[lit-ideas] Re: More places to nuke

  • From: Robert Paul <robert.paul@xxxxxxxx>
  • To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Wed, 22 Feb 2006 13:04:56 -0800

Eric wrote re 'progress':

I am repeating a point Arthur Koestler makes somewhere...I think it is _The Ghost in the Machine_. He argues that technical achievements wax and wane with civilizations, stating, for example, that Euclid knew more about geometry than people did 1,000 years later, Da Vinci knew more about making pigments than any contemporary painters, the Romans developed water-resistant cement and this was lost for 800 years, etc. Sometimes this technical knowledge is rediscovered; sometimes it is lost. For the most part, he argues, the only continuous line of development in the last 5,000 years is in making weapons. Nobody forgot how to build Roman siege machines in the Dark Ages.

If Koestler said these things he was apparently speaking as a fairly insular Western European. Whether Da Vinci 'knew more about making pigments' than painters do today is one thing; but the alleged loss of mathematical knowledge after Euclid is another. Mathematical knowledge was alive and well in Arab lands, and the great Arabian mathematicians made advances (e.g. in spherical geometry) that went beyond Euclid. That this knowledge was unknown in the West doesn't mean that it disappeared and had to be re-invented. It simply had to be recovered in the West through scholarly exchange, as did the great works of Aristotle.


'…Euclid knew more about geometry than people did 1,000 years later,' is an unfortunately ethnocentric sentence, and understood literally, it's plainly false.

When there's a power blackout in New York, the lights may still be on in Fargo.

Robert Paul
Reed College

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