| as for the greek tradition, it very much did not fizzle after
| aristoteles; eudoxus was another student of platon, sure, but
| eucleides was a quarter century later, archimedes didn't die
| until a century later, and ptolemaios and galenos were almost
| 500 years later. i recommend reading lucio russo's _the
| forgotten revolution_ , which makes an excellent case that
| there was a sustained scientific enterprise in pre-christian
| hellenistic europe
|
| and, of course, today there is a sustained scientific
| enterprise throughout the world, and most scientists in the
| west are not christian; about half of all scientists are
| atheist or agnostic, with the numbers being much higher in
| the west: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/237802
| 311666435...
| fngjdflmdflg wrote:
| >but the West had no paper to print them until it was
| reintroduced by... again, the Islamic civilization.
|
| You don't need paper to write though - you can use animal hides
| (ie. parchment/vellum). Writing in Europe existed before Islam
| (see eg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Brixianus). Most
| documents in that period in Europe used parchment and before
| that they were using papyrus.
|
| Here's a chart of estimated manuscript production in Western
| Europe.[0] Century 6th 7th 8th
| 9th 10th 11th 12th 13th 14th
| 15th Output 13,552 10,639 43,702 201,742
| 135,637 212,030 768,721 1,761,951 2,746,951 4,999,161
| Increase -21 311 362 -33 56
| 263 129 56 82
|
| Paper was used started from the Twelfth century.[0] There is an
| increase to be sure, but not one large enough to support the
| claim that Greek texts were lost in Europe due to lack of
| paper.
|
| [0] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-
| economic-...
| kragen wrote:
| paper is much cheaper than animal parchment, and although
| animal parchment is longer-lasting than paper, paper is much
| longer-lasting than papyrus, so a given level of manuscript
| production can preserve many more texts. there are definitely
| many greek texts that were lost in europe during the dark
| ages because the only copies were on papyrus that
| deteriorated under conditions where paper would have survived
| fngjdflmdflg wrote:
| That argument about Greek works being lost due to use of
| papyrus in Europe in I assume the early middle ages is
| worth considering (any links would be appreciated). My
| argument above is about the claim 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." Specifically
| that the second sentence results in the first sentence
| being the case in Europe (ie. that there was nothing to
| write on in Europe).
| kragen wrote:
| unfortunately the texts i'd most like to link are not
| linkable because they were lost in medieval times
|
| https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3290/long_paper3261.pdf says:
|
| > _It is to be noted, that historical and philological
| knowledge of loss rates is very scarce and elusive, but
| it can still be approached from various angles, such as
| the collection of data from ancient library catalogues,
| inventories, wills, as well as allusions and
| intertextuality [54, 4, 9]. Buringh [9] provides
| estimates for the Latin West, with a geometric mean of
| loss around -25% per century, with variations from -11%
| in the 9th to -32% in the 14th and 15th centuries (with
| local variations between medieval institutions from -3%
| to -71% per century). The global loss rate for non-
| illustrated manuscripts of several well known collections
| have been estimated around 93-97% [32, 38, 53, 40]. But
| there is a potential bias in accounting only for well
| known institutional collections, from which some
| manuscripts are known to have survived: trying to account
| for fully lost libraries, Buringh [9] is compelled to
| revise his estimates higher, to -25% by century until the
| 12th, up to -43% in the 15th._
|
| (note that buringh's figures here are highest _after_ the
| dark ages and the introduction of paper!)
|
| i only have buringh's figures from this _scholium_
| because buringh 's paper itself has not been preserved in
| sci-hub and will probably be lost in the next century
|
| i agree that in the counterfactual history where there
| was no papyrus in europe there would have been even
| higher losses
| fngjdflmdflg wrote:
| >i only have buringh's figures from this scholium because
| buringh's paper itself has not been preserved in sci-hub
| and will probably be lost in the next century
|
| I accessed it just fine. Try the doi link:
| 10.1163/9789047428640. The author is the same as the one
| I quoted above, and he gives the same 25% figure there. I
| don't see any specific argument about papyrus in the text
| you quoted though, which is what I was hoping you would
| link to. From what little I read about it, it seems
| parchment was the primary medium for manuscripts in
| Europe starting from the 4th century:
|
| >Parchment, however, did not come into general use for
| book production until some centuries later, even though
| it had a marked advantage over papyrus in its greater
| durability; moreover, it was better suited than papyrus
| for writing on both sides. It was at about the start of
| the fourth century A.D. that it began to take the place
| of papyrus in the manufacture of the best books, and the
| works con- sidered worth preserving were gradually
| transferred from papyrus roll to parchment codex. It is
| in this century that the great parchment codices of the
| Greek Bible (the Vaticanus and the Sinaiticus; see p p .
| 62-7) were prepared; and the earliest extant parchment
| manu- scripts of pagan works date probably from the same
| century. But the use of papyrus did not cease then, and
| papyrus manuscripts of the New Testament have been found
| dating from the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries.[0]
|
| So it seems difficult to blame the loss of Greek works in
| Europe on the lack paper specifically. An argument could
| be made that by the end of the Roman Empire, nobody cared
| about Greek science anymore, which meant they didn't feel
| the need to preserve it in parchment and instead only
| used papyrus, which later deteriorated. That is something
| I could agree to, as the Romans never really cared about
| science (or anything intellectual) in the first place. I
| would still want to see some links that actually make
| this argument (which I had assumed you had when I asked
| for them).
|
| My main point here is that it is hard to say that Greek
| works were lost due to lack of technology (either in the
| strong form given by GP or the weak form you proposed
| here). More likely in my opinion is that literate Europe
| was not so interested in Greek works to begin with in the
| early middle ages. Most scribes were monks or part of the
| clergy generally, and they were mainly interested in
| ecclesiastical works, and that is what got written down,
| copied and studied. I would also suggest that Greek works
| were probably not universally seen as heretical at this
| point (early middle ages) as there was not such a strong
| central church/Pope which only developed in earnest
| starting in the 8th century (or so I recall). Although I
| have no evidence for that last claim.
|
| [0] Metzger, Bruce (2005). The Text of the New Testament:
| Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration (4th ed.).
| Oxford University Press. p. 8. source found via
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papyrus full text here: htt
| ps://ia600208.us.archive.org/9/items/TheTextOfNewTestamen
| ...
| baud147258 wrote:
| > but the West had no paper to print them until it was
| reintroduced
|
| Europe started using paper a few centuries before printing was
| invented there. And why do you talk about _re_introduction? I
| don't think paper was used in Europe before it was introduced
| by the Islamic world
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(page generated 2024-08-16 23:02 UTC)