[lit-ideas] Re: The 'Near-Eastern' influences on the Greek philosophy, sc...

  • From: Omar Kusturica <omarkusto@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Fri, 9 Apr 2004 22:14:10 -0700 (PDT)

--- John McCreery <mccreery@xxxxxxx> wrote:

> 
> What is omitted is several hundreds of years of
> philosophical labor to 
> synthesize  Greek and Middle Eastern views that
> produced the works to 
> which Jefferson's writing alludes and the particular
> state of play in 
> this long conversation at the moment in which
> Jefferson was writing.

*Well, yes, in particular Locke. It was Locke, rather
than Polybius, who developed the argument, and his
work was familiar to the Founding Fathers.
 
> If Omar wishes to complain that conventional
> presentations of the 
> History of Philosophy in which "philosophy" is
> limited to philosophy in 
> "the West" ignore the contributions of thinkers in
> other parts of the 
> world, that can hardly be denied. The way I was
> taught the subject 
> (WARNING: forty years ago), in which a firm line was
> drawn from the 
> Pre-Socratics through Plato and Aristotle to the
> Stoics and Epicureans, 
> St. Thomas and St. Augstine....to the Renaissance,
> etc., with only a 
> cursory bow to the Muslim thinkers who preserved the
> writings of the 
> Greeks and passed them them back to the West when
> the Renaissance came 
> around is, perhaps, a particularly egregious
> example. In effect it 
> reduces the role of those Muslim thinkers to one
> similar to that of the 
> Monks who, it was said, played a similar role in
> preserving important 
> documents until sharper thinkers came along.

*Yes. Such accounts certainly diminish the role of
Muslim thinkers themselves, particularly of Ibn Rushd
and (somewhat paradoxically) Al-Ghazali in the
development of the medieval and early modern Western
thought.

> What I offer here is a speculation that what we are
> pleased to call 
> Western thought and the emergence from it of what we
> call Science 
> reflects the peculiar historical confluence of Greek
> rationalism with 
> Middle Eastern monotheism, combined with a leap to
> insisting on 
> empirical verification instead of cogitation alone.

*It is not exactly peculiar - it happened in the Arab
world in the 10th century, with the Mutazilla school
in theology and with the rationalist philosophers like
Al-Farabi and Ibn-Sinna. But then came a reaction. It
was argued, not without some philosophical
justification, that rationalism has gone too far, and
encroached upon the areas properly assigned to
revelation, such as the nature of the world and the
nature of God himself. The principal exponent of this
argument was, of course, Al-Ghazali. (We may leave
open the question of how much Al-Ghazali's argument
itself was on solid Islamic grounds, given that the
Kuran itself uses rational arguments to prove the
existence of Allah.)  Ghazali's objection was, in
truth, only to the speculative rationalist
metaphysics, not to reason itself and certainly not to
empirical sciences. But as the study of logic and
natural science was then closely intertwined with
philosophy, these pursuits probably suffered as well. 


Something like this may have happened in the West in
the early Enlightenment - I am thinking, for example,
of Spinoza and his unabashed confidence in reason. But
then you get a series of thinkers who emphasized the
limitations of reason - for example, Hume with his
skepticism about the application of reason to
causality, and Kant with his insistence that the
noumena are not accessible to human understanding. In
Nietzsche, of course, the critique of reason becomes
even more radical.

I will stop here as I have no major objection to the
rest of your post. It was a thoughtful post.

O.K.




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