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

  • From: Omar Kusturica <omarkusto@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Sat, 10 Apr 2004 01:17:22 -0700 (PDT)

--- John McCreery <mccreery@xxxxxxx> wrote:
(snip)The question is, how the Old
> Testament's Jehovah, 
> an extremely temperamental Deity inclined to all
> sorts of (from a human 
> perspective) arbitrary nastiness (see, for example,
> the Book of Job) 
> become tamed into the Deists' watchmaker, who then
> wanders off stage, 
> leaving Natural Laws in his place. I am suggesting
> that one way of 
> conceiving this process is to see medieval and later
> thinkers 
> struggling to encompass the God of Scripture within
> the philosophical 
> project launched by the Greeks. What Monotheistic
> religion brings to 
> Science is, however, something either underplayed or
> largely missing in 
> classic Greek thought, the notion of causes that do
> not resemble their 
> effects.

There is in Aristotle the notion of a cause that is
radically different from its effects, the Unmoved
Mover. But Aristotle held that we can know nothing
about the Unmoved Mover, whereas for example in Islam
it is suggested that it is possible to arrive at an
understanding of Allah through observation of the
created world.

On a different node, I am thinking about some elements
of the West's prevalent form of monotheism, i.e.
Christianity, that are consistent (or continuous) with
the Platonist and Aristotelian philosophies.
Christianity has a robust notion of soul and the
after-life, which is under-developed in Judaism. When
this is combined with the Greek (specially Platonic)
notion of the world of intelligible ideas as the
ultimate reality, it might make for a view of the
Other World as essentially congenial to human reason
and of the human reason as something, if not divine as
Aristotle held, then at least akin to divinity. (At
least, Nietzsche thought that some such notion of 'the
otherwordly' was ubiquitous in the Western thought and
thus in need of being rejected.)

Of course, this would not really explain the
Enlightenment turn to empiricism. Indeed, I don't see
how this could be explained without invoking the
influence of Arab and Chinese natural science. (The
Orient strikes again.)

O.K.



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