Scholasticism and Arabian Influence

7 Key excerpts on "Scholasticism and Arabian Influence"

• 

  eBook - ePub

  Medieval Islamic Economic Thought

  Filling the Great Gap in European Economics

  • S.M. Ghazanfar(Author)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  Further, we can readily agree on the more recent Western impact on the Islamic world, for not only we are our witnesses, but also because of the long-established Western superiority that we take for granted. However, it becomes somewhat unsettling when we learn of the distant, far more significant impacts in reverse. Once the initial reaction is overcome, the tendency then is to keep the extent of those impacts within “proper bounds”. The names of a few medieval Islamic scholars are tolerated, but, at best, we begrudge them a role beyond mere “transmitters” of the Greeks (see Makdisi 1974). Such posturing is “garbled falsification” and “colossal misrepresentation” (Briffault, 189, 201), and “worse than a lie” (Sarton 1952, 27).

  Having stated a secondary but related theme of this paper, we now proceed to the main task: that is, to document some evidence as to the influence of selected Arab-Islamic Scholastics, Ibn Rushd in particular, which contributed immeasurably to European awakening.

  The Islamic Scholastics and their influence

  Presently our task is to briefly explore the intellectual core of the medieval Islamic-European connections that gave rise to what Haskins called the “vision of a profoundly secular renaissance” (quote from Benson and Constable, xxiii). That vision was inspired through the scholarship of medieval Islamic “giants”, as Sarton referred to them, such as those mentioned earlier—Al-Kindi (801–73), Al-Razi (865–925), Al-Farabi (870–950), Ibn Sina (980–1037), Al-Ghazali (1058–1111), and, in particular, Ibn Rushd (1126–98). The Europe of the late Dark Ages was receptive, but such a vision

  had no roots in the earlier medieval culture of the West. It is neither Christian, nor Latin, nor German. It appears abruptly in Southern France about the time of the First Crusade, without any preparation and previous development…The origins of the new style are to be found in the rich and brilliant society of Muslim Spain.

  (Dawson 1952, 153)

  Thus emerged the “confidence in the power of reason and that faith in the rationality of the universe without which science will have been impossible” (Dawson 1967, 230). The period of the Crusades provided the “greatest stimulus to cultural advance” through “challenges from the outside, as Western Europeans expanded their horizons and discovered the very different peoples who lived beyond their frontiers” (Ferruolo, 136). Further, “the Crusades were of central importance…they helped to shape European attitudes, feelings, and values. The achievements of the twelfth century renaissance owe a great deal to the Crusades” (Ferruolo, 137).

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Jewish Contributions to Civilization: An Estimate

  • Joseph Jacobs(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Gorgias Press

    (Publisher)

  Now Christianity had al-ready been largely influenced by Neo-Platonic thought from the very beginning in the Gospel of John, and was not, therefore, fundamentally disturbed by further infusion of it. But when Archbishop Raymond of Toledo, in the middle of the twelfth century, caused the physical and metaphysical works of Aristotle to be made accessible in Latin translations, executed, as we have seen, by Dominic Gundisalvi (pos-sibly assisted by his Jewish associate, Johannes Hispalenis) and by Gerard of Cremona, the same problems necessarily arose which had en-gaged the attention of Maimonides. 1 It can therefore be easily understood how eagerly his aid was invoked by the great scholastics of the thirteenth century, who were puzzled by the same problems and had reached the same crisis in their line of thought. 1 The logical and rhetorical works had already been made accessible in Latin by Boethius, and formed the basis of the Quadrivium. See H. O. Taylor, The Medieval Mind, chapter 34, Methods of Scholasticism. 168 I N F L U E N C E OF JEWISH T H O U G H T But before dealing in such detail as our space permits with the manner in which the Christian scholastics adopted the solution of the Jewish theologian, a discussion would be in order of the contrasting influence of Solomon ibn Gabirol upon the same thinkers, which forms one of the most curious episodes in the history of thought. H e is quoted by all of the four greater scholas-tics of the thirteenth century mentioned above under the name of Avicebron, Avicebrom, or Avicebrol. None of them, however, knew that he was a Jew; indeed, William of Auvergne argues rather elaborately that, though an Arab, he must have been a Christian, because his views about the Will of God correspond so closely to the Christian doctrine of the Word or Logos.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  No longer available |Learn more

  Encyclopedia of Muslim World

  • (Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Learning Press

    (Publisher)

  ________________________ WORLD TECHNOLOGIES ________________________ Chapter- 7 Philosophy & Science in Islam Philosophy Averroes, founder of the Averroism school of philosophy, was influential in the rise of secular thought in Western Europe. Islamic philosophy Islamic philosophy is a branch of Islamic studies, and is a longstanding tradition in the compatibility between aql (reason) and iman (faith). Introduction Islamic philosophy refers to philosophy produced in an Islamic society. It is not necessarily concerned with religious issues, nor exclusively produced by Muslims. [Oliver Leaman, Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy] ________________________ WORLD TECHNOLOGIES ________________________ Formative influences Islamic philosophy as the name implies refers to philosophical activity within the Islamic milieu. The main sources of classical or early Islamic philosophy are the religion of Islam itself (especially ideas derived and interpreted from the Quran), Greek philosophy which the early Muslims inherited as a result of conquests when Alexandria, Syria and Jundi-shapur came under Muslim rule, along with pre-Islamic Indian philosophy and Iranian philosophy. Many of the early philosophical debates centered around reconciling religion and reason, the latter exemplified by Greek philosophy. One aspect which stands out in Islamic philosophy is that, the philosophy in Islam travels wide but comes back to conform it with the Quran and Sunna. Early Islamic philosophy In early Islamic thought, which refers to philosophy during the Islamic Golden Age, traditionally dated between the 8th and 12th centuries, two main currents may be distinguished. The first is Kalam, that mainly dealt with Islamic theological questions, and the other is Falsafa, that was founded on interpretations of Aristotelianism and Neoplatonism.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  The Formation of Arab Reason

  Text, Tradition and the Construction of Modernity in the Arab World

  • Mohammed Abed Al-Jabri(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • I.B. Tauris

    (Publisher)

  And the knowledge of illumination, including Sufism (mysticism), Sh i ¯ ʿ ite thought, Ismˉ a ʿi ¯l philosophy, esoteric exegesis of the Qur ʾ ˉ an, illuminationist philosophy, alchemy, healing and a predictive astrometry, magic, talismans and astrology . . . etc., founded on an epistemological system based on the methodology of ‘disclosure and communion [with the divine]’ and ‘sympathy and antipathy’ and on what we termed ‘the irrational of the reason’ – meaning what relates to the mind and not to religion, a point of view that is adopted by Hermetism – as a view and a paradigmatic frame of reference. Finally, the knowledge of demonstration, including logic, mathematics and the various branches of the natural sciences as well as discussions of divine attributes, more like metaphysics, founded by a single cognitive system that is based on the methodology of exper-imental observation and reasonable deduction, and on what we termed ‘the reasonable of the reason’ – meaning the conceptual knowledge founded on mental premises – as a view and a paradigmatic frame of reference. Moreover, our focus on the epistemological aspects alone of the internal structure of the Arab culture made us aware of the nature of activities taking place within this culture. Consequently, if we emphasised earlier 416 THE FORMATION OF ARAB REASON how movement in Arab culture is closer to being considered an operation of ‘dependence’ rather than one of ‘transition’ (Chapter Two), this was based on the fact that the Arab-Islamic linguistic and religious sciences emerged directly and entirely during the Era of Codification, to which subsequent periods added or contributed little worth mentioning. This is also based on the fact that the ‘eternal’ Arab cultural stage still contains prominent individuals from throughout the entire history of Arab culture and that the intellectual Arab ‘public’ is unconcerned with the interval of time that separates them from any such personage.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Beliefs and Biology

  Theories of Life and Living

  • J. Trusted(Author)
  • 2003(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  20 Beliefs and Biology 2 From the Middle Ages to the Renaissance: from scholasticism to the study of nature ARABIC INFLUENCES Although much of the philosophy of Ancient Greece was lost to the Christian West in the so-called Dark Ages (c. 500–1000) many writ- ings survived in Constantinople and in the Arabic and Persian Em- pires. Abu Sina, more generally known as Avicenna (985–1037), and Ibn-Rushd, usually called Averroes (1126–98), were two celebrated Arabic scholars. Avicenna had much in common with later Renais- sance philosophers in that he had a wide range of interests and many talents. He was a skilled physician and compiled a list of 758 drugs that could be extracted from plants; although most were available to the Ancient Greeks, more than 100 were from herbs unknown in Greece or elsewhere in Europe. 1 Avicenna also practised as a mathematician and astronomer and in addition he had artistic talents and was a gifted poet. However, he is reputed to have been self-indulgent and his rela- tively early death was said to be due, at least in part, to his debauched lifestyle. Perhaps for this reason he showed no great originality and his conception of the natural world was primarily Aristotelian, though he did not accept Aristotle’s anatomy but, rather, followed the teach- ings of Galen. When his works became known in the West his Canon of Medicine was adopted as a major medical text and helped support Galen’s authority. Averroes also based his natural philosophy on Aristotle’s, but not uncritically: he was especially concerned to revise Aristotle’s account of potentiality and actuality. As we have seen, Aristotle had appealed to this in his explanation of the development of seeds, eggs and em- bryos to maturity and had said that the process was analogous to the formation of a bowl from a lump of silver in that both were changes involving a potentiality becoming an actuality.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Hergenhahn's An Introduction to the History of Psychology

  • Tracy Henley(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. 86 C H A P T E R 3 And, in a clear anticipation of the modern com-puter, Raymond Lull (ca. 1232–1315) conceived of and built machines that would apply Aristotelian logic to help convert Moslems and Jews to Christi-anity (Moody, 1967). Still, even by the 14th and 15th centuries, philos-ophy served religion, as did everyone and everything else. There were two classes of people: believers and nonbelievers. The latter, if they could not be con-verted, were punished, imprisoned, or killed, and they were considered either stupid or influenced by the devil.There was no in-between. If the God con-templated through introspection was real, so must other objects of thought be real, such as demons, devils, and dragons. Astrology was extremely pop-ular, and magic was practiced extensively. Supersti-tion was not confined only to the peasant but also characterized kings, scholars, and clergy. As Bacon learned, this was not yet a time of open inquiry. To use Kuhn’s (1996) terminology, schol-arship was limited to a single paradigm: the Chris-tian conception of humans and the world. Although Kuhn was mainly concerned with the physical sci-ences, his notion of paradigms can also be applied to other fields. As with other paradigms, the Christian paradigm determined what was acceptable as a prob-lem and what counted as a solution. Most scholars were engaged in “normal philosophy,” which, like normal science, is concerned only with exploring the implications of the accepted paradigm. Little creativity is involved in either normal science or normal philosophy.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Symphorien Champier and the Reception of the Occultist Tradition in Renaissance France

  • Brian P. Copenhaver(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  Scholasticism and the Later Middle Ages 147 circumstances if we call on Chaucer's description of an earlier Eng-lish physician to mirror the likely condition of Champier's medical attitudes: With us there was a Doctour ofPhisik; In al this world ne was ther noon hym lik, To speke ofphisik and of surgery e, For he was grounded in astronomye. He kepte his pacient a ful greet deel In houres by his magyk natureel. Wei koude he fortunen the ascendent Of his y mages for his pacient. Wei knew he the aide Esculapius, And Deyscorides, and eek Rufus, Olde Ypocras, Haly, and Galyen, Serapion, Razis, andAvycen, Averrois, Damascien, and Constantyn, Bernard, and Gatesden, and Gilbertyn. 1 ^ V. SCHOLASTICISM AND THE LATER MIDDLE AGES Champier the humanist might infrequently use the term 'scholastic' to mean 'captious champion of the old stupidity polluted with the dirt of barbarism', but patriotism burned more brightly in his spirit than humanism. The opinions of the Paris theologians were proud testimony of the intellectual primacy of Champier's countrymen and thus not lightly to be discarded. 139 Thomas Aquinas, 'divine Austria: 'Li compilacione de le science des estoilles' Books /-///, University of California Publications in Modem Philology, Vol. 33,no. 2 (Berkeley: Universi-ty of California Press, 1947), pp. 37-38; for the wide availability by Champier's time of Arab astrological texts, see Carmody, Astrological Sciences, pp. 78-85, 87-102,113-116,132-136,144-150. 138. F. N. Robinson, ed., The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (2nd ed.; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957), p. 21 [General Prologue, 11. 411-448, 429-434]; Campbell, Arabian Medicine, I, p. 199. 139. Castigationes, fols. VIIIvMX: 'Scholastic! sive morosi veteris inscitiae

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book