[email protected] wrote: > According to Khan, both authors showed an appreciation for the > masterpiece of Ibn al_Haytham, the Book of Optics,[....] > > > It is a bold claim that the scientific method has its origins in Islam, > but apparently a claim with merit. > > Not really. The claim that Alhazen's (as he was widely known in the West) optics were a significant improvement on Greek optics, that he partook (retrospectively) of what would later be called experimental method, and that his work was known and used in the late Medieval West is pretty standard stuff. Alhazen even made a significant appearance in the graduate seminar in visual perception I took some 20 year ago. Behind Avicenna (Ibn Sina) and Averroes (Ibn Rushd), Alhazen he is probably the best known in the West of the Muslim scholars.
> If I can add my own two bits, I've stumbled upon an interesting figure in > the early history of chemistry, a woman known as Mary or Maria the Jewess > (among other names). She lived in Alexandria some time around the third > century CE. She's credited with being a founder of alchemy... Now that would be quite astonishing, seeing as "alchemy" is a word with Arabic roots (a language not much spoken in 3rd century Alexandria -- Greek and Demotic/Coptic, mostly). The problem here is that many quite different magical traditions based on the mixing and preparing of various materials have been labeled "alchemical." They all have certain "family resemblances" to each other (and even make reference to earlier traditions, often legendary rather than substantive), but they emerged at quite different times from quite different cultures. The book Stephen cites is published by Princeton (which is a good publisher), but I think one of the reviewers on the Google Books site hits the nail on the head when s/he says: "Apparently the only legitimate reason to connect Judaism to alchemy is that a few curious Jews recorded the 'science' of their time in Hebrew and 'saved originally non-Jewish alchemical writing for posterity.' Instead of attempting to establish a link between alchemy and Judaism, Patai might have explored centuries of Christendom's superstitious association of Jews with magical, esoteric, and dark arts." > As a Jew, a woman, and an Alexandrian, she obviously represented > something other than a white, Christian, male, Eurocentric source of > knowledge. > > The other site Stephen cites says "Scholars speculate on her origins. She's called The Jewess because Zosimos called her a Sister of Moses. That could well've been no more than a convoluted way of saying she was wise. She could've been a Greek working in Egypt, or even a Syrian." Since no evidence is really presented, it is hard to tell whether this is a fair assessment, or just an political attempt to deny that she might actually have been Jewish. The site also claims, "Maria wasn't really an alchemist. She was less interested in the philosophy of transmutation than she was in practical chemical processes. The alchemists of a later age used some pretty fanciful and metaphorical language to describe her processes. But that was their rhetoric, not hers. Maria was closer in her thinking to Egyptian process engineers -- like the Egyptian women who developed the process chemistry for brewing beer." Now, there's a fair bit of crude presentism at work here, but I think that he's got the basic idea that calling her an "alchemist" identifies her with a much later intellectual tradition. (Now if the writer could only figure out identifying her with chemical process engineers falls into precisely the same trap.) Still, she sounds like she might have been an interesting figure. Chris -- Christopher D. Green Department of Psychology York University Toronto, ON M3J 1P3 Canada 416-736-2100 ex. 66164 [email protected] http://www.yorku.ca/christo/ ========================== --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly ([email protected])
