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Why was Islamic science sacked?


Heisingtso

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,.............   the only  benefit of being a basset hound I suppose.

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Anyone who has studied a bit of chemistry and the history of the subject knows that Albertus Magnus was the first person to identify arsenic as an element. People knew about compounds of arsenic as far back as the Greeks and Persians - and one or two may have inadvertently isolated arsenic - but it was Albertus Magnus who first carried out a proper experiment to reduce those compounds. Not many people can lay claim to having identified an element, and I would say that puts Albertus Magnus in the category of an early scientist, even if he was into alchemy and astrology. After all, when did alchemy become chemistry? With Robert Boyle? Or with Newton? They were contemporaries, and whilst the former wanted to take the magic out of alchemy, it was the magic that appealed to the latter.

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12 minutes ago, Derek Willis said:

Anyone who has studied a bit of chemistry and the history of the subject knows that Albertus Magnus was the first person to identify arsenic as an element. People knew about compounds of arsenic as far back as the Greeks and Persians - and one or two may have inadvertently isolated arsenic - but it was Albertus Magnus who first carried out a proper experiment to reduce those compounds. Not many people can lay claim to having identified an element, and I would say that puts Albertus Magnus in the category of an early scientist, even if he was into alchemy and astrology. After all, when did alchemy become chemistry? With Robert Boyle? Or with Newton? They were contemporaries, and whilst the former wanted to take the magic out of alchemy, it was the magic that appealed to the latter.

Which certainly nobody disputes, the dispute (sidetracking this thread) is whether he had a big effect on free thinkers. And there we will have to put a categorical no.

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So you are saying the science done by Albertus Magnus - limited as it was - had no effect on free thinkers, whether contemporaries or later? Can you demonstrate that? Can you show some evidence that people like Copernicus, Bruno and Galileo were not influenced by Albertus Magnus's example. That is what you are saying, so some evidence would be welcome.

Edit: Out of interest here is a link to an excerpt of a book that describes Albertus Magnus's influence on Galileo. In one of his notebooks Galileo makes over twenty references to Albertus Magnus. To say Albertus Magnus had no big effect on freethinkers seems unlikely to me.

http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-94-009-8404-2_12#page-1

Edit Again: In 1992 the Pope said the Church was wrong to condemn Galileo. Galileo's science is now "Catholic Science". So the fact that Albertus Magnus was made a saint is no evidence that he was "pro-church".

Edited by Derek Willis
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29 minutes ago, Derek Willis said:

So you are saying the science done by Albertus Magnus - limited as it was - had no effect on free thinkers, whether contemporaries or later? Can you demonstrate that? Can you show some evidence that people like Copernicus, Bruno and Galileo were not influenced by Albertus Magnus's example. That is what you are saying, so some evidence would be welcome.

Edit: Out of interest here is a link to an excerpt of a book that describes Albertus Magnus's influence on Galileo. In one of his notebooks Galileo makes over twenty references to Albertus Magnus. To say Albertus Magnus had no big effect on freethinkers seems unlikely to me.

http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-94-009-8404-2_12#page-1

 

As much as the science of Bradwardine or Mendel. But we cannot deny a certain advancement of sciences by them. To free-think you have to think  out of the box. As long as religion is not questionable you are not capable of thinking out of the box. In fact, you tend to hide your indisputable discoveries...like Gregor Mendel.

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The dispute, to use your words, is whether Albertus Magnus had a big effect on free thinkers. You said he categorically did not. Obviously he did have a big effect on free thinkers, which is why Galileo mentions him so often in his notebooks. I can't imagine you are going to admit you are wrong on this, so let's leave it at that. 

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5 minutes ago, Derek Willis said:

The dispute, to use your words, is whether Albertus Magnus had a big effect on free thinkers. You said he categorically did not. Obviously he did have a big effect on free thinkers, which is why Galileo mentions him so often in his notebooks. I can't imagine you are going to admit you are wrong on this, so let's leave it at that. 

And it is still categorical not. Somebody instrumental in imposing an article of faith (The Ptolemaic science system)  , that at the end of the day caused the death of Bruno and the silencing of Gallileo oppressed free thought. See that it has two components like FREE (which means without limits) and thought.

Edit: I certainly hate to rub your nose in it... but if you knew what free thought means you would not post the above garble.

Edited by questionmark
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Dear me, you really are a sore loser. You said Albertus Magnus categorically had no big effect on free thinkers. Galileo was one of the greatest free thinkers of all time and he was obviously influenced in a big way by Albertus Magnus, or else why would he refer to him so often? I suggest that in the same way as Galileo did after he was shown the instruments of torture, Albertus Magnus toed the line with the Church because it was safer that way. You claim you are some sort of academic. Well, attempting to bully you opinions onto other people and hurl insults is probably why you are an amateur historian and not a professional. 

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34 minutes ago, Derek Willis said:

Dear me, you really are a sore loser. You said Albertus Magnus categorically had no big effect on free thinkers. Galileo was one of the greatest free thinkers of all time and he was obviously influenced in a big way by Albertus Magnus, or else why would he refer to him so often? I suggest that in the same way as Galileo did after he was shown the instruments of torture, Albertus Magnus toed the line with the Church because it was safer that way. You claim you are some sort of academic. Well, attempting to bully you opinions onto other people and hurl insults is probably why you are an amateur historian and not a professional. 

What did I loose?

And now, to recap the history: When it became evident that Europe would need higher education to compete with the rest of the world that task was given to Thomas, who when he discovered the basic contradiction between the Ptolemaic system and the Aristotelian system asked his teacher to decide. His teacher decided that, given  that in Aristotelian system Venus could not be recessive (that only works if all turns around the Earth) and therefore astrology did not have a basis in it only the Ptolemaic system had a validity, and the other was to be discarded as untrue.

If "Saint Albert" actually would have done anything for free thought he would not have ordered one of the systems to be valid. He would have suggested that they needed study instead of discarding one (which at the end of the day was better founded than Ptolemy' s theory... who funnily also was an astrologer.

So again, no, he did not.

But feel free to point me to some historic source in which Albert's philosophy (ergo thoughts) have actually a relevance on free thinkers. And don't come with "he discovered". That had an influence on Science. But Science is not necessarily free thought. (Though without free thought science generally stays static)

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10 minutes ago, questionmark said:

What did I loose?

And now, to recap the history: When it became evident that Europe would need higher education to compete with the rest of the world that task was given to Thomas, who when he discovered the basic contradiction between the Ptolemaic system and the Aristotelian system asked his teacher to decide. His teacher decided that, given  that in Aristotelian system Venus could not be recessive (that only works if all turns around the Earth) and therefore astrology did not have a basis in it only the Ptolemaic system had a validity, and the other was to be discarded as untrue.

If "Saint Albert" actually would have done anything for free thought he would not have ordered one of the systems to be valid. He would have suggested that they needed study instead of discarding one (which at the end of the day was better founded than Ptolemy' s theory... who funnily also was an astrologer.

So again, no, he did not.

But feel free to point me to some historic source in which Albert's philosophy (ergo thoughts) have actually a relevance on free thinkers. And don't come with "he discovered". That had an influence on Science. But Science is not necessarily free thought. (Though without free thought science generally stays static)

 

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So keen you posted twice! In an earlier posting you said Albertus Magnus "hardly did much to advance science". As I pointed out, he isolated and identified an element. Not many scientists have done that - far less than ninety-two, in fact. Then you said Albertus Magnus had no big effect on free thinkers. Then I pointed out how much one of the greatest free thinkers of all time seemed very fond of referring to him.

And now you avoid admitting your research is lacking on both counts by introducing another topic. Perhaps Albertus Magnus was sensible when he stopped short of suggesting the motions of the heavenly bodies need study. Perhaps - like Copernicus, who years later had the sense to publish his great book whilst on his death-bed, and like Galileo, who had the great sense to recant before being tortured and executed - Albertus Magnus had the sense to know that progress comes a step at a time. Had he been a hothead like Bruno, he would have been executed and his works burned. Instead, his works survived and influenced later free thinkers such as Galileo. In that sense, like that other great harbinger Erasmus, he laid the egg that other men hatched. Not a bad legacy, I would say.

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18 minutes ago, Derek Willis said:

So keen you posted twice! In an earlier posting you said Albertus Magnus "hardly did much to advance science". As I pointed out, he isolated and identified an element. Not many scientists have done that - far less than ninety-two, in fact. Then you said Albertus Magnus had no big effect on free thinkers. Then I pointed out how much one of the greatest free thinkers of all time seemed very fond of referring to him.

And now you avoid admitting your research is lacking on both counts by introducing another topic. Perhaps Albertus Magnus was sensible when he stopped short of suggesting the motions of the heavenly bodies need study. Perhaps - like Copernicus, who years later had the sense to publish his great book whilst on his death-bed, and like Galileo, who had the great sense to recant before being tortured and executed - Albertus Magnus had the sense to know that progress comes a step at a time. Had he been a hothead like Bruno, he would have been executed and his works burned. Instead, his works survived and influenced later free thinkers such as Galileo. In that sense, like that other great harbinger Erasmus, he laid the egg that other men hatched. Not a bad legacy, I would say.

Well, I guess this goes to another section. And you are quite wrong about Galileo... he was not the primary goal after all when he published the Discursi it was on direct suggestion of the Inquisition to publish the solar-centric model as  theory, but the goal was a certain Mr. Kepler ... who sadly, sadly was out of reach as Protestant in a Protestant country and a Mr.Copernicus (sadly already dead) . So for want of the donkey they hit the sack it was carrying... and then took it out on Kepler's mother accusing her of witchcraft.

That is how Galileo got off. And that is how a latter Pope asked him for forgiveness (500 years too late, I might add).

 

 

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You've lost me with that. Are you being ironic when you say Copernicus was "sadly already dead" and that Kepler was "sadly, sadly put out of reach" because he was a Protestant?

This is just a bit of fun, but the Pope's righting of the wrong against Galileo was in 1992. Five hundred years earlier than that was 1492. That is seventy-two years before the great man was born.

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7 hours ago, questionmark said:

Which certainly nobody disputes, the dispute (sidetracking this thread) is whether he had a big effect on free thinkers. .

His discoveries had a 'big effect' on a few people though

 

Arsenic+and+Old+Lace6.jpg

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On 5/29/2016 at 11:44 PM, back to earth said:

,.............   the only  benefit of being a basset hound I suppose.

Pfft. There are dozens of benefits of being a basset hound. Just because your heathenish affectations prevent you from seeing them properly doesn't mean they're not there.

--Jaylemurph

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15 hours ago, Derek Willis said:

You've lost me with that. Are you being ironic when you say Copernicus was "sadly already dead" and that Kepler was "sadly, sadly put out of reach" because he was a Protestant?

This is just a bit of fun, but the Pope's righting of the wrong against Galileo was in 1992. Five hundred years earlier than that was 1492. That is seventy-two years before the great man was born.

Well, let me explain some history the way it is seldom taught in Catechism class:

While 100 years before 1616 it did not matter much whether the earth was round, flat, concave or whatever. But one crucial thing happened that made it matter: Columbus discovered America.

Now navigation over open waters was needed. While many nations were capable seafarer (outstandingly so Spain and Portugal) they all navigated along coasts and there you had landmarks (natural or artificial) to aid your navigating. The problem with open water navigation is that there are no marks. And dead reckoning mostly ended the former state (dead).

So, the idea was that one had to understand how the universe related to Earth, because the sun and the stars made one helluva lighthouse.

The second thing that happened is that a certain Mr. Luther, a certain Mr. Johannes Hus and a certain Mr. Calvin plus a King of England (just to mention the most predominant ones) decided that Rome no longer was the center of the world... at least as far as religion goes. So that opened up the possibility to expand on the findings of a Mr. Copernicus of the sun being the center of the world system.

While in Rome they were still thumping Psalm 104:5 ("the Lord set the earth on its foundations; it can never be moved") in Protestant Europe the likes of Mercator, Gemma Frisius, Tycho Brahe and Kepler (just to mention the predominant ones) were happily chipping away at the geocentric model reducing it to rubble.

At the beginning Mr Galilei did not pay much attention to it (in fact in a letter to Kepler he said something along the lines of "all fine and good, but if I say that they --meaning his Italian colleagues-- will laugh at me). When the reports (especially by the circular letters sent periodically by Kepler) got more convincing he decided to check it himself (with a new toy he had gotten recently called Telescope) and found the observations to be correct.

Now, Copernicus' observations were not really disputed by the church, in fact Pope Gregor used them to make the calendar called after him (and used by us to this day) would it not have been for a certain Father Niccolo Lorini who, in his lengthy readings stumbled upon the above psalm... and more than that: he informed the Inquisition. And the Inquisition did what the inquisition does, in February 1616 they forbade all teachings of heliocentrism as heretic.

Naturally the guys in Protestant Europe could not care less and started developing geographic models to determine the position of an observer on the Earth based on the position of celestial bodies. These advancements did not escape the Catholic seafarer, but being heretic they could neither mention them nor expand on them and only use them at the risk of being slightly roasted by the Holy Congregation for the Defense of the Faith.

That, and the fact that Pope Urban was a friend of sciences, got Galileo ten years later a little leeway and the compromise was that he could put forward his observations as theory... not as fact.

Well, it did not take any pressure out of the kettle... now the clamor of the seafarer and traders in Catholic Europe got even bigger saying they needed that science to compete with the British, Dutch, Swedish and Danish. The Inquisition was caught. They could either declare Psalm 104:5 as false, and the teachings of Saint Albert with it or they had to act against this thing. And there came the problem. They could not get Copernicus as he was dead (quite comfortably so I would add) so were Frisius,  Brahe and Mercator, Keppler  was in a protestant land and therefore out of reach so all they had left to statute an example with was Galileo. And that is what they did. And what saved Galileo's neck was not that he retracted (never stopped the Inquisition before or after) but that he got permission to publish his work.

The end of the operation was that piece by piece the Catholic Spaniards and Portuguese lost their sea superiority and taken over by the Protestant Dutch, British, Danish and Swedish.

And there we have precisely what Saint Thomas and Saint Albert were send out to avoid. And funnily exactly the same as happened to the Islamic countries.... 5 centuries before that.

 

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I see the point you are making. However, I thought that whilst he was a Cardinal, Barberini was a friend of the sciences, but once he became Pope Urban VIII he was far from a friend of the sciences. In fact, according to Jacob Bronowski's take on the Galileo affair, Barberini pretended to be a friend of the sciences in order to gain favor from the progressive wing of the Church and hence secure his election as Pope. Moreover, Bronowski's opinion is that Urban took the defender of Church tradition in Dialogue - aptly named "Simplicius" - to be a caricature of himself. On that basis the Pope - thinking his censors had let him down by allowing the publication of Dialogue - insisted Galileo retract, or face the full force of the Inquisition.

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I think international politics in the 16th and 17th Century is far too complex to be reduced to "pro-science" and "anti-science," especially given the fact that "science" had yet to be formally described in its modern sense or uniformly adopted anywhere. If nothing else, QM's longer posts allow for a more complex consideration of events.

--Jaylemurph

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1 minute ago, jaylemurph said:

I think international politics in the 16th and 17th Century is far too complex to be reduced to "pro-science" and "anti-science," especially given the fact that "science" had yet to be formally described in its modern sense or uniformly adopted anywhere. If nothing else, QM's longer posts allow for a more complex consideration of events.

--Jaylemurph

Well Jay, I was not planning to write a book and get into all details. But yes, I agree with you. In fact the protestants, at large were not so in favor of a round earth (Luther himself called it "The greatest stupidity ever") never mind for a heliocentric system. But the liberties in Protestant land were much larger, no matter if for personal believe, arts or sciences than in catholic regions where you at any time you could receive a visit from some friendly Domenican friars to tell you that they did not like your opinions. And that made the difference. Or as I said at the beginning of this thread: Tolerance makes science flourish (probably not with those words).

 

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22 hours ago, jaylemurph said:

Pfft. There are dozens of benefits of being a basset hound. Just because your heathenish affectations prevent you from seeing them properly doesn't mean they're not there.

--Jaylemurph

Great !     Another Christian basset hound !     (They keep coming around on Saturday morning scratching on my kennel door !  <_< )

 

I bet you even got a problem  about my tatts too ! 

 

 

dog-tattoo-1.JPG

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1 hour ago, questionmark said:

Well Jay, I was not planning to write a book and get into all details. But yes, I agree with you. In fact the protestants, at large were not so in favor of a round earth (Luther himself called it "The greatest stupidity ever") never mind for a heliocentric system. But the liberties in Protestant land were much larger, no matter if for personal believe, arts or sciences than in catholic regions where you at any time you could receive a visit from some friendly Domenican friars to tell you that they did not like your opinions. And that made the difference. Or as I said at the beginning of this thread: Tolerance makes science flourish (probably not with those words).

 

You can see the same effect of intolerance and anti-intellectual bias on the rise and fall of science in China. This was before the great divergence.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Divergence

 

Edited by Hanslune
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why was science sakced?

 

Welll because 95% of the world's top clerigs are *******s, and see science as a threath to their enlightenment and their power to enlight the masses.

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5 hours ago, back to earth said:

Great !     Another Christian basset hound !     (They keep coming around on Saturday morning scratching on my kennel door !  <_< )

 

I bet you even got a problem  about my tatts too ! 

 

 

dog-tattoo-1.JPG

Our Past Basset Masters are not Christian. They frown on all religion; they support only Truth. Their Truth, which is not religion.

And they have no problem with tattoos!

 

--Jaylemurph

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It is interesting to remember that Copernicus was himself a Catholic cleric and minor order Dominican. So not all Catholic clerics and Dominicans were against understanding the universe for what it is. 

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2 hours ago, Derek Willis said:

It is interesting to remember that Copernicus was himself a Catholic cleric and minor order Dominican. So not all Catholic clerics and Dominicans were against understanding the universe for what it is. 

Nobody claims that, but Copernicus was damn lucky the no one like Lorini was around who understood what he was doing... else he would have suddenly stopped stargazing.

Even in the most oppressive regimes discoveries are made... and generally don't do much for the advancement of science in its time, best example is Gregor Mendel (though one can hardly say that the Augustinian regime is very oppressive). He had discovered the heredity principle in the 1830s yet due to moral considerations was never able to publish it. 70 years later it was rediscovered. Had Darwin known about these experiments he could have avoided various errors he made in his research in 1859.

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