> On Feb 5, 2017, at 11:12 PM, John F Sowa <s...@bestweb.net> wrote: > > At the beginning of the 13th c, the translations of Aristotle > were denounced by theologians who had a vested interest in Plato. > The fact that they were translated from Arabic sources also raised > suspicions of heresy. But scientists such as Roger Bacon were > inspired by the science, and Thomas Aquinas made Aristotle safe > for Christianity.
To be fair there were some theological reasons they were distrustful of the new innovations in scholastic thinking by Aristotle. A lot of the condemnations of 1210-1277 have fairly compelling reasons behind them (even if we don’t in the least buy the theology they were defending). Some seem a bit silly admittedly, like the debate about whether there was a single shared intellect or separate intellects for each person. (Roughly a debate about whether propositions were individual or shared - although it often came to have a form more akin to what platonic mystics asserted of a shared mind) It’s interesting that the greatest of the Aristotilean influenced scholastics, Aquinas, really had his heyday in the early Renaissance rather than during his life or the immediate years following. > Crosby, Alfred W. (1997) The Measure of Reality: Quantification > and Western Society, 1250-1600, Cambridge University Press. > > Sample factoid: In 1275, there were no mechanical clocks in Europe. > By 1300, every town of any size had a church with a clock tower, > and neighboring towns were competing with each other in building > the most elaborate clocks. The European emphasis on measuring time > is a major difference between European civilizations and traditional > societies everywhere else. And it started in the 13th c. This is an important feature often overlooked. It’s very hard to do reproducible empirical studies without accurate time keeping. There were some primitive methods like using hour glasses but having ubiquitous and synchronizable clocks probably transformed the world more than anything else before the age of steam and plumbing.
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